My 5yr old daughter uses my old C2Q 6600 (2.4ghz no overclock), 4gb ram, Radeon HD7850, 240gb ssd, win10. Obviously it’s not the original configuration, I’ve upgraded hardware where it makes sense and running Win10 helps. But CPU and motherboard are approaching 15years old.

My daughter uses it everyday, it handles 1080p video with no issues and can play many games (but obviously not modern AAA titles). Performance in lightweight tasks like web surfing still feels very snappy. Far from useless. I’ll be sad to see it retired (or repurposed again) once my daughter starts to play games that require more CPU.

ODwilly wrote on 2022-01-25, 06:22:

That Athlon might be able to be bumped up to a Athlon quad for a tenner or maybe a Phenom depending on HP bios support. Def no 125 watt chips but there are 95 watt 6 core and 4 core Phenom ii's, and a bunch of 65watt Quads as well.

As I've said I prefer the z series better. I really have no specific use for it, snagged I because it was cheap and was an "almost" z2n0. I have to donate a bunch of puters 2 years ago, it'll probably be amongst them. I think I'll miss the asus essentio the most, I like the bare metal case, and the asus boot logo. It's only a pentium such and such, yes I realize many upgrade possibilities. I actually bought the stickers and did a bang up job applying them to an lga771 xeon I have lying around. But never went all the way.

Oh yeah found that on the road.

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years.
"retro" XP builds are also becoming more common, which will flow onto the XP overkill builds

Give it enough time and even the current gen hardware will be "worth it" maybe not with us but I've no doubt the "kids of today" will become nostalgic of their computers just as we did 20 years later on.

This excludes crap budget hardware though. No one builds Celeron/Intel Graphics based PC's now, Can't see many people wanting to relive things line netbooks

chinny22 wrote on 2022-01-25, 12:30:

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years. "retro" XP b […]
Show full quote

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years.
"retro" XP builds are also becoming more common, which will flow onto the XP overkill builds

Give it enough time and even the current gen hardware will be "worth it" maybe not with us but I've no doubt the "kids of today" will become nostalgic of their computers just as we did 20 years later on.

This excludes crap budget hardware though. No one builds Celeron/Intel Graphics based PC's now, Can't see many people wanting to relive things line netbooks

A Celery 300A with an Intel i740 AGP card might be fun . .shit but fun.

I like cheap computers. I spend or have spent big money on cutting edge hardware in the past, it all seems crazy now. I like them cheap. Free is even better. I love finding computers on the road. Donated puters are great fun also. Neighbor donated me a dual socket 604 Dell server. It's a bitch and a bastard though. Did I also mention I like computers that won't aggravate my present hernia nor cause me to herniate again?

This isn't a "vintage" thread. I'm not waxing nostalgic about netbooks. I have to unload a bunch of stuff, and though I intend to sell off a bunch of what I now have, and buy a new (cheap) laptop, I thought it might be nice to keep one older unit around. Something I could leave in the car behind my seat. For whatever. Everything doesn't come down to whether something is a worthwhile gaming computer.

Is your computer newer than your car? It used to be you would switch computers every couple of years and switch car a couple of times a decade.

Errius wrote on 2022-01-26, 07:06:

Is your computer newer than your car? It used to be you would switch computers every couple of years and switch car a couple of times a decade.

Teh more worrying question is

Is your new computer more expensive than your car ?

For me thats a yes, the GPU alone with worth more than a lot of second hand beaters.

GPU prices currently are crazy, 3070ti starts at 1700 up to 2000AUD, 3090s here in Australia run 4000AUD for some models, most are ~3700AUD, 6900xts are cheaper at 2000-2600 AUD, these prices assume there are any in stock.

I have an LGA775 PC with an X800XT PE that is my main Windows 98SE rig, it's perfect for DOS and Win9x gaming. I also dual boot it to Linux (AntiX 19.3) and do file transfers and the like. Double plus good.

I also recently built an Athlon II X4 640 PC inside an IBM NetVista case using a mATX AM2+ motherboard. I'm really enjoying using it, far snappier than I thought possible and plays pretty much every game from 2005-2010 fine with an HD4850. I am currently trying to repair a broken GTX480 and GTX780 so if either of them actually work, I'll drop that in instead and turn it into a secondary gaming rig.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-01-24, 22:15:

Your core 2 duo/quad. Atom such and such. Your socket 1366/115n xeon appurtenance. How do you feel about them? Most of us have 1 or more (or many more, you little hoarding so-and-so) hanging around.

My main PC, which I'm using right now, is a Q9550, 8 GB RAM, HD7850. Good for web browsing, watching YouTube and such, Office, older games. I'm not willing to pay a fortune for a more modern GPU so the newest games are out of the question anyway.
And who cares about Windows 11.

Azarien wrote on 2022-01-26, 10:22:

chris2021 wrote on 2022-01-24, 22:15:

Your core 2 duo/quad. Atom such and such. Your socket 1366/115n xeon appurtenance. How do you feel about them? Most of us have 1 or more (or many more, you little hoarding so-and-so) hanging around.

My main PC, which I'm using right now, is a Q9550, 8 GB RAM, HD7850. Good for web browsing, watching YouTube and such, Office, older games. I'm not willing to pay a fortune for a more modern GPU so the newest games are out of the question anyway.
And who cares about Windows 11.

Me, I care.

And anyone who wants to play the most recent games on modern GPUs cares too, Afterall DX12U doesnt work on anything below Win10 and Linux is nowhere near being ready for mainstream modern gaming or RT GPUs.

So perhaps instead of making a huge generalisation just simply state you have no interest in Windows 11, its ok to not like certain operating systems, its not ok to project that on to others who may not share your views.

I dont like Linux and have yet to find a distro worth my time and effort in moving to, perhaps one day that will change but right now Linux for me is either a general use OS or a retro PC OS.

I had the delusion a couple years back that I could fulfill all my computing needs with a Powermac 7500 or some such. I don't think they even had usb. Nowadays even something _with_ usb 2 is a setback. The other problem is what to do when your Mac dies. Yes I suppose they're plentiful enough. But not exactly common.

chinny22 wrote on 2022-01-25, 12:30:

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years. "retro" XP b […]
Show full quote

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years.
"retro" XP builds are also becoming more common, which will flow onto the XP overkill builds

Give it enough time and even the current gen hardware will be "worth it" maybe not with us but I've no doubt the "kids of today" will become nostalgic of their computers just as we did 20 years later on.

This excludes crap budget hardware though. No one builds Celeron/Intel Graphics based PC's now, Can't see many people wanting to relive things line netbooks

Remember when some people said that 486 would never become retro? Because it's so mass-produced it's just cheap junk it's not interesting/it's boring/low quality.
You are absolutely right btw. P4 is a nice platform though. Perhaps not the best but it's definitely not completely boring 😜
There's at least 3 CPU sockets and at least 4 memory types to choose from (and at least 5 if DDR3 is included).

XP builds are fun 😀

And I still think some particular Celerons are definitely worth it, especially some of the P2/P3-era ones.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-01-26, 12:36:

Remember when some people said that 486 would never become retro? Because it's so mass-produced it's just cheap junk it's not in […]
Show full quote

chinny22 wrote on 2022-01-25, 12:30:

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years. "retro" XP b […]
Show full quote

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years.
"retro" XP builds are also becoming more common, which will flow onto the XP overkill builds

Give it enough time and even the current gen hardware will be "worth it" maybe not with us but I've no doubt the "kids of today" will become nostalgic of their computers just as we did 20 years later on.

This excludes crap budget hardware though. No one builds Celeron/Intel Graphics based PC's now, Can't see many people wanting to relive things line netbooks

Remember when some people said that 486 would never become retro? Because it's so mass-produced it's just cheap junk it's not interesting/it's boring/low quality.
You are absolutely right btw. P4 is a nice platform though. Perhaps not the best but it's definitely not completely boring 😜
There's at least 3 CPU sockets and at least 4 memory types to choose from (and at least 5 if DDR3 is included).

XP builds are fun 😀

And I still think some particular Celerons are definitely worth it, especially some of the P2/P3-era ones.

The whole P4 > Core 2 era is just a fun time, P4 covered a huge amount of time due to Intel taking their sweet ass time realising that Netburst was never going to hit the targets they wanted it to but it was around just long enough to see S775 and DDR3. I could shove a P4 Cedar Mill HT 661 in my Striker II extreme and it would work perfectly fine with hardware it by rights should have never seen. (IIRC the 661 was the last P4 released)

Such a fun time and the one era I enjoy greatly collecting parts for, I also love modding 771 Xeons and modding boards to take them.

A 300A celery is fun to OC the snot out of, even then it not powerful just a lot of fun, P3 Celerons are ok too, they are not nerfed to the point of uselessness that a lot of P4 Celerons are.

Ah yes....my secret army of ever growing old Xeons, Core 2 Duos, and <5th geni3s, i5s, and occasionally i7s that people keep throwing away for the next generation. This is what I use for main machines, and I keep a lot of them as backups for whatever I'm using daily because I tend to find it easier to just roll a different machine while I fix the other one, even easier now since I have Linux on the majority (only two machines have Windows 10 at any given time, not planning to upgrade to 11 anytime soon).

They're not immune to the same cycle everything else went down, they're where 486s were when I got into doing this - that period where they are too new for anyone of us to want, but too old for anyone mainstream to want. I'm between keeping and selling on a lot of them because it's easy to accumulate, but then if I hold onto these until they cost as much as the 486s do now, I can "cash out" nicely later. In 10 more years you'll have today's kids and teens trying to get some old Dell OptiPlex 7-whatzit to boot Windows 7 with an unofficial SP upgrade to install, and trying to get it on their Wifi network so they can drag that 280MB Abandonware install of Five Nights at Freddy's, Fortnite, or Minecraft to the hard drive. Probably will pull more than 486s tend to today because of inflation and the fact these are getting trashed way faster than the old stuff was - that usually laid in someone's closet/attic/garage for a decade or two.

chinny22 wrote on 2022-01-25, 12:30:

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years. "retro" XP b […]
Show full quote

People said P4's would never become desirable yet more and more 478/775 builds are featuring here in recent years.
"retro" XP builds are also becoming more common, which will flow onto the XP overkill builds

Give it enough time and even the current gen hardware will be "worth it" maybe not with us but I've no doubt the "kids of today" will become nostalgic of their computers just as we did 20 years later on.

This excludes crap budget hardware though. No one builds Celeron/Intel Graphics based PC's now, Can't see many people wanting to relive things line netbooks

I have a few P4 builds because they were being thrown out and I said what the hell. You can make a fast W98 box using a P4. I mostly used Athlon XPs when P4's were used by the masses so I have a few of them around and spare boards (probably too many) so a P4 was nice to compare them with.

People will buy crap budget hardware to relive something in their youth and just because it's cheaper then what top end gear is going to cost.

chris2021 wrote on 2022-01-26, 12:16:

I had the delusion a couple years back that I could fulfill all my computing needs with a Powermac 7500 or some such. I don't think they even had usb. Nowadays even something _with_ usb 2 is a setback. The other problem is what to do when your Mac dies. Yes I suppose they're plentiful enough. But not exactly common.

20 years ago when Apple users were still using OS 9 and OSX 10.x was still a joke I put together a Powermac 8500 with a G3-400/1MB , Ultimate rez video, ATA/66 IDE card, PCI USB card, IDE CDRW and a ton of RAM to mess around with. There were plenty of aftermarket USB cards (with Firewire if you wanted) for the 7500/8500 and all other PCI Powermacs. Granted a new Apple G4 would have been faster but much more expensive than that I slapped together for a fraction of the cost. I made it to play around with Mac OS 9 and to support my 68K Quadra 950 which was my first retro rig.

Was/is sata an option? It's silly imo to arbitrarily limit yourself, and it was a temporary pipe dream. Basic computers are so cheap to slap together it wouldn't pay to attempt to do modern tasks with an old box.

For that matter why not just go with an Atari ST. Or TT, but they're unobtainium. I spend so much time on tne.internet looking for that new shiny object it would be to my advantage to limit myself though.

Unknown_K wrote on 2022-01-26, 22:53:

People will buy crap budget hardware to relive something in their youth and just because it's cheaper then what top end gear is going to cost.

Well that and 12 months younger, crap budget hardware, is as fast as 12 months older high end.... or not even. Just after June 6th 2001 enthusiasts were scrabbling to get several hundred dollar 1400Mhz Athlon Thunderbird socket A CPU as the fastest you could get, by October 9th the Palomino Athlon XP cores were released with a rating to show how fast they were compared to a Thunderbird, and the very bottom of the range, the hundred and a half CPU was the XP 1500+ .. if that was even too rich for your blood, you didn't have to wait until June rolled around again to pick up a Duron Morgan 1300 (1.3Ghz actual) which was palomino core based with trimmed cache, released in January, and probably down to $50 by June 2002. On code that didn't favor large cache it was clock the clock the same as the XP1500 (No surprise, same core, same clock) and didn't take too much of a hit on the cache heavy stuff, like 5%, so was more or less right beside the Thunderbird 1400 and a little ahead on some workloads. So if you were jonesing after the fastest socket A in mid 2001, who's to say you're really wrong for going 3 months and 3 days newer than target and picking a cheapy XP 1500+ rather than a then and again now expensive thunderbird 1400.

edit: quote inserted for context.

Sadly I'm lost by the quote and the reply. No matter I'll just buy whatever suits me, knowing full well that breaking the bank for cutting edge hardware never makes any sense (unless you're loaded or your livelihood requires it). I don't shoot for bottom of the barrel, sometimes wind up there regardless 🤣. I just buy what makes the most sense for the money. I don't spend hours gaming, not even minutes these days. Ultimately a computer is supposed to enhance intellectual endeavor somehow. The vast majority of hw and sw out there serves to dumb the masses down more then anything else.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-26, 23:18:

Unknown_K wrote on 2022-01-26, 22:53:

People will buy crap budget hardware to relive something in their youth and just because it's cheaper then what top end gear is going to cost.

Well that and 12 months younger, crap budget hardware, is as fast as 12 months older high end.... or not even. Just after June 6th 2001 enthusiasts were scrabbling to get several hundred dollar 1400Mhz Athlon Thunderbird socket A CPU as the fastest you could get, by October 9th the Palomino Athlon XP cores were released with a rating to show how fast they were compared to a Thunderbird, and the very bottom of the range, the hundred and a half CPU was the XP 1500+ .. if that was even too rich for your blood, you didn't have to wait until June rolled around again to pick up a Duron Morgan 1300 (1.3Ghz actual) which was palomino core based with trimmed cache, released in January, and probably down to $50 by June 2002. On code that didn't favor large cache it was clock the clock the same as the XP1500 (No surprise, same core, same clock) and didn't take too much of a hit on the cache heavy stuff, like 5%, so was more or less right beside the Thunderbird 1400 and a little ahead on some workloads. So if you were jonesing after the fastest socket A in mid 2001, who's to say you're really wrong for going 3 months and 3 days newer than target and picking a cheapy XP 1500+ rather than a then and again now expensive thunderbird 1400.

edit: quote inserted for context.

I've had the opportunity to pickup a few thunderbird boards, but they have honestly never interested me, the XP series was more interesting and fun to build with, slot A stuff is expensive and usually requires reworks for the capacitors, same with slot 1 boards.

I do love a good PII450 tho, but I dont have an interest in collecting them due to the mentioned repairs usually required to plague generation boards.