aitotat wrote on 2023-10-23, 09:24:

And for 1995 build the S3 vision 968 based cards would likely be better than Trio based cards because Trio was used on cheaper cards and Vision on better quality cards.

I did some more digging on this and found some benchmark comparisons: Re: Benchmarks for high-end VLB graphic cards - ET4000W32P/ARK1000VL/Trio64/S3 Vision968/Mach64

While the 968 is faster in Windows, the Trio64 is better under DOS.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 17:38:

Which is why I can understand you limiting yourself to a year, especiually those years ago technology moved on so quickly. What was the best at the end of one year wouldnt have made the best model spec list the next.

It's just meant to examine what a high-end gaming rig would have looked like for a given year. That's all there is to it.

For anyone wanting to do a period correct gaming build, maybe it can provide some guidance of what was available at certain points in time.

Other than that, it was never intended to be an "ultimate gaming PC of all time" list.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-23, 17:44:

It's just meant to examine what a high-end gaming rig would have looked like for a given year. That's all there is to it. […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 17:38:

Which is why I can understand you limiting yourself to a year, especiually those years ago technology moved on so quickly. What was the best at the end of one year wouldnt have made the best model spec list the next.

It's just meant to examine what a high-end gaming rig would have looked like for a given year. That's all there is to it.

For anyone wanting to do a period correct gaming build, maybe it can provide some guidance of what was available at certain points in time.

Other than that, it was never intended to be an "ultimate gaming PC of all time" list.

Well in that case it might well turn out to be an interesting list indeed.

The one thing I do remember is by the time 1999 rolled around people were starting to look at their PCs not only to play games but also edit videos on their PCs...
Which is where the optical drives come in. Because the CD... DVD-RAM was also trying to kick off then too.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 15:20:

Yes they were first to market with their 1GHz CPU but nobody took AMD seriously

Enthusiast market did.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 15:20:

It was a real disaster for Intel, but the alternative in AMD was so weak the disaster didnt hardly seem to matter. I mean none of the bog OEMs in the US or Europe dropped Intel because of it

There was this small case of bribery involved in those decisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_ … ._v._Intel_Corp.
DELL alone was receiving $1Billion (yes, a B) a year for being exclusive Intel shop while Intel products struggled to compete on even grounds.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 15:24:

As an example that 1999 system might better read
Intel 820
512Mb SDRAM

broken system https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/impact-intel,190.html Another Intels costly recall.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-23, 18:15:

Enthusiast market did. […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 15:20:

Yes they were first to market with their 1GHz CPU but nobody took AMD seriously

Enthusiast market did.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 15:20:

It was a real disaster for Intel, but the alternative in AMD was so weak the disaster didnt hardly seem to matter. I mean none of the bog OEMs in the US or Europe dropped Intel because of it

There was this small case of bribery involved in those decisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_ … ._v._Intel_Corp.
DELL alone was receiving $1Billion (yes, a B) a year for being exclusive Intel shop while Intel products struggled to compete on even grounds.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 15:24:

As an example that 1999 system might better read
Intel 820
512Mb SDRAM

broken system https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/impact-intel,190.html Another Intels costly recall.

You could have counted all the AMD enthusiasts on the fingers of one hand back then.
They were know for low CPUs like the K6-2.

Yes the Intel 820 chipset was a flop, it was a disaster. I dont think there is a single person who would tell you otherwise.
It didnt matter. People still bought the Intel chipset boards by the thousands. the 440BX and i810 boards sold well to make up for it. Meanwhile AMD was trying to make inroads into the Intel dominance of the market. It sold but and kept AMD in business so from that point of view it was a success, but in terms of numbers it didnt sell very many at all. And then not long later Intel came up with the 1gig flip chips which put the whole thing to bed in the 2000s.
AMD didnt come back again until the Athlon XP line of CPUs, and they were very successful indeed. Especially the Duron budget line of CPUs not because they were good but because they were cheap. Which is what people wanted.

Updated the list with a few changes:

1) Downgraded the 1994 spec to a Pentium 90 instead of the original Pentium 100. After reviewing a bunch of 1994 magazines, I can't find a single instance of a Pentium 100 in any systems offered for sale or even listed stand-alone. Even in CGW's Dec 1994 issue they mention the existence of the Pentium 100, but still recommend a Pentium 90 based on price/performance.

2) Boosted 1994 HDD spec to 1 GB based on listed specs from a Falcon Mach V system.

3) Downgraded the 1999 spec to a Pentium III 733. Again, based on review of various magazines in late 1999 this was the highest spec processor available, even though the 800MHz model did technically release end of Dec 1999. Also tweaked the chipset / sockets to reflect both Socket 370 and Slot 1.

4) Tweaked some of the RAM amounts. Boosted 1997 to 128MB based on the Falcon Northwest Mach V system listed in CGW's Dec 1997 issue which featured 128MB of RAM. Downgraded the 1999 build to 256MB based on the max listed in CGW's ultimate rig in Dec 1999.

5) Modified the 1996 GPU to a S3 ViRGE/VX in place of the previous ViRGE/DX. The latter doesn't appear to have been available in 1996.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-23, 20:34:

1) Downgraded the 1994 spec to a Pentium 90 instead of the original Pentium 100. After reviewing a bunch of 1994 magazines, I can't find a single instance of a Pentium 100 in any systems offered for sale or even listed stand-alone. Even in CGW's Dec 1994 issue they mention the existence of the Pentium 100, but still recommend a Pentium 90 based on price/performance.

This is my Pentium 100 "gold top" SX962. The labeling on the heatspreader has been mostly erased by contact with the original heatsink, but the engraving on the ceramic part is still readable:

The production date code starts with "L448", so it's from late 1994. Now, this is an FDIV bug-free CPU, so I would expect most bugged chips to have been produced earlier than this one, more like mid-1994. But yes, the P100 seems to be exceedingly rare in 1994 when compared to the P90.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 04:23:

the 440BX chipset on the 99 system doesnt sound right. I know the 810 was a disaster but the 820 was basically DOA as there was no take up beyond big system OEMs. But the 810 was what we had until the 815 came out a year or so later.

440BX is right. I bought one of Dell's last 440BX systems in June 2000, right ahead of the release of the i815 the next month.

Basically, the i810 had no AGP, so was useless for anything other than entry, entry-level workloads. The i820 + SDRAM combo was... barely around... and got recalled around that time. i820 + RDRAM was insanely expensive.

So, 440BX it was. And the 440BX was so popular and the other alternatives so bad (there was also a 133MHz FSB VIA chipset) that this is why the usual folks in Taiwan started making 440BX motherboards factory overclocked to 133MHz FSB.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-23, 21:47:

440BX is right. I bought one of Dell's last 440BX systems in June 2000, right ahead of the release of the i815 the next month. […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 04:23:

the 440BX chipset on the 99 system doesnt sound right. I know the 810 was a disaster but the 820 was basically DOA as there was no take up beyond big system OEMs. But the 810 was what we had until the 815 came out a year or so later.

440BX is right. I bought one of Dell's last 440BX systems in June 2000, right ahead of the release of the i815 the next month.

Basically, the i810 had no AGP, so was useless for anything other than entry, entry-level workloads. The i820 + SDRAM combo was... barely around... and got recalled around that time. i820 + RDRAM was insanely expensive.

So, 440BX it was. And the 440BX was so popular and the other alternatives so bad (there was also a 133MHz FSB VIA chipset) that this is why the usual folks in Taiwan started making 440BX motherboards factory overclocked to 133MHz FSB.

I didnt mean that. When I think of the 440BX I think of old chipsets. But of course its really the first of the "new" chipsets.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 22:16:

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-23, 21:47:

440BX is right. I bought one of Dell's last 440BX systems in June 2000, right ahead of the release of the i815 the next month. […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 04:23:

the 440BX chipset on the 99 system doesnt sound right. I know the 810 was a disaster but the 820 was basically DOA as there was no take up beyond big system OEMs. But the 810 was what we had until the 815 came out a year or so later.

440BX is right. I bought one of Dell's last 440BX systems in June 2000, right ahead of the release of the i815 the next month.

Basically, the i810 had no AGP, so was useless for anything other than entry, entry-level workloads. The i820 + SDRAM combo was... barely around... and got recalled around that time. i820 + RDRAM was insanely expensive.

So, 440BX it was. And the 440BX was so popular and the other alternatives so bad (there was also a 133MHz FSB VIA chipset) that this is why the usual folks in Taiwan started making 440BX motherboards factory overclocked to 133MHz FSB.

I didnt mean that. When I think of the 440BX I think of old chipsets. But of course its really the first of the "new" chipsets.

Not really? The 440BX is old. It has an old name. It has an old southbridge with a forgettable name connected via PCI instead of an ICH connected over... I forget the name of the interconnect. It's the last Intel chipset with ISA. Etc.

And in large OEM systems, at least, the 440BX was paired with Slot 1, which was itself old and dying in favour of socket 370 and away from the slot model dating back to the PII.

The 440BX was good, but it wasn't really 'new', certainly not at the time of its glory days stretching into mid-2000... and it continued its life in mobile, too. I got one of the last (again - this seems to have been a habit of mine) Dell Inspiron 4000s in summer 2001, so a year after the i815 release on desktop, and that was a 440BX as well.

Worth noting, too, that the 440BX has been very popular in the virtualization world.

I think it's fairly clear that Intel started to look at cleaning up the 'Wintel' platform, hardware-wise, with the i8xx/ICH chipsets.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 19:54:

You could have counted all the AMD enthusiasts on the fingers of one hand back then.
They were know for low CPUs like the K6-2.

K6 was extreme budget poor spec bottom of the barrel market yes, but Athlon took over hi-end enthusiast segment in 2000. In 2000 informed people picked AMD because it was simultaneously faster and cheaper. Intel served either overpriced or entirely defective products for whole year while frantically working on P4 in the background. For example March 2000 situation https://www.anandtech.com/show/498/3
Pentium III 800 "in stock for between $800 and $900"
Athlon 850 "for around $800, if not less."
Athlon 800 "over 50 online vendors that carry the 800MHz parts, which are currently priced between $500 and $600"
Athlon 750 "could be had anywhere between $350 - $450"
Pentium III 750 "about $650"
Athlon 700 "everywhere for as low as $250"
Pentium III 733/700 "between $400 and $500"

By May 2000 you could in theory buy $744 Intel Pentium III 933 MHz, in practice street price was closer to $850 due to low shipments.
Athlon 1GHz official price $1299, street $1400 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/ … 0527/p_cpu.html
Athlon 950 official $1000, street $760
Athlon 750 official $800, street $255 😮
Pentium III 650/667 was ~$250

By 2001 newly released Pentium 4 traded speed crown back and forth, so if you didnt care about cost Intel again made sense. If you wanted best bang for buck there was no choice but AMD either DIY or from small often mom&pop vendors.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 19:54:

Yes the Intel 820 chipset was a flop, it was a disaster. I dont think there is a single person who would tell you otherwise.
It didnt matter.

it does matter when your computer crashes. What kind of Ultimate Gaming Rig crashes? 😀

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 19:54:

kept AMD in business so from that point of view it was a success, but in terms of numbers it didnt sell very many at all. And then not long later Intel came up with the 1gig flip chips which put the whole thing to bed in the 2000s.
AMD didnt come back again until the Athlon XP line of CPUs, and they were very successful indeed. Especially the Duron budget line of CPUs not because they were good but because they were cheap. Which is what people wanted.

Again AMD didnt make inroads because of Intel bribery scandal. It doesnt matter how good your products are when 800 Pound Gorilla incumbent forces all of the biggest B2B clients into signing exclusivity deals, or more precisely pledges to not carry AMD hardware in exchange for huge unofficial off the books discounts. Anecdotally Microsoft later did the same with Linux https://slashdot.org/story/02/08/10/1420208/d … wo-microsoft-os

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-23, 17:38:

aitotat wrote on 2023-10-23, 09:24:

And for 1995 build the S3 vision 968 based cards would likely be better than Trio based cards because Trio was used on cheaper cards and Vision on better quality cards.

I did some more digging on this and found some benchmark comparisons: Re: Benchmarks for high-end VLB graphic cards - ET4000W32P/ARK1000VL/Trio64/S3 Vision968/Mach64

While the 968 is faster in Windows, the Trio64 is better under DOS.

Perhaps the 868 (uses DRAM like Trio instead of VRAM that the 96x uses) would be better than 968 then. I have compared VLB Trio64 and 864 and there were no performance differences in DOS but the 864 based card was better quality card. But with S3 cards you cannot be sure what clock rates they operate at. Here are some of my comparisons (seems like I had tested 968 based card and found it to be slower than Trio64 but I had completely forgotten it). I did those tests in my 1996 Pentium thread.

S3 2d card choice is purely academic, speed differences are imperceptible in real use and invisible in games. Virge 3D "acceleration" was pure scam.

Love threads like this. Is there a 2000/2001 thread somewhere as well?

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-24, 05:45:

Virge 3D "acceleration" was pure scam.

A few years back, I've done some limited testing on this with Tomb Raider. At 640x480, a Virge DX in S3D mode performs slightly better than a Pentium 133 using software rendering at that same resolution. Of course, you get 16-bit color, perspective correction and bilinear filtering with S3D, while the software renderer uses a 256 color palette without any of those things.

Also, in S3D mode, you can turn off some of those extra features and lower the resolution to 512x384 for an additional FPS boost, which leaves the software rendering performance of the Pentium 133 firmly behind.

So the Virge DX (which is one of the faster models) can actually serve as an accelerator on slower Pentium systems, but gets quickly outclassed on anything faster. It doesn't help that clocks vary wildly between Virge cards from different manufacturers, so take my test results with a grain of salt. That said, most people who decry the Virge as a "decelerator" seem to be doing one or more of these things:

• using an original Virge or a VX, both of which are slower than the newer DX and GX models
• using it for games from 1998 or later, instead of focusing on S3D and early Direct3D titles
• using it with a fast CPU, like a Pentium 3

In any of those scenarios, the Virge will indeed be a very bad choice. But for S3D acceleration under pure DOS, it can be an ok solution, if paired with a slow CPU. Heck, there's even a video of someone using a Virge with a 486 and getting a lot more performance out of Tomb Raider compared to what that CPU can normally provide via software rendering.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-23, 22:31:

Not really? The 440BX is old. It has an old name. It has an old southbridge with a forgettable name connected via PCI instead of […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 22:16:

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-23, 21:47:

440BX is right. I bought one of Dell's last 440BX systems in June 2000, right ahead of the release of the i815 the next month.

Basically, the i810 had no AGP, so was useless for anything other than entry, entry-level workloads. The i820 + SDRAM combo was... barely around... and got recalled around that time. i820 + RDRAM was insanely expensive.

So, 440BX it was. And the 440BX was so popular and the other alternatives so bad (there was also a 133MHz FSB VIA chipset) that this is why the usual folks in Taiwan started making 440BX motherboards factory overclocked to 133MHz FSB.

I didnt mean that. When I think of the 440BX I think of old chipsets. But of course its really the first of the "new" chipsets.

Not really? The 440BX is old. It has an old name. It has an old southbridge with a forgettable name connected via PCI instead of an ICH connected over... I forget the name of the interconnect. It's the last Intel chipset with ISA. Etc.

And in large OEM systems, at least, the 440BX was paired with Slot 1, which was itself old and dying in favour of socket 370 and away from the slot model dating back to the PII.

The 440BX was good, but it wasn't really 'new', certainly not at the time of its glory days stretching into mid-2000... and it continued its life in mobile, too. I got one of the last (again - this seems to have been a habit of mine) Dell Inspiron 4000s in summer 2001, so a year after the i815 release on desktop, and that was a 440BX as well.

Worth noting, too, that the 440BX has been very popular in the virtualization world.

I think it's fairly clear that Intel started to look at cleaning up the 'Wintel' platform, hardware-wise, with the i8xx/ICH chipsets.

Another trap people often fall for.
The 440BX out performed the 810 and 820 and it is about equal to the 815.
The early gen ICHs werent anything to write home about, and they lacked features you might well expect them to have given the name.

The Pentium II was 2 years old by this point in time. The OEMs were only to happy to use up the parts from the parts bin while they could before the flip chips took a hold of the market, which is why the exact opposite of what youre saying happened happened and there was a rush on slot 1 systems to get rid of them into 2000.
I know beyond a doubt that in the UK OEMs were still selling Slot 1 based systems in 2000 and they were the cheapest of the cheap systems in 2001 too.
The Pentium II wasnt old by the time the flip chips came alone, there were people still more than happy to take them and it didnt matter if it was a slot 1 or flip chip P3.

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-24, 05:03:

K6 was extreme budget poor spec bottom of the barrel market yes, but Athlon took over hi-end enthusiast segment in 2000. In 2000 […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 19:54:

You could have counted all the AMD enthusiasts on the fingers of one hand back then.
They were know for low CPUs like the K6-2.

K6 was extreme budget poor spec bottom of the barrel market yes, but Athlon took over hi-end enthusiast segment in 2000. In 2000 informed people picked AMD because it was simultaneously faster and cheaper. Intel served either overpriced or entirely defective products for whole year while frantically working on P4 in the background. For example March 2000 situation https://www.anandtech.com/show/498/3
Pentium III 800 "in stock for between $800 and $900"
Athlon 850 "for around $800, if not less."
Athlon 800 "over 50 online vendors that carry the 800MHz parts, which are currently priced between $500 and $600"
Athlon 750 "could be had anywhere between $350 - $450"
Pentium III 750 "about $650"
Athlon 700 "everywhere for as low as $250"
Pentium III 733/700 "between $400 and $500"

By May 2000 you could in theory buy $744 Intel Pentium III 933 MHz, in practice street price was closer to $850 due to low shipments.
Athlon 1GHz official price $1299, street $1400 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/ … 0527/p_cpu.html
Athlon 950 official $1000, street $760
Athlon 750 official $800, street $255 😮
Pentium III 650/667 was ~$250

By 2001 newly released Pentium 4 traded speed crown back and forth, so if you didnt care about cost Intel again made sense. If you wanted best bang for buck there was no choice but AMD either DIY or from small often mom&pop vendors.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 19:54:

Yes the Intel 820 chipset was a flop, it was a disaster. I dont think there is a single person who would tell you otherwise.
It didnt matter.

it does matter when your computer crashes. What kind of Ultimate Gaming Rig crashes? 😀

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-23, 19:54:

kept AMD in business so from that point of view it was a success, but in terms of numbers it didnt sell very many at all. And then not long later Intel came up with the 1gig flip chips which put the whole thing to bed in the 2000s.
AMD didnt come back again until the Athlon XP line of CPUs, and they were very successful indeed. Especially the Duron budget line of CPUs not because they were good but because they were cheap. Which is what people wanted.

Again AMD didnt make inroads because of Intel bribery scandal. It doesnt matter how good your products are when 800 Pound Gorilla incumbent forces all of the biggest B2B clients into signing exclusivity deals, or more precisely pledges to not carry AMD hardware in exchange for huge unofficial off the books discounts. Anecdotally Microsoft later did the same with Linux https://slashdot.org/story/02/08/10/1420208/d … wo-microsoft-os

The article you posted at the start tells you that the Pentium does offer a speed advantage over the AMD but the AMD is cheaper.

You can always tell a die hard AMD fan when they have to take the performance charts on a day by day basis. Because sometimes when the wind is blowing in the right direction as it was on a particular day in early August of 2000 then the AMD will outperform the Intel chips.

The whole AMD Intel price thing.
Intel were always more expensive than AMD.

Thats also another AMD fan marker. Theyre hung up on prices.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-24, 14:24:

The Pentium II was 2 years old by this point in time. The OEMs were only to happy to use up the parts from the parts bin while they could before the flip chips took a hold

Just to clear things up Pentium 2 is also a flip chip

FC in FC-PGA is just marketing.

I know. I now also know you werent actually there at the time all this was playing out.
If you were you would know why I use the terms I do to differentiate the things we're talking about.

If youre reduced to that then its about time to call it a loss isnt it?

SECC and FC-PGA...

When we talked about them, because there was the two types at the same time then one of a P3 and the other was a flip chip P3 and that was you knew one from the other.
In conversation it wasnt a slot 1 P3, it was just a P3.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-24, 14:37:

Thats also another AMD fan marker. Theyre hung up on prices.

Price/performance ratios and affordability is an important factor.

I used AMD systems from the K6-2 era through to the Athlon XP , not because I wanted to, but because I was a student working low-paying jobs and paying for school.

As much as I would have loved to have a high-end Pentium II or Pentium III system of the time, financial realities dictated otherwise.

This also wasn't exclusive to AMD users. The Celeron 300 was highly popular because of its overclockability and overall price-to-performance ratio.