Tier 5: radeon 8500 and lower/geforce4 and lower: these cards should be considered for your Windows 98 system and not for XP. No recommendation here as the performance is too low. You really need a DirectX 9 card if you want to cover the 2000 – 2004 era.
Where are the rest? Well, there are dozens of models that I have not tested because I do not have them. Because I can not recommend something that I did not used personally and I know is compatible and good they do not appear at all in my recommendations. However I welcome any input from colleagues that have other cards and tested them on socket 462.

Personally my opinion - once you get to "tier 4" it makes more sense to look into really low end newer cards. All the "garbage" like that 6600, even 6600LE, etc. Or DDR2 versions of better cards like 7300GT, may be even 7600GS/GT, 6800LE, etc. Assuming the they are cheap (sometimes they are). Etc, etc. Basically whatever newer is possible to find for cheap. Why? This will perform comparably or better to older mid-range cards, will be cheaper, usually - cooler and easier to replace as this tend to be super common from all the office or "multimedia" systems.

Obviously within context of this discussion - older cards like GF FX or radeon 9nnn are great for older, w98 stuff.

I also can not stress enough how great 7300GT GDDR3 is - it is very similar in performance to 6600GT and can often be seen for really low price like $5-15, because people just see "300" and assume it is junk (like all previous <600 cards are). Well, it is not and being G73 it also brings all the new features of 7 series, which can make it even preferable to 6600GT.

Athlon XP makes sense for two purposes
- Windows 98 -> you need GeForce 4 or FX
- Windows XP -> you get 7xxx series card depending on your budget

Those tiers are not very meaningful as they lead to suboptimal systems.

AlexZ wrote on Yesterday, 19:38:

Athlon XP makes sense for two purposes
- Windows 98 -> you need GeForce 4 or FX
- Windows XP -> you get 7xxx series card depending on your budget

I kind of agree, but also with how hard some of this cards are to get IMO it is not that binary. Every card is worth looking into and some GF6 cards are not bad at all. In fact some of them are interesting because of native AGP and older fabrication process which should not be affected by bumpgate, and may be more reliable.

What does not make sense, IMO, is going below GF6 for winXP - this ends up being too slow, or too expensive in extreme cases like high end radeons. And FX series have noting at all to offer here.

AlexZ wrote on Yesterday, 19:38:

Athlon XP makes sense for two purposes - Windows 98 -> you need GeForce 4 or FX - Windows XP -> you get 7xxx series card dependi […]
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Athlon XP makes sense for two purposes
- Windows 98 -> you need GeForce 4 or FX
- Windows XP -> you get 7xxx series card depending on your budget

Those tiers are not very meaningful as they lead to suboptimal systems.

It is not that simple, otherwise we would not have the myriad of Athlon XP configurations on the forum! Also today you must take into account the price of each component, I am sure not everyone is going to spend 100 USD on a high end AGP card!

STORAGE:
Before presenting the variants I will say a few things!
With regards to SSD’s I had mixed experiences: on Abit AN7/NF7 – S 2.0 I could used an Intel SSD connected to the silicon image 3112 controller but not a Kingston/Plextor/Adata one; on any other board I could not use a SSD: for example on NF7 – S2G with native SATA controller integrated into the Southbridge as soon as I connected a SSD the system froze on startup, on Abit AT7 – MAX 2 with Marvell 8030 controller no SSD worked; on KR7A – 133R as soon as I connected a SSD with a SATA to PATA adapter the system refused to get over IDE devices detection. I will not recommend a SSD as I believe the problems I encountered far outweigh the benefits – no noise, very low access time.
Motherboards with a VIA chipset and the VT8237 Southbridge support only SATA 1 drives or SATA 2 drives jumpered to SATA 1; on older boards I encountered even more issues: only HDD’s with a certain capacity would work, using an adapter with large drives resulted in a system freeze.
The best option would be a SATA hard drive connected to the SATA port or to the IDE port using an adapter (if possible) - I got 2 SATA to IDE adapters and both work just fine an any socket 462 board. Be aware that there is a limit on the capacity! For example Abit AN7 has a 500 GB limit and the older the board the lower the limit!
Another option is to use a PCI SATA controller from Promise for example. Because there are so many of them I can not make a recommendation about any of them! I will talk strictly about what you can use with the onboard SATA/IDE.

So my experience with storage on socketA:

First of all my goal is SSD, always. HDD is absolutely not an option, apart from may be testing. So i look at everything from that perspective. Noise and performance of hard drives is one thing i absolutely do not miss about old systems. Also vintage hard drives tend to have questionable reliability while new ones are overpriced and present the same compatibility challenges as SSDs. This is just a personal opinion though, nothing more.

I've had zero issues with nvidia south bridges integrated sata. I've plugged in random SSDs, old or new and random hard drives and everything always worked. On different boards. The only caveat is - better to not install the drivers, as those bring a bunch of issues, and use with "standard" microsoft ones. Performance is... ~110-130MB/s, which is actually quite good for this old hardware and can be hard to achieve on PCI controllers. I am surprised to hear about the issues on NF7 – S2G, this must be board or bios specific. This makes MCP2-S/R/GB quite desirable for me, because it represents pretty much the best storage performance/compatibility on socketA.

VIA = bad. As mentioned sata1 only so no SSDs => completely uninteresting for me. This ports might as well not exist.

Silicon image 3112/3114 = horrible, not only compatibility is questionable (some SSDs work, some do not), but also silent data corruption issues in some configurations. Completely useless and capable of causing data loss and random stability issues which are hard to troubleshoot. Never use.

So my take here - it is either MCP2-S/R/GB or no SATA at all (admittedly i have no experience with SIS chipsets). Obviously motherboards with better soldered discrete controllers may exist, but i've never practically used one. In case of no SATA - IDE-SATA adapters have worked flawlessly for me on socketA, with various SSDs. Both VIA(but newer ones - KT333,KT400,KT600) and nvidia. Performance is worse than with MCP2-S/R/GB, around ~70-90MB/s, but still good enough.

There are also PCI controllers which work fine with SSDs, and for me if other options fail this is the way to go.

On my Abit NF7-S2G NO ssd worked! Not even the Intel ones that work OK on AN7! So I can not recommend a storage medium that will not work on any Abit motherboards with one exception. Compatibility must be broader, not just one board! Again i do not have experience with boards from other manufacturers so I can not comment about them, but thank you for your input.

Tier 1: western digital raptor 150 GB: the best SATA 1 HDD! I use one in my ultimate Athlon XP system and it works beautifully. It is expensive so only recommended for those willing to pay the price and wanting to build the ultimate Athlon XP machine. An alternative would be the 74 GB raptor if you can squeeze all your staff onto it. Pretty easy to find on eBay but expensive!

Tier 2: any SATA 150(first generation) drive will work just fine in any board connected directly or using an adapter. The best option is to use the drives you have or you can get for free – I got lots of old SATA drives for free from decommissioned systems. However if do not have one and you need to buy one or more prices are very low, you can buy them in bulk on eBay for cheap. They represent the best price to performance option!

Tier 3: PATA drives: I got quite a few of them and the main problem is age, wear and tear. I strongly think that SATA is the way to go so not recommended.

Yeah, i totally get what you are saying and in case of storage i would not consider what i am saying any sort of advice. Just opinion.

It also illustrates very well how different approaches and priorities can be. I do not look at this from compatibility point of view, for me working SSD is simply a hard requirement for a system i am going to practically use. If i can not make it work on some board i will replace the board. Kind of like nforce2 has horrible memory compatibility, but you are willing to live with that and buy specific RAM to make it work because it offers certain benefits. This is also the reason for my previous comments about MCP2-T - i am willing to sacrifice that and choose motherboard partly based on storage compatibility.

I also do use IDE/PATA drives for troubleshooting. As old as they are this is ultimately the best option in terms of compatibility (will always work on any board) so when i am having some sort of stability issues or something this is very good option in order to be sure storage is not the issue. Not great for long term use though and here i totally agree - would not recommend.

That said late IDE/PATA and SATA1 did intersect quite a bit. I'd say IDE drives were sold all the way to at least SATA2. It is possible to find IDE drive which is newer than SATA1 one. Like i have IDE 500GB WD blue made in 2009. Drives like this should be an option too, though they are less common.

My Athlon 64 system uses 1TB Western Digital 7200rpm SATA drive. These are quieter and much faster than period correct drives. Having functional SATA without bugs is a big advantage. It isn't only an issue of HDDs but also DVD drives. PATA DVD drives are very old by now and many will have bad lasers. I have like 5 PATA DVD drives that have big problems reading CD-RW.

Unfortunately, 1tb on any socket 462 Abit board is out of the question. The max capacity that I have used is 500gb Sata or Pata.

AlexZ wrote on Today, 07:53:

My Athlon 64 system uses 1TB Western Digital 7200rpm SATA drive. These are quieter and much faster than period correct drives. Having functional SATA without bugs is a big advantage. It isn't only an issue of HDDs but also DVD drives. PATA DVD drives are very old by now and many will have bad lasers. I have like 5 PATA DVD drives that have big problems reading CD-RW.

Curious. I find older DVD drives, SATA or IDE, to be more reliable than generic cheap junk, the result of typical race to the bottom, which are later SATA drives. I still have a bunch of IDE drives which work great and in fact this are one of the reasons i am using one of this socketA systems.

But yeah, i totally agree that functioning SATA is one of the major things to look for in the motherboard. Sadly it becomes a little difficult though - too many requirements which too little boards fit. I am currently using the board with no SATA and IDE-SATA adapter. As much as i'd like one with SATA so far i was not able to find one which fits all the other requirements.

nd22 wrote on Today, 08:06:

Unfortunately, 1tb on any socket 462 Abit board is out of the question. The max capacity that I have used is 500gb Sata or Pata.

Well, if you really want that, though i personally find this amount of storage to not be required on this systems apart from some special use cases, you could always use one of those PCI controllers. Some are pretty nice and they bypass BIOS limitations. The only thing to keep in mind is that those are limited by PCI bus speed. Which controllers in the south bridge are not.

I do have one of this with 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD in old, KT333 based system, because i work with DVDs there and needed extra storage + more ports (onboard IDE is used by 4 CD/DVD drives). Works without any issues.

One issue i have with modern 1TB HDDs though is that they make no sense to buy. They literally cost as much as SSDs, present all the same compatibility challenges (because of new controller) and are not even close to being as fast. I can see myself using stuff i already have or got bundled with something for "free", but buying new? No way.

That's not even taking SMR stuff into consideration, that is just pure garbage.

OPTICAL DRIVE:
Tier 1: SATA optical drives are cheap as chips, can be used with an adapter and represent the recommended option.

Tier 2: Regarding PATA optical drives the recommendation is straightforward: get any IDE DVD drive and you are all set. Many times they are offered for free; this is how I got lots of units. I would also recommend them if you can get them for free.

FLOPPY DISK DRIVE
Tier 1: GOTEK floppy emulator is the recommended option. You need one anyway if you are into retro computing and nothing else comes close to it.

Tier 2: the old floppy drive: for nostalgia you may have one but otherwise not recommended.

nd22 wrote on Today, 08:55:

FLOPPY DISK DRIVE
Tier 1: GOTEK floppy emulator is the recommended option. You need one anyway if you are into retro computing and nothing else comes close to it.

Tier 2: the old floppy drive: for nostalgia you may have one but otherwise not recommended.

LS120 ... don't even bother with a normal floppy its too slow and a LS120 drive can read and write normal floppy disks far quicker.