ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-09-08, 07:30:

Still lasted 19 years though. […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-07, 15:52:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-09-07, 15:40:

Who is making it out to be something it wasnt? It did have a 19 year life span. Ive read up on them too, and their uses. […]
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Who is making it out to be something it wasnt?
It did have a 19 year life span.
Ive read up on them too, and their uses.

X86-64 was without a doubt the best way to go in the consumer space because it was so much cheaper and easier to roll out.

It was doomed to failure in the consumer space because it was incompatible with everything else that had come before. So no carrying over any of your old software to it.
Its not a system that will ever find any fans in a place like this because you cant play games on it in the same way as any x86 system.

If you have read up on it then you will know it did find its uses in certain places. And it was those places that kept it alive for 19 years.

HP was paying Intel to keep Itanium alive, That is the only reason it lasted 19 years . .MONEY and Hubris and certainly not sales of very niche server systems.

Still lasted 19 years though.

In the arena it was used it it wasnt the the failure you make it out to be.
Everywhere else it was, sure, but it did find its uses in a spercific arena.

No it was a failure, even in the specific areas it was good at other systems ran circles around it.

Again HP was paying for its survival, it was dead in 2012 and that would have been its final iteration but HP paid for Intel to do a die shrink on it which got canned and Kittson ended up being a Poulson refresh with nothing added aside from a 133Mhz speed bump, it was the EXACT same CPU bugs and all.

So the last new version of Itanium was Poulson in 2012.

You can try and spin Itanium any which way you want but the Industry considered it a failure and many here also agree with that, it had some interesting ideas and could have been huge but delivery and execution was lacking.

I'm tired of this discussion and its off topic for this thread so we had better leave it there, I'm sure if a thread was made to discuss it further you would get better engagement.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-09-08, 08:24:

Thank you all very much for your help and participation in the discussion. I didn't expect so many valuable comments. This forum […]
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Thank you all very much for your help and participation in the discussion. I didn't expect so many valuable comments. This forum is great.

My friend told me that he a long time ago had Pc with Celeron 500mhz, 128mb ram and WinXp.

Apparently Windows XP worked fine for his Pc, but only with SP1. After installing SP2, Windows XP was running slowly.

I think about P3 800mhz, 512mb ram and GF2mx, GF4Ti4200 or Radeon 9xxx. Depending on what I will find cheaper.

I don't want to connect the Internet to this computer but apart from a special program for download drivers from the Internet, I don't have any idea to completed drivers.

Drives are fun and Vogons has a ton of info on what driver would be best to use, a GF4 Ti4200 would be a great fit and the 4200 cards are not horribly expensive either.

When I wrote about collecting drivers for PC Pentium 3 I mean way to download and installed.

After connection Pc to the internet I can use software to download drivers, but I must find another way. Is any website with drivers for old pc?

GreenBook wrote on 2024-09-08, 08:24:

I think about P3 800mhz, 512mb ram and GF2mx, GF4Ti4200 or Radeon 9xxx. Depending on what I will find cheaper.

Wow, what a coincidence: I've got all five items you've listed. 😸

GF2MX cards should be the cheapest and most plentiful but their performance were somewhat limited; GF4Ti4200 cards were highly praised for late Win9x and early to mid-WinXP games but you might have to look harder for a bargain.

The case of Radeon 9xxx could be more complex due to ATI's chaotic nomenclature back then, using different chips like R2xx, RV2xx, R3xx, RV3xx, plus different memory bandwidths and clock speeds. 😵 Newer chips like R360 or RV3xx required 1.5V AGP8x slot that no Slot 1 or Socket 370 motherboard could provide; the compatibility of "universal AGP slot" also varied among motherboards so it's better to find a universal card (two notches instead of one) with R300/350 (although any expensive 9800, 9700, or 9500 would be bottlenecked by the universal AGP 4x slot) or R/RV2xx card (not just some of 9xxx series but also included 8500 and 7500) just to be safe. Personally I've got a Gigabyte GV-R9000 Pro II on a GA-6VXC7-4X-P with P3-800EB.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-09-08, 08:24:

I don't want to connect the Internet to this computer but apart from a special program for download drivers from the Internet, I don't have any idea to completed drivers.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-09-08, 08:53:

After connection Pc to the internet I can use software to download drivers, but I must find another way. Is any website with drivers for old pc?

IMHO it would be a bit faster and a lot safer to download drivers with a modern computer before transferring them to your retro build, even if they were fully capable of web browsing.

For your final question: VOGONS has a driver library of its own.

I mean I don't want connect internet to retro pc and I can't use software to download all drivers. And I think about get the webssite (on main pc) download drivers then copy them to pendrive.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-09-08, 08:24:

Thank you all very much for your help and participation in the discussion. I didn't expect so many valuable comments. This forum […]
Show full quote

Thank you all very much for your help and participation in the discussion. I didn't expect so many valuable comments. This forum is great.

My friend told me that he a long time ago had Pc with Celeron 500mhz, 128mb ram and WinXp.

Apparently Windows XP worked fine for his Pc, but only with SP1. After installing SP2, Windows XP was running slowly.

I think about P3 800mhz, 512mb ram and GF2mx, GF4Ti4200 or Radeon 9xxx. Depending on what I will find cheaper.

I don't want to connect the Internet to this computer but apart from a special program for download drivers from the Internet, I don't have any idea to completed drivers.

dont use "special programs" for downloading drivers, they usually try to install stuff you don't want, possibly even malware, download the drivers yourself individually on another pc, scan them with antivirus then transfer across with a usb stick,

these are 2 well known sites for drivers if you cant find them on the vogon drivers section:

https://download.cnet.com/

or

https://www.driverguide.com/

GF4 you can find on nvidias site, should use the same driver as FX5 series, you may have to look for an earlier revision driver rather than the lastest one,

i'm looking for drivers at the moment and a few different sites i've tried have downloaded one of the files below, instead of the actual driver i was expecting, i dont trust that crap so avoid any all in one driver installers like these (Setup_DriverDoc_2024.exe / driveridentifier_setup.exe) unless anyone on here can recommend a legitimate one.

GreenBook wrote on 2024-09-08, 08:24:

Thank you all very much for your help and participation in the discussion. I didn't expect so many valuable comments. This forum is great.

My friend told me that he a long time ago had Pc with Celeron 500mhz, 128mb ram and WinXp.

Apparently Windows XP worked fine for his Pc, but only with SP1. After installing SP2, Windows XP was running slowly.

I'm not sure blaming the SP is fair - it's important to note how the entire software ecosystem was evolving between 2001 and 2004. In 2004, an XP system would need more RAM and CPU to run current software than would have been required in 2001.

And keep in mind in 2004, you could buy RAM-starved Dell Dimension 2400/3000 Celeron 2.4s for dirt, dirt cheap.

Yes, even our P4 Willamette 1.7Ghz (with starved sdram memory bandwith), suffered from the jump from SP1 to SP2.
It had 768Mb, 256Mb stock and 512Mb more that I added in 2004 in conjunction with FX5600 and Win98 to WinXp upgrade.

It was a nice pc, perfectly usable but felt noticeably slower after updgrading to SP2. I remember reinstalling XP at some point and didn't update past SP1 until it was required and... I think we moved soon to 1st gen Athlon 64 X2 at that point.

Recently, I did some tests with some of my retro hw of the period (PIII-S 1266), and decided not to go over SP1. Same feeling here 😀

No wonder I never had memories of XP being "snappy" (not including "retro" Core builds with 2+ GB RAM and SATA SSD) because I've never used vanilla XP even to this day.

My first XP experience was Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8 GHz Thoroughbred) with 2 x 256 MB DDR-2700 (333 MHz) and 80 GB PATA HDD in 2003; SP1 was already preinstalled. Subsequent upgrades to SP2 and SP3 turned it from "good" to "okay" then "acceptable." Looking it back with modern understandings, I'd say the system was bogged down mostly by its PATA HDD, not CPU or RAM. My Mom's experience with her Celeron 2.4 GHz was much worse though: HDD (same PATA 80 GB but a noisier Seagate instead of my quieter WD) was always busy probably due to smaller RAM (just 1 x 256 MB DDR-3200 single channel) and cache. The situation improved a little bit after replacing that DIMM with 1 GB but the system (Asus Terminator T2-P barebone with proprietary P4P8T motherboard; much to my chagrin but that was another story) still gave my Mom lots of problems afterwards (and they naturally became MY problems) before it was finally replaced in 2010.

Just checked the PassMark score of Athlon XP 2200+ and contemporary Pentium 3 / M: it was faster than Tualatin, on par with Banias, and started losing it to Dothan. With doubled TDP though. OTOH the Celeron 2.4 GHz was only on par with the slowest Tualatin. Duh. 😵

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-08, 17:43:

My first XP experience was Athlon XP 2200+ (1.8 GHz Thoroughbred) with 2 x 256 MB DDR-2700 (333 MHz) and 80 GB PATA HDD in 2003; SP1 was already preinstalled. Subsequent upgrades to SP2 and SP3 turned it from "good" to "okay" then "acceptable." Looking it back with modern understandings, I'd say the system was bogged down mostly by its PATA HDD, not CPU or RAM. My Mom's experience with her Celeron 2.4 GHz was much worse though: HDD (same PATA 80 GB but a noisier Seagate instead of my quieter WD) was always busy probably due to smaller RAM (just 1 x 256 MB DDR-3200 single channel) and cache.

I would disagree - your PATA HDD was normal/respectable for the time, unless it was an unusually weird one like a 5400RPM or so. I think you were RAM-starved.

I remember booting up XP in 2003 or 2004 on my aunt's new Dell 2400/3000 with 128 megs of RAM and it was absolutely unusable. Now, that machine had been deliberately ordered with too little RAM and we had a DIMM on hand to add more, but that <1 hour of 'let's OOBE and test this thing before opening it up and putting in the extra RAM' was insanely atrocious.

I am pretty sure that XP, done booting and sitting idle on the desktop, uses something like 160+ megs of RAM. (Which is better than Win11 which is closer to 5ish gigs) So... if you have less than probably 384, you're going to be swapping to disk real quick.

Same with Win2000, which was the first NT-based OS I ever used. Started with 128 megs of RAM and it would just... freeze... for multiple seconds regularly. Upgraded to 256 megs and it got better. Upgraded again to 640 megs (ahhhhh the great SDRAM price collapse of 2001) and it just screamed. And Win2000's baseline RAM usage is a lot lower than XP's, probably half or less.

You could still get new XP machines in 2005 with like 256 megs of RAM, but that just wasn't enough. By 2005, I'd have said a gig was where you wanted to be, maybe not enough. I know that by the time I build my C2D in 2006 with 2 gigs, the 1 gig in my RDRAM P4 system (that I missed the chance to upgrade in that tiny window of time in like 2003 when RDRAM was half-affordable) was definitely no longer enough.

Now, don't get me wrong, if you put an SSD in a RAM-starved retro system today, it'll perform a lot better than the same system swapping to a hard drive back in the day, but... personally, I would rather have hard drives and maximal quantities of RAM in a retro system rather than SSDs that are used for swap.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-08, 18:21:

Now, don't get me wrong, if you put an SSD in a RAM-starved retro system today, it'll perform a lot better than the same system swapping to a hard drive back in the day, but... personally, I would rather have hard drives and maximal quantities of RAM in a retro system rather than SSDs that are used for swap.

My current XP game rig: C2D E7400 + 2 x 2GB DDR2-800 + 120 GB SATA SSD (aligned) + Radeon HD 5670 w/ 1GB GDDR5. Sounds like an over-overkill for most games under XP doesn't it? Not to mention the clean install gave me less than 30 TSR in Task Manager. However, when I play Quake 3 Arena (released in 1999, it was not even an XP game but a 98SE game) the frame rate would drop to SINGLE DIGITS when AVG Antivirus (18.6.3983.0, last XP-compatible edition released in August 2018) auto-updates its virus definitions in the background. Maybe I should disable its auto-update before starting any game session...... 😅

I have so much 939 to 1150 hardware packed away that I could not only open a Steve's Pointless Museum of Ideal XP Gaming Hardware, but supply a chain of them. Yet, I choose to do most of my XP era gaming on a Pentium III running...MCE 2005, of all XP things. The operating system itself runs perfectly on this machine; even the MCE animations are nice and 60-fps-fluid.

Frame rates in games such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and F.E.A.R. are admittedly less than stellar. In fact, they can dip into the 20s when FEAR is at its most chaotic--as if the computer itself is a little worried of what might be lurking around the corner. But to me, that's all part of the nostalgia. I have some fond memories of playing XP classics on a PIII-S machine right up until late 2003 or early 2004, which is when I finally upgraded to an Athlon 64. So OK, I played through most of FEAR on an Athlon 64. But whenever I needed a quick hit of entertainment whilst the Athlon ripped a DVD, the PIII was always there to save the day!

Now, my PIII of choice is a little more powerful than your typical Blue Man Group special, with 2GB of DDR and a 1628 MHz Tualatin-S at its core. The Radeon 9800 Pro video card and X-Fi sound card also have no business being in a socket 370 rig. But this combination of hardware manages to vault to the Windows XP desktop even quicker than a Tualeron-1400 can get Windows 98 to a usable state. And when you run a more reasonable game, such as Quake 3 with all of the visual settings cranked, this Pentium powerhouse can pump out over 220 fps. That's like, mild Athlon XP performance!

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-08, 08:30:

No it was a failure, even in the specific areas it was good at other systems ran circles around it. […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-09-08, 07:30:

Still lasted 19 years though. […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2024-09-07, 15:52:

HP was paying Intel to keep Itanium alive, That is the only reason it lasted 19 years . .MONEY and Hubris and certainly not sales of very niche server systems.

Still lasted 19 years though.

In the arena it was used it it wasnt the the failure you make it out to be.
Everywhere else it was, sure, but it did find its uses in a spercific arena.

No it was a failure, even in the specific areas it was good at other systems ran circles around it.

Again HP was paying for its survival, it was dead in 2012 and that would have been its final iteration but HP paid for Intel to do a die shrink on it which got canned and Kittson ended up being a Poulson refresh with nothing added aside from a 133Mhz speed bump, it was the EXACT same CPU bugs and all.

So the last new version of Itanium was Poulson in 2012.

You can try and spin Itanium any which way you want but the Industry considered it a failure and many here also agree with that, it had some interesting ideas and could have been huge but delivery and execution was lacking.

I'm tired of this discussion and its off topic for this thread so we had better leave it there, I'm sure if a thread was made to discuss it further you would get better engagement.

HP developed the spec.
Youre making it sound like HP was paying Intel to keep it alive against the will of Intel when it was brainchild of HP not Intel so they would be the ones who were paying for it.
It was HP who wanted it in the first place. I never said it was a success, I said it lasted 19 years.
Yes I think youre right, we should leave it there.

Ram became extremely cheap late 99-02.

I know I lot of people who were pushing 9x in the day with 128mb-768mb circa 1999+
Everybody became familiar with various fixes, the speed fix for fast CPUS in 95 and the ram registry fixes for over 256mb in 98

It also didn’t seem that uncommon to have a PIII with 1gb+ support, even certain BX boards in theory supported 1gb

https://web.archive.org/web/20180103032407/ht … gistered_memory

Many SIS boards and the so called 266 boards supported 1.5gb+. Intel 840 should also support more

Tyan had a serverworx board that supported a full 8gb

The wierd off brand boards that support more than a gig shouldn’t cost more than a bx board these days.

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-09, 00:33:

Ram became extremely cheap late 99-02. […]
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Ram became extremely cheap late 99-02.

I know I lot of people who were pushing 9x in the day with 128mb-768mb circa 1999+
Everybody became familiar with various fixes, the speed fix for fast CPUS in 95 and the ram registry fixes for over 256mb in 98

It also didn’t seem that uncommon to have a PIII with 1gb+ support, even certain BX boards in theory supported 1gb

Many SIS boards and the so called 266 boards supported 1.5gb+. Intel 840 should also support more

Tyan had a serverworx board that supported a full 8gb

The wierd off brand boards that support more than a gig shouldn’t cost more than a bx board these days.

Thats when it started to get cheaper, I wouldnt say it became extremely cheap for quite some years after that.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-09-09, 02:06:

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-09, 00:33:

Ram became extremely cheap late 99-02. […]
Show full quote

Ram became extremely cheap late 99-02.

I know I lot of people who were pushing 9x in the day with 128mb-768mb circa 1999+
Everybody became familiar with various fixes, the speed fix for fast CPUS in 95 and the ram registry fixes for over 256mb in 98

It also didn’t seem that uncommon to have a PIII with 1gb+ support, even certain BX boards in theory supported 1gb

Many SIS boards and the so called 266 boards supported 1.5gb+. Intel 840 should also support more

Tyan had a serverworx board that supported a full 8gb

The wierd off brand boards that support more than a gig shouldn’t cost more than a bx board these days.

Thats when it started to get cheaper, I wouldnt say it became extremely cheap for quite some years after that.

I was getting $9.99 256mb pc133cl3 low density early 2k when sdram was getting dumped and overproduced from the .com bubble collapse , back in the days that shipping was $50 for a stick of ram but it was $52 to ship 10x sticks

64mb EDO simms were like $15 in that period as well and you could occasionally pick up a 512mb stick of high density for $35 on pricewatch (good on newish socket a boards)
I bought a pallet of Ppro workstations in 2000 that made great 2k internet machines when you bumped the ram to 256 or 384 (6x 72 pin simms)

I wish I would have kept screenshots from pricewatch because the fallout from canned “technology “ company pull outs from broken leases kept hitting the market for near nothing almost 3 years. A lot of pallets 2 year old equipment went straight to the dump in that period because so many businesses went under they didn’t even bother marketing it.

Tons of bad 1 year old motherboards and power supplies but the ram always was good.

It's worth noting that some games rely on libraries provided by later Windows XP service packs. For example, I couldn't get Warcraft III patched past 1.17 to run on SP1. And those errors aren't easy to diagnose.

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-09, 02:17:

I was getting $9.99 256mb pc133cl3 low density early 2k when sdram was getting dumped and overproduced from the .com bubble coll […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-09-09, 02:06:

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-09-09, 00:33:

Ram became extremely cheap late 99-02. […]
Show full quote

Ram became extremely cheap late 99-02.

I know I lot of people who were pushing 9x in the day with 128mb-768mb circa 1999+
Everybody became familiar with various fixes, the speed fix for fast CPUS in 95 and the ram registry fixes for over 256mb in 98

It also didn’t seem that uncommon to have a PIII with 1gb+ support, even certain BX boards in theory supported 1gb

Many SIS boards and the so called 266 boards supported 1.5gb+. Intel 840 should also support more

Tyan had a serverworx board that supported a full 8gb

The wierd off brand boards that support more than a gig shouldn’t cost more than a bx board these days.

Thats when it started to get cheaper, I wouldnt say it became extremely cheap for quite some years after that.

I was getting $9.99 256mb pc133cl3 low density early 2k when sdram was getting dumped and overproduced from the .com bubble collapse , back in the days that shipping was $50 for a stick of ram but it was $52 to ship 10x sticks

64mb EDO simms were like $15 in that period as well and you could occasionally pick up a 512mb stick of high density for $35 on pricewatch (good on newish socket a boards)
I bought a pallet of Ppro workstations in 2000 that made great 2k internet machines when you bumped the ram to 256 or 384 (6x 72 pin simms)

I wish I would have kept screenshots from pricewatch because the fallout from canned “technology “ company pull outs from broken leases kept hitting the market for near nothing almost 3 years. A lot of pallets 2 year old equipment went straight to the dump in that period because so many businesses went under they didn’t even bother marketing it.

Tons of bad 1 year old motherboards and power supplies but the ram always was good.

The dead dot com servers used PC133?
I mean yeah maybe you might have been able to pick up second hand RAM in some places, like you say you did, but that isnt a reflection of the entire market and certainly not of the new market.

The records from the day doesnt seem to back up what you say.

64 MB DIMM PC-100 @ $79.99 . TigerDirect.com . April 20 1999
128 MB DIMM PC-100 @ $89 . StarSurplus.com . May 9 2000
128 MB DIMM PC-133 @ $18.89 Crucial . October 30 2001
256 MB DIMM PC-133 @ $49.49 . Crucial . October 1 2002

Then from 2003 it starts to get cheap

512MB DIMM PC-133 @ $39 StarSurplus . April 22 2003

And PC133 RAM gets cheap because this appears on the markets
512MB DIMM DDR-3200 @ $89 . NewEgg.com . January 01 2004

If you want to talk about RAM prices I can tell you exactly how much they were on exactly what days and who was selling to who.

You being able to pick up the scraps from a dead dot com doesnt mean RAM prices are coming down.

Im not going to say youre wrong. A friend of mine made a good living for him doing exactly what you did. But I know what the markets were selling this stuff for

GreenBook wrote on 2024-09-08, 08:53:

When I wrote about collecting drivers for PC Pentium 3 I mean way to download and installed.

After connection Pc to the internet I can use software to download drivers, but I must find another way. Is any website with drivers for old pc?

I agree with Trashbytes, searching for the drivers is a big part of what makes this fun!
Even if it isn't for you, let us know here and we'll happily provide a link to the drivers you need 😀

If you really want, you can connect the PC to the internet and run one of those programs. I would say risk is pretty small behind your routers firewall and you'll only be connected for a short time.

I'm surprised no one asked but what would be the most demanding game you want to play?
Some games that run on a P3 and Windows 98 may struggle on a P4.
Windows 2000 is very lightweight compared to XP, but you can always try XP and if some games are too slow downgrade to 2000

chinny22 wrote on 2024-09-09, 06:01:

I'm surprised no one asked but what would be the most demanding game you want to play?
Some games that run on a P3 and Windows 98 may struggle on a P4.
Windows 2000 is very lightweight compared to XP, but you can always try XP and if some games are too slow downgrade to 2000

My main reason for being interested in Pentium 3 is a childhood dream.

I played on P2 450mhz and dreamed of a Pentium 3.

One of my friends had this PC: Pentium3 800 or 866mhz, GF2mx and 128 MB RAM.

I want WindowsXP to run smoothly. I know that all games from the 90s will run on the highest details. I wonder how GTA3 and MaxPayne from 2001 work on this PC.