gdjacobs wrote:

kaputnik wrote:

Well, in my opinion it really depends on what OS you're planning to use. If you go W98, it'd be a shame to not get good DOS support too, and that means you'd want ISA.

In my opinion, this involves too many compromises resulting in a machine that is not overly compatible in DOS with significant holes in the performance envelope and quite a bit less performance than might otherwise be possible in Win98.

What good DOS support is missing when you don't have ISA? The only thing I can think of is not having an old sound blaster. However, I've yet to run into compat problems just using a Aureal Vortex 2 PCI

Vortex 2? How about good FM synthesis? How about motherboards without DDMA support?

It's a good sound card with good DOS compatibility, but it's not invincible.

I'd go for 64. I recently build my -06 rig that looks like this:

It's pretty good for 04-06 gaming, but let's face it, nothing can run Call of Duty 2 on full settings. 🤣

Pretty sure a GF 8800 GTX with Core 2 Extreme QX6700 OC'ed with 4GB RAM rig can do CoD 2 full details (all have been released before January 1 2007 😉).

agent_x007 wrote:

Pretty sure a GF 8800 GTX with Core 2 Extreme QX6700 OC'ed with 4GB RAM rig can do CoD 2 full details (all have been released before January 1 2007 😉).

Perhaps like in this linked thread! 😁

The performance numbers I posted are bad though because of Vista and the CPU was too hot running for a good overclock so I left it at 3.46GHz. Now I have a much better QX6700 (still B3 = kosher) so I should replace the one in that build but at the time that hot running one was the only one I had.

The year was 2006! (Geforce 8800 GTX SLI performance numbers on the second page)
The year was 2006! (Warning! not 100% retro) (Edit, now the link is working)

agent_x007 wrote:

Pretty sure a GF 8800 GTX with Core 2 Extreme QX6700 OC'ed with 4GB RAM rig can do CoD 2 full details (all have been released before January 1 2007 😉).

Well yes, still it was long after CoD 2 was released, I doubt there was much that could run it at the time. Most problems appear to come from the use of excessive smoke effects in some parts of the first mission.

A64 gets my vote, particularly for the added instruction set. I'm a fan of the 754 venice personally.

blank001 wrote:

A64 gets my vote, particularly for the added instruction set. I'm a fan of the 754 venice personally.

Same here ^^

Athlon 64 hands down. IHS, vastly better heatsink retention and cooler availability.

Socket 754 as others have said, mainly because of Win98 support.
There are some (few) s939 boards that may also support it like the 939Dual-SATA2.

Unless you need ISA that is, then Socket A is the last bastion. I'm currently building one to host a radio reception board (Winradio WR-1000i).

Last bastion...I think I'll go for that. Thx for the advice.

Pretty much any VIA based board will work great with Win98 and they're still fairly common amongst first generation K8 motherboards.

elod wrote:

Athlon 64 hands down. IHS, vastly better heatsink retention and cooler availability.

Personally I don't mind the absence of an IHS on AXP, I never had a die crack and even though mounting a HSF seems more barbaric (lol) it's something I've gotten completely used to! And it does cool pretty good and for such an easy task I don't mind a bare die. It's literally just a couple minutes work at the most.

The IHS retention mechanisms are absolutely superior when it comes to userfriendlyness, but I've gotten boards where I first had to go look for a new retention mechanism as the original one was missing and AXP only needs these 3 tab-thingies on each side (and less TIM 😁).

Tualatin and some Cyrix's actually make safe installation of CPU HSFs more difficult due to their added height and I actually broke a CPU socket trying to mount a HSF on my MII-400 (and I was not able to glue it back that time).

So...yes non-IHS cooling solutions are less user friendly, but imo if you're used to it it no big deal anyway.

In most cases I'd go with Athlon XP for Windows9x/Me and Athlon 64 for a low end Windows XP build.

gdjacobs wrote:

Ampera wrote:

They're both wrong answers.

The correct answer would be a Pentium 4.

P4 doesn't have significant (any?) advantages over Athlon64.

I see two advantages.
1: it's a more robust platform and tends to be more reliable. You have to work hard to kill a good p4 system.
2: they can make a nice space heater.

Rhuwyn wrote:

In most cases I'd go with Athlon XP for Windows9x/Me and Athlon 64 for a low end Windows XP build.

Me too. I dont like the fact that sA motherboards only had 3 dimm slots for a maxium of 3GB of memory.. Also the SATA support wasnt really mature.

So i would at least would run windows 2000 on a sA system, and windows xp on a more advanced platform like Athlon 64.., the best chipset for that is n-force 4 or higher, (would skip n-force 3 anyways due AGP support) Pci-e support would give you far more options on graphic cards.

Robin4 wrote:

Rhuwyn wrote:

In most cases I'd go with Athlon XP for Windows9x/Me and Athlon 64 for a low end Windows XP build.

Me too. I dont like the fact that sA motherboards only had 3 dimm slots for a maxium of 3GB of memory.. Also the SATA support wasnt really mature.

So i would at least would run windows 2000 on a sA system, and windows xp on a more advanced platform like Athlon 64.., the best chipset for that is n-force 4 or higher, (would skip n-force 3 anyways due AGP support) Pci-e support would give you far more options on graphic cards.

Wouldn't most sA motherboards underclock their RAM if using more than 2 DIMMs? I could run 2x1GB at DDR-400 but putting in any more DIMMs would result in slower memory frequencies.

When I put in a second pair of DIMMs in my s478 i865 board (all 4 modules being DDR-400) the memory was slowed down from DDR-400 to DDR-320.

I also prefer to use 512MB modules that are single sided as opposed to 512MB double sided modules, due to this DDR speed limitation (it depends on the chipset mostly how many banks it can run and at what frequency).

The XP is a million times more memorable to me than the 64.. The Athlon 64 really came to its own with the Athlon X2 64 IMO. There's just a lot of character in a KT600 + T-bred Athlon XP combination..

Also SMH at people saying the XP isn't fast enough in XP - I ran a Palomino 2000+ with WinXP and a Radeon 8500 for almost 2 years and it played everything perfectly well..

I vote for the Athlon64 as well. I have some fond memories of the T-bird, but I definitely remember Athlon XP machines being kinda witchety - not so much the fault of the CPU as of the various chipsets, which were a little hit-or-miss. The one I had never gave me any serious trouble, but I remember friends having no end of issues. OTOH, I was using Win2k, they were mostly using Win98, so maybe that's part of it.

As for Socket 754 versus 939, I don't really have an opinion. You'll hit more early-installment-weirdness on the 754, but I don't remember it being too severe. One thing to look at might be some of the dual-CPU socket 940 Opteron setups, if you can find them. Of course, you're getting into more modern territory there - PCI-e instead of AGP, 64/66 or 64/133MHz PCI, SATA, Ultra320 SCSI (or even SAS sometimes), and definitely no ISA, and they can be hardish to find. But if you can find one, those were some nice systems.