I seem to remember there being a shortage of flip chips when they were first released.
That together with the fact that it was at the point in time the Katamai was the current CPU PCs started to really gain popularity I think tells why there are so many of them.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-01, 20:47:

Most grandmas, aunties, and other computer novices don't have doctors' fat wallets. Imagine when they walked into a wholesale with, say, $1500 budget in summer of year 2000, and you were a salesperson, which of the two similarly-priced computers was easier for you to sell? A P3-1000 with onboard graphics and sound, or a P3-600 (less than half the price of P3-1000) with GF2 GTS and Live! / Vortex2? It would be difficult to explain FPS or SNR to a computer novice (especially those with little interest in latest games), but everyone knows 1000 > 600. Then the store manager's monthly report would conclude "contact our supplier that we need more P3-1000 with integrated sound and video at $1500 price range; no need for independent sound and video cards as few customers were attracted by those specs."

Yup, I think that's right... and then you continue this for close to another decade, and you end up with people believing that Intel MacBooks are just 'higher quality computers'. And in some ways they are, e.g. Apple hasn't cheaped out on wifi cards the way many PC OEMs were when they were giving you the crappiest 802.11n single-band card they could find, and Apple never used the bottom-of-the-barrel Intel processors, all the junk below i3 (and even then... I don't think Apple used a ton of i3s).

There have been plenty of high quality Windows desktops and laptops, but they require some amount of skill to acquire. And a much higher budget. I remember telling someone at work a few years ago that their ThinkPad cost $2xxx CAD and their reaction was "but you can buy a Mac for that much money." It is very, very difficult to sell good-quality Windows machines to the general public.

For the record, if it was my aunt or grandma faced with that budget and those options, I would have told her to buy a Celeron 600 (i.e. cheaper than your PIII 600) with onboard graphics/audio and spend the savings on more RAM and a higher-quality, bigger monitor. 😀 But big stores are even worse at selling good monitors than they are at selling good graphics/sound cards...
(When I was budget constrained and ordering a Dell at that time, after having had two big-retailer-monitor-bundle junk CRTs, I deliberately chose the TNT2 M64 and the 700MHz Coppermine and spent the savings on a 19" Trinitron CRT. And twenty-four years later, I will tell you that I never, ever, ever regretted that decision and, indeed, have never bought a junky monitor for a main system since.)

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-01, 22:20:

Yup, I think that's right... and then you continue this for close to another decade, and you end up with people believing that Intel MacBooks are just 'higher quality computers'. And in some ways they are, e.g. Apple hasn't cheaped out on wifi cards the way many PC OEMs were when they were giving you the crappiest 802.11n single-band card they could find, and Apple never used the bottom-of-the-barrel Intel processors, all the junk below i3 (and even then... I don't think Apple used a ton of i3s).

Apple had records of using inferior components and/or designs like keyboards and "antennagate." Didn't stop them to sell mundane items at hefty prices, though.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-01, 22:20:

There have been plenty of high quality Windows desktops and laptops, but they require some amount of skill to acquire. And a much higher budget. I remember telling someone at work a few years ago that their ThinkPad cost $2xxx CAD and their reaction was "but you can buy a Mac for that much money." It is very, very difficult to sell good-quality Windows machines to the general public.

A brand name, especially an easy one ("apple" is one of the very first English words for a toddler to learn), is always more recognizable than a product line (iBook, MacBook vanilla/Air/Pro etc.) or a model number. Most consumers don't know the differences between models equipped with either PPC, x86, or ARM64; they simply call them "Apple."

Heck, I had a former coworker who couldn't tell if an airliner she took was either driven by "jets" (turbofan engines, to be exact) or propellers.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-01, 22:20:

For the record, if it was my aunt or grandma faced with that budget and those options, I would have told her to buy a Celeron 600 (i.e. cheaper than your PIII 600) with onboard graphics/audio and spend the savings on more RAM and a higher-quality, bigger monitor. 😀 But big stores are even worse at selling good monitors than they are at selling good graphics/sound cards...

Well, one has to be capable of defining "good" before choosing a good product. Content creators (photographers, videographers, designers) want wide gamut coverage and calibrated color accuracy. Gamers want fast refresh rates and low lag. What do general consumers want? Pleasant colors (usually high contrast and saturation i.e. "punchy") with lowest prices. And those "punchy" monitors outsell the two "good" monitor types by a big margin.

This reminds me that novice users back then had two additional bad habits that made screen displays of low-end monitors even worse:

1. Kept using VGA cable even if DVI connections were available at both ends (graphic cards and monitors)
2. Set lower screen resolution "to make letters and icons bigger" instead of assigning more dots for fonts (usually from 96 to 120 DPI) and icons

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-01, 22:20:

(When I was budget constrained and ordering a Dell at that time, after having had two big-retailer-monitor-bundle junk CRTs, I deliberately chose the TNT2 M64 and the 700MHz Coppermine and spent the savings on a 19" Trinitron CRT. And twenty-four years later, I will tell you that I never, ever, ever regretted that decision and, indeed, have never bought a junky monitor for a main system since.)

I didn't like Sony Trinitron for those two thin black horizontal lines so I chose NEC MultiSync XP15 in December 1995 for NT$25,000 (almost US$800 today), one of the best non-Trinitron 15" monitor money could buy back then. Used it for six years before replacing it with a Philips Brilliance 107P. Should have kept at least one of them (sigh).

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-02, 07:26:

Well, one has to be capable of defining "good" before choosing a good product. Content creators (photographers, videographers, designers) want wide gamut coverage and calibrated color accuracy. Gamers want fast refresh rates and low lag. What do general consumers want? Pleasant colors (usually high contrast and saturation i.e. "punchy") with lowest prices. And those "punchy" monitors outsell the two "good" monitor types by a big margin.

In 2024, I'd agree that defining "good" can be more challenging, although I would argue that defining "not good" (regardless of needs) is easy. There are stores full of hardware/peripherals that are not good at anything...

In 2000, though, I think things were much simpler. The flexibility of CRTs helped too. A nice high end CRT would have better colour accuracy, better refresh rates, better resolutions, etc. Sure, for some highly-highly demanding/specialized needs, one model might have been better, but generally speaking? Same with most components, e.g. processors - in the era of single core processors, higher clock rate (on the same core design) always beat lower clock rate, and there weren't the other parameters (core counts, turbo boost parameters, thermals, etc) that make it more challenging now to find the best processor for particular uses.

Am I right in thinking ZX was Intel's first purpose-built cost reduced chipset rather then just using a previous generation?

We had a customer, Investors? traders? I can't remember Wolf of Wall Street types anyway that had no clue, they just wanted "the best" especially when they saw someone else getting work done.
But that's just human nature.

2000's were easy.
Cheap=Celeron/Duron
Mainstream=Pentium/Athlon
High end=Xeon

chinny22 wrote on 2024-09-03, 00:33:

Am I right in thinking ZX was Intel's first purpose-built cost reduced chipset rather then just using a previous generation?

First deliberately inferior version would be 430FX with removed memory parity and limited cacheable area.
Same crap again with 440EX, somehow very unpopular chip, never seen board with it IRL.
I dont know if 440ZX was sufficiently crappified, normal versions only real limitation was 512MB ram barrier, something no one would ever encounter before 2001 ram price slump.
I think 810 is the first Intel outright low end offering with very little redeeming qualities. OEMs loved it, saved them ~$40 on graphics and sound. Perfect for office work.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-09-03, 01:01:

I think 810 is the first Intel outright low end offering with very little redeeming qualities. OEMs loved it, saved them ~$40 on graphics and sound. Perfect for office work.

Was i810 launched with Celeron, or were there early Celerons paired with older chipsets and soldered-on ATI or whatever video chips? I know very little about what the platform for the first Celerons was...

430FX was limited but much faster than the previous intel chipsets. 430VX, aside from adding SDRAM, was crippled compared to 430HX though.

There were two rounds of cap plagues - the bad electrolyte used in off-brand caps (Jack o... er, jackcon that got ABIT), and then a few years later bad Japanese caps (Rubycon) that hit Dell and Apple hard.

For a while when intel was pushing RAMBUS hard, 440BX chipsets were also in short supply.

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-28, 23:23:

but very, very few Coppermine systems, or at least slot 1 Coppermines (there are more socket 370 Coppermines like Dell Dimension 4100s, but those generally don't have ISA slots).

Slot 1 coppermines were more expensive to produce, it's easier to just put a Socket on the motherboard especially if you're the integrator specifying your design to the manufacturer.

Socket370 Coppermines are good fun if you have the right equipment... I'm currently testing 9 Coppermine Celeron 566 CPUs at 850Mhz (100 x 8.5) to see which ones are stable at 1.8v. So far two aren't and the one I'm testing now is looking promising.

None of my Mendocino Celerons could do 550Mhz at a reasonable voltage.

Yeah, Coppermine Celerons are kinda interesting.

Turns out my Abit ZM6 motherboard (440ZX) can use a few of those thanks to the latest BIOS, but apparently only of a certain stepping. I got the 600 MHz model earlier this year, which seems to be the fastest officially supported Celeron for that board. Unofficially, and with some hardware modifications, it could possibly even take Tualatin Celerons, but I never bothered with that.

My guess is that only the latest stepping [D0] will do fsb 100. For the 566 that is CPUID SL5L5

From my recollection the very first Coppermine Celerons that hit shelves in 2000 did 100MHz pretty reliably thanks to being manufactured on same process as 900MHz P3. Much more luck than for example early 366@550. Intel was careful not to sell too fast a CPU at a bottom price and slow dripped new Celeron clocks to lag behind "proper" P3s

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-03, 01:34:

Was i810 launched with Celeron, or were there early Celerons paired with older chipsets and soldered-on ATI or whatever video chips? I know very little about what the platform for the first Celerons was...

If Wikipedia was correct, the first Covington Celeron 266 with Slot 1 packaging was announced in April 1998, together with 440BX (full-fledged) and 440EX (crippled) chipsets. 810 chipset was announced a year later in April 1999, probably together with Mendocino Celeron 466.

happycube wrote on 2024-09-03, 03:30:

430FX was limited but much faster than the previous intel chipsets. 430VX, aside from adding SDRAM, was crippled compared to 430HX though.

IMHO 430FX was groundbreaking for its support of EDO RAM and integrated IDE and DMA controllers plus PCI-ISA bridge on PIIX, even with less RAM features (personally considered as the oldest "practical" retro chipset). 430VX had very little upgrade as a successor of 430FX (SDRAM and USB support) but I wouldn't call it a crippled 430HX as I wouldn't call WinME a crippled Win2K: they were meant for very different markets.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-09-03, 09:02:

From my recollection the very first Coppermine Celerons that hit shelves in 2000 did 100MHz pretty reliably thanks to being manufactured on same process as 900MHz P3.

Yes, that observation corresponds with the [D0] Celeron steppings and the Pentium III [cD0] steppings. These are all rated at 1.75 volt. I have a P III 850 cpu here with stepping [cD0] that runs at fsb 133 = 1.13 Ghz with 1.75 stock voltage These later ones are very nice cpu's.

happycube wrote on 2024-09-03, 03:30:

430FX was limited but much faster than the previous intel chipsets. 430VX, aside from adding SDRAM, was crippled compared to 430HX though.

The 430VX was for home users and the 430HX was meant for servers (hence being able to cache much more RAM).

Still have a few 430HX boards purchased new in the 90's.

Unknown_K wrote on 2024-09-03, 13:41:

happycube wrote on 2024-09-03, 03:30:

430FX was limited but much faster than the previous intel chipsets. 430VX, aside from adding SDRAM, was crippled compared to 430HX though.

The 430VX was for home users and the 430HX was meant for servers (hence being able to cache much more RAM).

Still have a few 430HX boards purchased new in the 90's.

Yes,

The VX even at the time of release was panned by critics as a cheap low end, half baked chipset for the home market.

It was Intels first Pentium chipset meant to compete with cheap 3rd party boards, performance was fair depending on what you were comparing to
but features were many times lacking, Tons of VX boards sold without L2 cache.

The VX like the TX was many times on the avoid list with most recommending the HX in Intel world as the only legitimate Intel Pentium chipset made.

The VX was low end even compared to the original Pentium chipset albeit with quality of life improvements including the memory controller speed bug fixed (cache and the amount of ram supported wasn’t though)

Net result is that the HX continued to sell even with overclocking support after it should have been obsolete when the “gimped “ TX hit the market with an artificial cache limit to keep it from embarrassing Intels various next generation P6 CPUs.
The TX only slightly edged out the HX with proper UDMA support and slightly faster uncached ram performance but using current components at the time any differences were hidden by better cache on the HX.

PCI “bugs” were fixed on the TX but the HX handles more devices on the PCI bus more efficiently. (Not sure anyone ever used 4 pci cards but meh)

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.periphs. … s/c/9l8w7x3yxRc

Intel 430HX L2 256Kb VS Intel 430HX L2 512Kb VS Intel 430TX L2 512Kb - Motherboards comparison

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-09-03, 07:19:

Yeah, Coppermine Celerons are kinda interesting.

Reflecting on your post, I looked up the other steppings -- I wonder why Intel increased the voltage for the cC0 and cD0 steppings to 1.7v... Ususally that should go down with an improved process. I'll keep testing the rest of my 566 CPUs today, I lowered the voltage to 1.7V for now, I didn't realize 1.5V was stock (thought it was 1.65 like PIII).

PARKE wrote on 2024-09-03, 08:39:

My guess is that only the latest stepping [D0] will do fsb 100. For the 566 that is CPUID SL5L5

No, so far I'm 1 for 3 on 100Mhz FSB on SL4PC at 1.7V (or I was last night, I have to go check on mprime). I have 6 more to test.

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-03, 14:08:

The VX even at the time of release was panned by critics as a cheap low end, half baked chipset. ... ...performance was fair dep […]
Show full quote

The VX even at the time of release was panned by critics as a cheap low end, half baked chipset.
...
...performance was fair depending on what you were comparing to but features were many times lacking, Tons of VX boards sold without L2 cache.
...
The VX like the TX was many times on the avoid list with most recommending the HX in Intel world as the only legitimate Intel Pentium chipset made.
...
The VX was low end even compared to the original Pentium chipset albeit with quality of life improvements including the memory controller speed bug fixed (cache and the amount of ram supported wasn’t though)
...
The TX only slightly edged out the HX with proper UDMA support and slightly faster uncached ram performance but using current components at the time any differences were hidden by better cache on the HX.

I don't know what the big hoopla is with the HX... Yes, the HX cached much more RAM, but who used that? FX and VX are fine chipsets. FX used PIIX and VX had PIIX3. The only difference is that PIIX3 had USB. By the time TX came around, it was not a good buy. Yes, you got UDMA with TX, but HDDs were so slow back then, you would be more than fine with MWDMA on the FX or VX. And if you waited only a little bit more you could upgrade to BX (read: skip LX completely).

I've been playing around with a P233MMX system using a VX board and I am more than pleased with the performance. I put a 64-bit PCI GeForce FX in there and it works great. I would say it can handle 3D up to Quake. Quake2 struggles a bit.

mockingbird wrote on 2024-09-03, 14:44:

PARKE wrote on 2024-09-03, 08:39:

My guess is that only the latest stepping [D0] will do fsb 100. For the 566 that is CPUID SL5L5

No, so far I'm 1 for 3 on 100Mhz FSB on SL4PC at 1.7V (or I was last night, I have to go check on mprime). I have 6 more to test.

Yeah, you're right. Here is an interesting threead:
Overclocking Pentium III / Celeron: Coppermine and Tualatin cores - Socket 370

mockingbird wrote on 2024-09-03, 14:44:

I don't know what the big hoopla is with the HX... Yes, the HX cached much more RAM, but who used that? FX and VX are fine chipsets. FX used PIIX and VX had PIIX3. The only difference is that PIIX3 had USB. By the time TX came around, it was not a good buy. Yes, you got UDMA with TX, but HDDs were so slow back then, you would be more than fine with MWDMA on the FX or VX. And if you waited only a little bit more you could upgrade to BX (read: skip LX completely).

I've been playing around with a P233MMX system using a VX board and I am more than pleased with the performance. I put a 64-bit PCI GeForce FX in there and it works great. I would say it can handle 3D up to Quake. Quake2 struggles a bit.

IIRC, the HX with EDO was faster in general than VX or TX, even with SDRAM ..

Edit: read the linked post, and stand corrected. Either my memory fails me, or the tables have turned other ways in other tests. Maybe CL3 SDRAM ..

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-03, 14:08:

Tons of VX boards sold without L2 cache.

Were you a victim of those PCChips fake cache?

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-03, 14:08:

The VX like the TX was many times on the avoid list with most recommending the HX in Intel world as the only legitimate Intel Pentium chipset made.

I think I've seen similar comments elsewhere many years ago on GeForce2: the "war" between the "legitimate" GeForce2 GTS Pro vs. the "illegitimate" GeForce2 MX.

Sure, MX was much inferior than GTS (and the differences became even greater in GF4 era), but the former provided many budget-constraint customers with their first experience of 3D acceleration. Not to mention the MX series was a huge financial success for Nvidia. Or it's like Xeon vs. Core i3, PCIe 4.0 SSD vs. 2.5" SATA SSD, you name it.

430FX/VX/TX chipsets had their limitations because Intel started selling P54C Pentiums to consumer markets; before then, Socket 4 P5 Pentiums were meant for servers and workstations in professional environments. If you were lucky enough to afford and enjoy 430HX and the later P6 Pentium Pro, good for you, but there's no need to berate contemporary consumer-grade products.