Slot1 for me is too much boring stable, it’s when computing starting to be “just work” that is ok for working (personally i have a mac for working stuff) but not fun for retro/hobby/gaming/discover ecc

DIP40 😉

If we're talking about x86 only, then I'm going to go with 80286. Probably a pretty unpopular opinion, but I find 286s are just really interesting to screw around with. 286s represent a transitional period, and were available for 8 years, so there was a lot of variety in the hardware.

There was transition from:
-5.25" to 3.5" drives
-MDA/CGA/EGA to VGA
-DIP to SIMM memory
-MFM/RLL to ESDI and IDE
-84-key to 101-key keyboards
-Grey to Beige case colours

Interesting events and features:

-ISA was decoupled from the main bus.
-BIOS setup went from floppies to ROM based
-Expansion RAM on an ISA card
-EMS memory
-Turbo buttons
-LED displays (some pretty fancy ones on Everex systems)
-Introduction of GUI and mouse

I guess every platform evolved during its life, but I just find 286s to be more extreme. You never know what kind of weird and exciting features you're going to get when you find a 286.

They're also good to own if you're into 80s culture.

I'm a big fan of LGA775, LGA1366, and Socket 939/AM2 but I don't really consider those retro. Socket 7, Socket 370, and Socket A are probably my favorite retro sockets.

Probably Socket 7 because they tend to "just work".

-Less jumper hell then 486 and prior
-More flexible in terms of speed and slow down
-ATX motherboards
-solid PCI and onboard IO
-still reletivly cheap and plentiful

Of course that does result in them being the more boring choice. But if you want just one good retro PC that can cover a large spectrum of DOS. There's no better substitute.

Slot 1, because I have a 1000/100 Pentium 3 CPU, so I have enough horsepower at least for most (if not all) Glide and DOS games. I do love 440BX for the fact that I can have decent performance with 2-3 ISA slots (AWE32, GUS, etc).

However, recently I've decided that I want to switch from Voodoo 5 to a more powerful GPU (like GeForce 4 Ti4200 or GeForce 3 Ti 500) and a V2 SLI. Because of that I kind of want to improve other limitations of the platform as well — get a UltraDMA100 controller and experiment with the 133MHz bus. My previous experience (P3B-F) did not do so well — the platform wasn't too stable. Then again, so many companies advertised their "133 440BX" motherboards, that there must be a board somewhere that can run stable with this setting.

Otherwise I love the 486 VLB platform as well as early Socket 7. Basically PC as it was prior to the Windows 95.

Socket 1366, though not yet retro, is my favourite . Bandwith, expandability (Xeon compatibility), native support for legacy PCI, longevity are the key factors .

I have a Xeon X5675 based one with 48GB of RAM as a triple boot Windows 7/ Windows 10/Linux setup and I intend to keep it a long time . I have a spare motherboard for it too and a few lesser 1366 CPUs, so this thing should run for a very long time .

Board is a SuperMicro x8Sax .

Hmmm... hard question to answer. From a practical point of view, my favorite platform would be super socket 7 since it's the most flexible. Runner up would be socket A for it's performance in 1998-2002 3d games, as well as it's ability (*with an athlon XP Mobile) to run a slew of older dos games. This is because when I was a teenager I always dreamed of running games of that period at max detail levels and high resolutions (1600x1200). As such my favorite builds are an K6-III + voodoo 3 + guillemot maixi gamer 64 and my Athlon XP 3200+ with a Abit AN7 and a geforce 4 ti 4600.

My favorite platform from a nostalgia point of view is socket 3. My first PC was a 486 (late model, 586 actually, some motherboard with a UMC chipset and PCI slots). It's also a rather impractical platform. My current socket 3 build is a POD83 on top of a MSI 4144 (sis chipset) with 32mb of ram, a 2mb late model matrox mystique and an AWE32, but the list of games that will run well on that machine is small.

I also have a thing for socket 370 machines because of their stability, as well as socket 423 pentium PCs for their quirkiness and rarity. Both platforms are very stable and easy to work with. Same for socket 754 and 939 - witch make remarkably good windows 98 retro PCs. I've built several such machines for friends who asked to get into retro gaming. They're also cheap and plentiful, although It's getting harder and harder to find decent 754/939 boards with AGP.

My least favorite platform is probably slot 1 (I find it the least interesting).

jheronimus wrote on 2020-07-12, 15:08:

Slot 1, because I have a 1000/100 Pentium 3 CPU, so I have enough horsepower at least for most (if not all) Glide and DOS games. I do love 440BX for the fact that I can have decent performance with 2-3 ISA slots (AWE32, GUS, etc).

However, recently I've decided that I want to switch from Voodoo 5 to a more powerful GPU (like GeForce 4 Ti4200 or GeForce 3 Ti 500) and a V2 SLI. Because of that I kind of want to improve other limitations of the platform as well — get a UltraDMA100 controller and experiment with the 133MHz bus. My previous experience (P3B-F) did not do so well — the platform wasn't too stable. Then again, so many companies advertised their "133 440BX" motherboards, that there must be a board somewhere that can run stable with this setting.

Otherwise I love the 486 VLB platform as well as early Socket 7. Basically PC as it was prior to the Windows 95.

Was there a thread with your 133MHz P3B-F experience ? I have mostly heard success stories (including my own) with this board so I am curious .

EDIT : Found it . Can't run Asus P3B-F at 133 MHz
Though my understanding is that the issue was more likely due to the Voodoo 5 not liking 89MHz AGP and not necessarily the fault of the P3B-F itself . Running any 440BX board at 133MHz will require a video card able to tolerate 89MHz AGP (or a PCI card instead). The AGP Voodoo 5 is not one of those .

Wow, great answers so far 😀.
I totally forgot about socket 423 ever being a thing because I had an AMD based system at the time and had practically no friends who had a Pentium 4.
We were all teenagers so nearly everyone either had a Duron or an Athlon, one friend had a Celeron based system.

My first real "gaming" system was a Duron 750 with only 64 MB ram at the beginning. It got even upgraded to XP later on, but by then I had added a
second stick of 64 MB RAM. So this system (I have an exact copy here, minus the no-name ram I had at that time) along with the socket 462 will always
be special to me but I found that nearly everything we played back then I can still play on my modern system so while I have very fond memories
I'm less excited when firing that system up.

I guess this is all rather strange, and I'm not sure why I have started to like Slot 1 systems so much, seeing that I never had one back then but I guess I always wanted
a Pentium 2/3 back when I was a kid and we had that Pentium 90, so that might explain it, along with the awesome stability.
For the very same reason I'm looking forward to building an Athlon 1400 based system because I never had one back then.

Socket 7 and socket 423. Socket 7 to me just screams windows 9x and fun memories on civ ii, while 423 is just different, only in production for a little under a year and then abandoned

My favourites would have to be the Apple II and 286. I grew up with them! Apple II at school, 286 at home.

I also have some great memories of the Slot 1 era. I really got into computers around that time, and P3-550 was the first machine that I put together myself. Hooked up to a giant 21" CRT monitor that I swear took up half my dorm room, that rig also served as my first DVD player! 😀

Its really hard to chose but Socket 7 is the one that I have done most things with and have most memories from. Had a Pentium 133mhz and a AMD K6-2 450 when I grew up and both were huge upgrades from my 386 I had before.

Some other more or less weird Socket 7 system has been in my collection since then, one of the worst was a K6-2 400 at a motherboard that wouldn't go under 2,5v and didn't support anything newer then AMD K5. But it worked and was more or less stable. Spent a lot of hours with that system building it in different configurations. It had a Pentium MMX 166 that i managed to overclock to about 300mhz on another motherboard.

Socket 3 with 33Mhz 486dx is my clear favourite because it allows me to do in dos exactly what I want. After that comes socket 370 that allows me to go through the glide period of retro gaming while allowing me to still use ISA cards.

It's a cross between 775 and Slot 1 because they both do their (retro) Jobs so well. The former has cheap, quiet, cool, powerful CPUs for XP gaming, DDR2 is very cheap, early PCI-E cards are dirt cheap. Can make a very easy XP gaming PCs with Socket 775.

Similar story for Slot 1. Can play every DOS game out there at high Res (but speed sensitive games will of course be unplayable), play every game that *needs* Windows 98, supports ISA, cheap CPUs if you keep to the 700MHz range, supports ATX and USB...

I always seem to come back to these two when I'm at a loss as to what to build "Oh let's just throw together one of those and play Doom 2"

My favourite platform is Socket 7 hands down, but currently I use Slot 1 for convenience's sake.

For me it’s got to be Dual-S370 with AGP and ISA because it does support most of the DOS games 1992+, does offer very good performance using Windows 98 SE and still has decent performance running Windows 2000/XP with GOG games up to 2002-2003. (No, it doesn’t run Crysis 😉).

Damn, this question is sending my brain into overdrive 😁

I'd have to go with Super Socket 7 too, it's just SUCH an interesting platform, and you REALLY need to do a lot of digging/tinkering to make it stable. But once you do, it's awesome and quite versatile.
And, of course, a close second in my book is definitely the Slot 1 440BX platform (but for very different reasons). As someone above pointed out, it's so stable that it's boring, however this can sometimes be a very good thing! 😀

darry wrote on 2020-07-12, 15:19:

Socket 1366, though not yet retro, is my favourite . Bandwith, expandability (Xeon compatibility), native support for legacy PCI, longevity are the key factors .

I have a Xeon X5675 based one with 48GB of RAM as a triple boot Windows 7/ Windows 10/Linux setup and I intend to keep it a long time . I have a spare motherboard for it too and a few lesser 1366 CPUs, so this thing should run for a very long time .

Board is a SuperMicro x8Sax .

I'm wanting to get a LGA1366 board that can overclock, as the Xeons really wake up when you overclock the snot out of them. The X5675 has a 3.06GHz base clock and 3.46GHz boost clock, yet can easily be made to run at a 4.2GHz boost clock.