VivienM wrote on 2023-10-21, 01:48:

Socket 370 was launched with the i810 (integrated graphics, no AGP, SDRAM) chipset and the i820 (RDRAM, only used in a few really high-end systems from Dell and the like). There was also a weird i820 with an SDRAM compatibility chip that got recalled and never came back.

Technically, there were earlier Socket 370 motherboards which used the 440ZX chipset, but those could only (officially) take Mendocino Celeron CPUs.

The Abit ZM6 is one such example, and it came out in early 1999. I still have one of those, paired with a Celeron 466. It's possible that with a BIOS update and a PowerLeap adapter (or a mod) you could stick a Coppermine CPU in there, but I never tried that myself.

Just to settle the RAM debate, I've attached a few snippets from magazines from 1995 to 1998. These are showing the high end amounts that were listed in some specs at the time.

1995 - 32MB
1996 - 64MB
1997 - 64MB
1998 - 256MB

While most specs would typically be less than that, these are intended to represent the money is no object absolute baller level of specs available.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 01:57:

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-21, 01:48:

Sorry, maybe I wasn't that clear. Socket 370 was launched with the i810 (integrated graphics, no AGP, SDRAM) chipset and the i82 […]
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Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 00:46:

Socket 370 did apparently release in late 1999, so along with the PIII 800MHz, thus why I'm including it.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't that clear. Socket 370 was launched with the i810 (integrated graphics, no AGP, SDRAM) chipset and the i820 (RDRAM, only used in a few really high-end systems from Dell and the like). There was also a weird i820 with an SDRAM compatibility chip that got recalled and never came back.

440BX was Slot 1.

Now, don't get me wrong, with the disaster around the i820 platform and the complete unsuitability of the i810 for anything beyond basic productivity, I'm sure by mid-2000, the usual creative Taiwanese folks (Abit, Asus, Gigabyte, etc) were putting together socket 370 and 440BX, but that is not the socket the 440BX is associated with. Most 440BX systems, including all the ones from the big guys like Dell (and I bought one of Dell's last 440BX systems in June 2000, maybe two weeks before they launched the i815-powered Dimension 4100), were Slot 1.

Ah, that's a good point. I did some copy-pasting when setting up the list, so I missed that. I guess technically it should be an 810 or 820 chipset for late 1999 / Socket 370.

The i810 is a low-end joke, the kind of chipset with no AGP that you got your grandmother to have a starter system for web browsing when she had never used a computer before.

The crazy high end if you won a substantial lottery would have been the i820 with RDRAM.

The normal high-end if you had a large-but-not-lottery/inheritance-large budget was the 440BX with Slot 1. Then the i815 starting in summer 2000 with socket 370.

This, actually, was a big problem in spring 2000. There was no good reasonable-highish-end platform from Intel, just low-end compromised SDRAM-based platforms (and the i815, which was less compromised than, say, the i845, but still has less RAM capacity than the 440BX at a time when 512 megs of RAM started to be affordable) and pricy RDRAM-based high-end platforms... and really, that's a problem that would continue until RDRAM was finally abandoned with the i865/i875s in 2003.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:08:

Just to settle the RAM debate, I've attached a few snippets from magazines from 1995 to 1998. These are showing the high end amo […]
Show full quote

Just to settle the RAM debate, I've attached a few snippets from magazines from 1995 to 1998. These are showing the high end amounts that were listed in some specs at the time.

1995 - 32MB
1996 - 64MB
1997 - 64MB
1998 - 256MB

While most specs would typically be less than that, these are intended to represent the money is no object absolute baller level of specs available.

1995 Nov Millenia PC.PNG

1996 Dec Zephyr Onyx.PNG

1997 Dec Gateway Computer.PNG

1998 Dec CGW Ultimate Rig.PNG

I would presume that those amounts of RAM, though, were not the maximum the motherboards could take, just the maximum one could buy the system with from the manufacturer.

That Dec. 1998 one is so interesting... agrees with my earlier post about SCSI. I think this was very much the tail end of people looking at SCSI for high-performance gaming-type desktops.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 01:56:

These are significant to me from having grown up through that era. Part of it is from reading gaming mags that listed various hi […]
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tunertom wrote on 2023-10-21, 01:44:

I don't understand this mentally of picking a date range... Why pick a date and build a system to a certain date? - especially if this date isn't significant to you.

I also don't understand why you are limiting yourself to what "people had" back in the day.

These are significant to me from having grown up through that era. Part of it is from reading gaming mags that listed various high end systems. I used to be an avid reader of CGW, for example, and always lusted after their ultimate rigs when they published them every year.

The appeal is being able to experience what it would have been like to have one of those rigs back in the day.

"Ultimate" means ultimate: i.e the best, the ultimate, now whether you shoot for ultimate performance, ultimate compatibility or ultimate value at the time of purchasing (today, not in the past, as you are purchasing/acquiring now not in the past) that is your business.

It can be temporal as well.

If you flip through a 1996 CGW issue where they list their "ultimate gaming rig" build, it's not going to be based on modern parts. 😉

And now you are in the future (present day) and are in a position where you can build those same "ultimate" platform systems they wrote about, have all the same hardware and software quirks you would of experienced then, as well as add quality of life improvements on top, like extra ram, bigger hard drive, add in cards, upgrades..

I know I seem like a negative Nancy but I just think you could have much more enjoyment, easier build, money saved etc - if you dropped the mentality of limiting to a certain release date and just built to purpose.

For example I have a system built around the ABIT be6-ii raid: I chose this because it's considered one of the best 440bx boards, I chose 440bx because it's one of the highest performers whilst still maintaining a respectable amount of late DOS compatibility.
I chose the 1.1ghz P3 in a slocket, highest performance possible with no downside for me.
It's got a ti4600 GPU to have the best compatibility for 9x titles and a selection of drivers to choose from

I consider this to be my personal ultimate system due to its combination of compatibility and performance, covering a massive range of usable software

Doubt I'd be able to build such a useful system if I was given a certain release date of stuff and was limited to that

Probably have less systems lay dormant and more seeing regular use too building for purpose

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 01:56:

The appeal is being able to experience what it would have been like to have one of those rigs back in the day.

Okay, so... that I can understand. It's the same reason that when I put my 'vintage Mac' hat on, one of the machines at the top of my bucket list (but that I will likely never get because they are rare and falling apart, not to mention they require all the unique peripherals of Macs of that era) is a Quadra 840av. Just because, for some reason, that's the machine I have the most memory of lusting after reading magazines as a kid...

But if that's your goal, then isn't the question to ask yourself - what was the thing you actually wanted back in the day? Rather than the 'arguably best' thing at the time that you may not have any memory of?

(e.g. I am going to be honest with you, I have absolutely no memory of any non-Creative Labs sound cards from the era you are looking at. Clearly there must have been some nice non-Creative sound cards I didn't know about, but I just don't remember them. So there wouldn't be this 'I am finally getting the thing I never could convince my parents to buy' feeling on one of those sound cards...)

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:13:

I would presume that those amounts of RAM, though, were not the maximum the motherboards could take, just the maximum one could buy the system with from the manufacturer.

Correct, and some ads would list the max amount in addition to the base amount. For example, this is a Falcon ad from 1995:

So yeah, 128MB of RAM in December 1995. That would have have been pretty ridiculous. 😆

That Dec. 1998 one is so interesting... agrees with my earlier post about SCSI. I think this was very much the tail end of people looking at SCSI for high-performance gaming-type desktops.

CGW seemed to really favor SCSI setups in their ultimate rigs.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:18:

Correct, and some ads would list the max amount in addition to the base amount. For example, this is a Falcon ad from 1995: […]
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VivienM wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:13:

I would presume that those amounts of RAM, though, were not the maximum the motherboards could take, just the maximum one could buy the system with from the manufacturer.

Correct, and some ads would list the max amount in addition to the base amount. For example, this is a Falcon ad from 1995:

1995 Falcon Mach V.PNG

So yeah, 128MB of RAM in December 1995. That would have have been pretty ridiculous. 😆

You could put 128MB of RAM in a Mac IIci from 1989. I don't want to know how much that would have cost... probably an order of magnitude or two more than the 128 megs in Dec. 1995.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:18:

That Dec. 1998 one is so interesting... agrees with my earlier post about SCSI. I think this was very much the tail end of people looking at SCSI for high-performance gaming-type desktops.

CGW seemed to really favor SCSI setups in their ultimate rigs.

It wasn't just them, I don't think. I had friends who were big into SCSI at that time. Dell/Gateway/etc all offered a rather pricy SCSI hard drive + Adaptec 2940 option. Originally SCSI CD-ROM too, though I think that switched to IDE CD-ROMs afterwards.

I have a vague sense that one of the things that killed SCSI for those applications is that the SCSI drives hit a maximum size limit of... 9?... gigs maybe at that time when IDE drives just kept growing and growing, and it just started to make less and less sense to pay a lot of money for the SCSI option and lose quite a bit of capacity compared to the IDE options. By the time bigger SCSI drives hit the market, no one wanted them except for servers and maybe a few workstations...

tunertom wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:16:

I know I seem like a negative Nancy but I just think you could have much more enjoyment, easier build, money saved etc - if you dropped the mentality of limiting to a certain release date and just built to purpose.

I've done that. I've got an ultimate XP build (i3770k), an ultimate 98 build (Athlon XP 2000+), and am working an ultimate DOS build based on a VIA C3...

This isn't an either/or thing. I do all sorts of retro builds whether limiting myself to specific hardware up from a certain period or doing things like cramming half a dozen sound cards into an industrial motherboard. There's all sorts of fun and experiences to be had with old hardware, and all sorts of builds can be explored.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:30:

tunertom wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:16:

I know I seem like a negative Nancy but I just think you could have much more enjoyment, easier build, money saved etc - if you dropped the mentality of limiting to a certain release date and just built to purpose.

I've done that. I've got an ultimate XP build (i3770k), an ultimate 98 build (Athlon XP 2000+), and am working an ultimate DOS build based on a VIA C3...

This isn't an either/or thing. I do all sorts of retro builds whether limiting myself to specific hardware up from a certain period or doing things like cramming half a dozen sound cards into an industrial motherboard. There's all sorts of fun and experiences to be had with old hardware, and all sorts of builds can be explored.

Fair enough, I just pictured you hoarding 20-30 systems built from magazine snapshots, one from each year and none of them particularly impressive -
I was wrong

tunertom wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:37:

Fair enough, I just pictured you hoarding 20-30 systems built from magazine snapshots, one from each year and none of them particularly impressive -
I was wrong

No, definitely not that crazy. At most I'll probably only horde about 8 to 10 systems based on magazine snapshots. 😁

A good reason not to go crazy with the physical RAM though for 9x systems is that Windoze swap file management goes to shit over 64MB or so. Having swap on an independent hard drive mitigates this a bit, but perversely, the more RAM you have the more it's screwing around with the swap file all the time. However, once you get to 99 or so and minimum requirements go over 64MB for a game or two, it's either put up with INTENSIVE swap file use, or suffer the overhead the rest of the time by bumping it to 128... then again by 2001 you need 256.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:18:

Okay, so... that I can understand. It's the same reason that when I put my 'vintage Mac' hat on, one of the machines at the top of my bucket list (but that I will likely never get because they are rare and falling apart, not to mention they require all the unique peripherals of Macs of that era) is a Quadra 840av. Just because, for some reason, that's the machine I have the most memory of lusting after reading magazines as a kid...

You never know. Sometimes you can get a lucky find.

But if that's your goal, then isn't the question to ask yourself - what was the thing you actually wanted back in the day? Rather than the 'arguably best' thing at the time that you may not have any memory of?

There were a few things I was always interested in getting. For example, never had a Gravis UltraSound growing up but was always curious about them. Or when I agonized over whether to buy a GeForce 3 to get the shiny water effects in Morrowind but didn't.

Collecting a lot of hardware allows me to revisit some of those choices or try things out I never got to originally. In some instances, I find myself discovering hardware I never even knew existed.

There's a never-ending list of hardware to experiment with and different builds to try out. For me a lot of the fun is journey, not the destination.

(e.g. I am going to be honest with you, I have absolutely no memory of any non-Creative Labs sound cards from the era you are looking at. Clearly there must have been some nice non-Creative sound cards I didn't know about, but I just don't remember them. So there wouldn't be this 'I am finally getting the thing I never could convince my parents to buy' feeling on one of those sound cards...)

Truth is I didn't really know anything about non-Creative cards either. We just had an SB16 growing up, before I eventually got a Diamond Monster Sound MX200.

It's the retro computing hobby that exposed me to a lot of hardware I never knew about. Stuff like the Roland MT-32 just blows my mind at how great old games could have sounded.

Part of my retro obsession is now doing crazy audio builds with half a dozen sound cards and a bunch of sound modules in a single setup. 😁

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:57:

A good reason not to go crazy with the physical RAM though for 9x systems is that Windoze swap file management goes to shit over 64MB or so. Having swap on an independent hard drive mitigates this a bit, but perversely, the more RAM you have the more it's screwing around with the swap file all the time. However, once you get to 99 or so and minimum requirements go over 64MB for a game or two, it's either put up with INTENSIVE swap file use, or suffer the overhead the rest of the time by bumping it to 128... then again by 2001 you need 256.

One option is just max out the RAM and then disable the swap file altogether. 😁

Nice, I also enjoy doing this exercise of coming up with the highest-end but realistic specs for systems on a certain period/year. There's something really fun about building a PC that would have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars back then for a fraction of the price, and thinking how much my younger self would have enjoyed it if I had lots of money. It's also helpful for component selection when you have accumulated a certain amount of old junk 😉

I don't have much nostalgia for my early PCs because being a teen with little money at my disposal meant only small incremental upgrades most of the time, usually with bottom of the barrel components. The only things I wish I could get back is my original AT case from 1993 and my boxed SBPro2 which I kept in mind condition until I stupidly trashed it.

Anyways, I think your specs are pretty much spot on, in fact I've been working on and off in a 1994 build that is pretty much identical to yours except no GUS and CT1770 instead of AWE32. By the way, I have a couple of bulky 2GB Quantum Empire SCSI drives dated 1994 so I think SCSI was usually a bit ahead of IDE in terms of capacity for a while... just mentioning that in case you want to go a bit "higher-end".

EDIT: regarding the RAM, back in '94 I had 4MB and my friends all had between 2 to 8MB except one of them whose father worked with computers and had a whooping 16MB. It was a DX2-66, not a Pentium, but still, seeing that memory count get to 16384K during POST used to blow our minds... RAM was indeed really expensive for a while during that period!

Gateway Destination is a bit of a meme. Gateway 2000 Destination Video Editing Workstation From what I read it was a huge DELL miscalculation and a flop.
Afaik it was build with 440FX, that means SIMMs and no AGP: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Gateway_2000_Destination_D6-266 while 440LX was already on the market and 440BX came 4 months later in 1998.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-10-21, 02:18:

Correct, and some ads would list the max amount in addition to the base amount. For example, this is a Falcon ad from 1995:
1995 Falcon Mach V.PNG
So yeah, 128MB of RAM in December 1995. That would have have been pretty ridiculous. 😆

uncached ram 😐 Ram is one of those things you can have too much of in early systems 😀

I'd considered a Matrox Millennium from 1995 to 1997 (Millennium II). Matrox was at that time known for their highend products, and DOS compatibility with current releases were excellent.

In February 1996 I got burned buying 16MB EDO for $459. By August that year the same shop was selling 16MB EDO for just $140. Around easter time 1997 when i upgraded it was down to $58.

vetz wrote on 2023-10-21, 13:22:

I'd considered a Matrox Millennium from 1995 to 1997 (Millennium II). Matrox was at that time known for their highend products, and DOS compatibility with current releases were excellent.

A Matrox Millennium would be a good choice too. Used to have one back in the 90s, and I know CGW uses them in a couple of their ultimate builds.

TheMobRules wrote on 2023-10-21, 04:40:

Nice, I also enjoy doing this exercise of coming up with the highest-end but realistic specs for systems on a certain period/year. There's something really fun about building a PC that would have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars back then for a fraction of the price, and thinking how much my younger self would have enjoyed it if I had lots of money. It's also helpful for component selection when you have accumulated a certain amount of old junk 😉

Definitely agree it's a handy guide when sifting through piles of old video cards and motherboards and things. 😁

Anyways, I think your specs are pretty much spot on, in fact I've been working on and off in a 1994 build that is pretty much identical to yours except no GUS and CT1770 instead of AWE32. By the way, I have a couple of bulky 2GB Quantum Empire SCSI drives dated 1994 so I think SCSI was usually a bit ahead of IDE in terms of capacity for a while... just mentioning that in case you want to go a bit "higher-end".

That's interesting to know about those SCSI drive sizes. I'll probably have to do some more research on HDD sizes at the time. I pretty skimmed through that part just guesstimating what would have been likely sizes used.