First post, by Katmai500
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Background:
For folks who are not familiar, Intel Timna was a project in 1999/2000 to integrate a Coppermine Celeron CPU with a RAMBUS memory controller and i752 graphics all on a single piece of silicon. The goal was to simplify motherboard designs for the sub -$600 PC market. Unfortunately, RDRAM prices never came down to reasonable levels, so Intel had to resort to pairing Timna with the flawed Memory Translator Hub (MTH) to allow use of cheaper SDRAM. Intel also paired the MTH with the i820 chipset. Performance was worse than native-SDRAM solutions such as the 440BX, and there were stability issues. After the MTH was recalled and vendors showed little interest in selling Timna systems, intel cancelled the project.
This build is probably the worst possible combination of hardware for a retro gaming build: a fairly slow Celeron processor, intel integrated graphics with i810 levels of performance, and no AGP slot for upgradability, but it's super rare and cool so here we go.
The Build:
First we start with an Intel Timna engineering sample CPU: Q-Spec QV18, rated for 667 MHz and manufactured in May of 2000. It looks a lot like a standard Socket 370 Celeron, but the pin-out is slightly different.
Next we need a motherboard. This is an ASUS TMA-PL pre-production Socket 370S motherboard for the Intel Timna. It has no chipset northbridge, since that functionality is integrated with the CPU. So all it has is the MTH for memory translation and an ICH2 southbridge.
Since this is a low-cost Celeron build, I'm sticking with the integrated Timna graphics and the on-board AC'97 audio. No need to fill up any PCI slots here. Just add a 128 MB stick of CL2 PC133 SDRAM, add a heatsink/fan, and it's good to go.
