Malvineous has been putting a lot of effort into getting the wiki off the ground - you would make a perfect contributor to the project if it's something you're interested in!

Totally interested, can someone give me some more info on what particulars you are looking for?

A photo with a white background would be perfect. Have a look at some of the existing images for the sort of style I think works best.

For the devices already on the wiki, we have one page for each model - so one page for a Sound Blaster 2.0, one for an SBPro, one for SB16, and so on. Some motherboards are offered with different options (e.g. onboard audio or not) so for these we will probably have one page for the motherboard model, with (hopefully!) one photo of each variant (onboard audio yes/no, onboard video yes/no, etc.) and some text explaining the different options available.

With this in mind, what would you think would work best for CPUs? How about one page for each model (PII/300, PII/350, etc.) with different steppings/revisions listed on that model's page?

The answer to this question probably hinges on the device lists on the wiki, which are supposed to list all the devices and compare features between them. For example the list of sound cards shows which devices have a CD interface and which will work in an 8-bit ISA slot, so if you are looking for a sound card to run your CD drive or to go into your XT, you can use the lists to find suitable candidates.

I guess if you are looking at a list of CPUs, you want to know which CPUs will work in a motherboard you have, so key attributes would be things like the socket and the microarchitecture codename. I don't think these change within the same CPU model, so one page per CPU model (with all the different revisions on that one model's page) should just about cover it, right?

What other attributes do you think should be recorded for CPUs? Cache size, bus speed, architecture, register size (32/64bit), little/big/both endian, address bus width/maximum addressable memory...what else? Power use? I'll create an infobox for CPUs with these attributes then do up an example page, and if you think it covers everything then you can just copy and paste it and change the details for each CPU model you add. Hopefully that will make it easy!

I'll have a think about the best way to code this up. It'd be nice to be able to show an automatically generated list on each motherboard's page of the CPUs that will work with that board. Or maybe even each CPU's page could have a list of motherboards that will run it...

@brassicGamer: Thanks for the kind words!

Info box sounds good, I would say: speed, bus speed, cache size, socket, voltage, power use would make a good start.

One page per couple model also sounds good: pentium, amd k6, Cyrix 6x86, 80486, etc

Ok so I started working on this but how do iI create new pages? For example here: http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/CPU

Look in the top right corner - there is a 'request account' link 😀

brassicGamer wrote:

Look in the top right corner - there is a 'request account' link 😀

Yes I've got that thank you and I've uploaded some photos. I don't know how to create a new page. I have some reading to do I guess.

Do a search of the title of the page you want to create and if the page does not exist it should give you an option to create it.

@gbeirn: Looks good! Just a couple of questions:

The article is titled "AMD Athlon 1GHz Slot A" which is fine, assuming there are non-Slot A versions of this CPU model. Is that true? If there is *only* a slot A version then we can drop that from the title, but if there are alternatives then it's fine as is.

With the image names, I will rename them so they also start with "AMD". Only a small thing, but I'm aiming for all the images to start with the same text that the article does, just for consistency.

What do you think about the photos? All the Slot A/1 CPUs are going to look much the same, so do you think it would be better to have just a photo of the top where the model numbers are? We can always link to the "Slot A" article to show different variations on those types of CPUs, e.g. different heatsink or fan combinations, what the inside looks like, etc. But it might be a bit pointless having front and rear views for a bunch of CPUs that look identical.

What photo should we use for the infobox? A generic Slot A shot for all Slot A CPUs, or the top view with the model numbers? I'm not quite sure what the "primary" photo would be for a slot CPU. For a socketed one, top down showing the model number would be fine, but not so sure for a slot. The front view seems like the best one to me, but then all of them will have the same photo which isn't ideal!

Otherwise, great start! If you're willing to keep going, maybe you could try some very different models next (e.g. a socket, non-Intel, etc.) just to get any kinks ironed out of the infobox, so there's less to go back and correct later if we find there's been a mistake anywhere.

Lastly, thank you so much for contributing!

I'll add some socket 3 and super / socket 7 models this week. But I imagine gbeirn has all of them anyway!

Ohhh the beauty of the AMD 286-16/S. That chip was the first great success I had in learning the art of overclocking back in the 80's. Because of its design, I was able to stick on a good homemade heatsink, and cheap thermal grease get I was able to get the board stable to 20MHz without a fan and 22MHz with a fan on top of the case. It took a lot of crystal swapings, and then I had to find a 3" hole saw to cut a hole in the top of the case (good 'ol desktop case), and swapping DRAM's down to 6ns, but it all worked out. Learned a lot about cooling and mods in the 80's from that wonderful little chip. Because of that chip, I still say that AMD made the best 286's ever. Thanks for the pics, brought back some great memories. Welcome aboard!

I somehow missed this thread.

First thing I noticed was the bend pins 🙁

But holy shat, so many! 🤣
Awesome! 😁

I saw a couple Pentium 2 chips which might have unlocked multipliers (400Mhz and 333MHz are the fastest which may have not fully locked multipliers).

I dunno, but perhaps it would be easier for gbeirn if he simply uploaded his pics and have someone else who knows his way around the wiki decide which ones to use for which page. This should save him lots of time (and possibly also frustration) so he can concentrate on taking those pics 😀.

Didnt notice this thread either until Tetrium commented. That is an insane quantity and variety of CPUs. I am kinda jealous. See a lot of things that I am missing.

Rhuwyn wrote:

Didnt notice this thread either until Tetrium commented. That is an insane quantity and variety of CPUs. I am kinda jealous. See a lot of things that I am missing.

Great collectors of Vogons! What's missing in your collections? 😜 😁

There's collectors who have like over 1k CPUs or more, but those often specialize in collecting only a few different types of computerparts.

At some point the difficulty will be about how to store all of it 🤣

Yeah good CPU collections are always nice to look at, I hope OP and other collectors would keep these things for many years to come. 😀

Good motherboard collections, however, seem to be far rarer. With hindsight, we probably should've been more aggressive in saving good boards from binners & recyclers. Heh... retro and hindsight, such a Mr. Obvious, am I? 😁

archsan wrote:

Yeah good CPU collections are always nice to look at, I hope OP and other collectors would keep these things for many years to come. 😀

Good motherboard collections, however, seem to be far rarer. With hindsight, we probably should've been more aggressive in saving good boards from binners & recyclers. Heh... retro and hindsight, such a Mr. Obvious, am I? 😁

Dunno....what would actually define a good motherboard collection? And wouldn't this definition also be flexible depending on who one would ask?

It's not always about raw numbers, but what is a good collection actually about?

Is it about rarity? Usability? Does everything have to be in working condition or at least be repairable?
Is it about having a collection that gives the collector as many different options as possible? A collection which with the collector can basically build anything he or she wants?
Does a good collection need fancy displays? And does a pile of motherboards in a box count as well? Do components without their original packaging count? Does the packaging have to be sealed? Is a collection which has spare parts better or just a waste of space? Is it about how much space or how many rooms the collector can decorate? Is it about value perhaps? Or perhaps its weight in mass? Or the number of boxes it is all stored in?
Does it have to be diverse or is a collection of all different models and revisions of all the Geforce 2 MX cards from all different manufacturers also a good collection?

Do items with missing proprietary cables count? Or won't it count, even though the component (which doesn't have all of its cables) might be extremely rare?

Interesting questions actually, perhaps I should start a thread about it 🤣

I have no plans to sell my collection, though things could always change, the future is never set.