zuldan wrote on 2026-04-04, 21:30:

I still remember walking into the computer store to purchase my Savage 2000 in December 1999. Couldn’t wait to get home to insta […]
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MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 19:00:

That's a very cool desktop.

Today I flicked through old magazine CDs looking for Savage 2000 drivers that activate its fabled T&L and I found in the readme.txt of version 4.12.01.9007-9.51.03, "This driver enables Transformation and Lighting. Using this feature may result in visual anomalies."

I am preparing to record actual A/B test of S3 vs Nvidia: Texture compression vs texture compression, T&L vs T&L ... but I don't have any T&L games and my GeForce 256 doesn't work.

I still remember walking into the computer store to purchase my Savage 2000 in December 1999. Couldn’t wait to get home to install it on my Abit BP6. I thought I had built a beast of a machine. I soon realised I had made a mistake. Only CPU 1 was being used in Windows 98 and the Savage 2000 couldn’t keep up with the GeForce 256. Back then information wasn’t readily available like it is today on hardware. You had to rely on magazines being honest. Things improved slightly when Windows 2000 was released 2 months later but only with Quake 3 🤣

Kicking myself for not keep the Savage and BP6, doh!

The Savage 2000 box looked similar to this Savage 4 box.

The attachment 7304DCC8-BC42-4BF8-A4C6-D4AA3E8A6BCD.jpeg is no longer available

My Super Socket 7 system lived through generations of GPUs: Matrox G200, Banshee, Voodoo3, Savage4Pro, GeForce2MX, GeForce4MX, GeForce3, and a mystery Radeon.

Of those, the Savage4Pro had demonstrated the highest image quality by pasting massively more detailed textures with zero CPU impact - but it was not the fastest. Magazines discouraged me from spending any money on a Savage2000. I later discovered the SS7 FPS ceiling. Due to SS7 architectural constraints, the GeForce3 was slower than earlier cards - my SS7 system was choking under heavier DX8 assumptions, various DX7 cards were returning roughly the same FPS, and the DX6 Savage4Pro was clearly behind the pack.

Had magazines focussed too much on marketing new builds and neglected readers upgrading old machines? Maybe. That is when I wanted to try a Savage2000 - I wanted to see if it could deliver the best of both worlds on the older PCs that it was probably designed for. Trouble was, the Savage2000 was short lived and impossibly rare so no answer was found..

.. I'll finish the story shortly, and not at market rates:

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 23:25:

My Super Socket 7 system lived through generations of GPUs: Matrox G200, Banshee, Voodoo3, Savage4Pro, GeForce2MX, GeForce4MX, GeForce3, and a mystery Radeon.

Socket 7 paired with gf3 is not a reasonable expectation for someone playing computer games. Fastest overclocked to its limit K6-3+ barely matches 1998 Celeron 300@450/stock January 2000 Celeron 533 performance.
https://hw-museum.cz/article/5/cpu-history-to … 1995---1999-/12

Budged minded people were overclocking cheap Celerons like 366 or 566 and playing maxed out games in 2000. https://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/celeron2-566/
https://web.archive.org/web/20020913090324/ht … tml?i=1227&p=11
By February 2001 (gf3) an absolute bottom end was $100 Celeron/Duron ~800MHz delivering ~twice the 300@450 performance.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 23:25:

Had magazines focussed too much on marketing new builds and neglected readers upgrading old machines?

ss7 was dead in 2001. Nobody expected anyone to try playing modern 3d games on a Ford Pinto of computers. At that point you cant really blame computer magazines for socket 7 Stockholm syndrome 😀

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-04-05, 14:26:

Socket 7 paired with gf3 is not a reasonable expectation for someone playing computer games. Fastest overclocked to its limit K6 […]
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MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 23:25:

My Super Socket 7 system lived through generations of GPUs: Matrox G200, Banshee, Voodoo3, Savage4Pro, GeForce2MX, GeForce4MX, GeForce3, and a mystery Radeon.

Socket 7 paired with gf3 is not a reasonable expectation for someone playing computer games. Fastest overclocked to its limit K6-3+ barely matches 1998 Celeron 300@450/stock January 2000 Celeron 533 performance.
https://hw-museum.cz/article/5/cpu-history-to … 1995---1999-/12

Budged minded people were overclocking cheap Celerons like 366 or 566 and playing maxed out games in 2000. https://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/celeron2-566/
https://web.archive.org/web/20020913090324/ht … tml?i=1227&p=11
By February 2001 (gf3) an absolute bottom end was $100 Celeron/Duron ~800MHz delivering ~twice the 300@450 performance.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-04-04, 23:25:

Had magazines focussed too much on marketing new builds and neglected readers upgrading old machines?

ss7 was dead in 2001. Nobody expected anyone to try playing modern 3d games on a Ford Pinto of computers. At that point you cant really blame computer magazines for socket 7 Stockholm syndrome 😀

Fair - and I built a Socket A tower after accepting that my SS7 was obsolete. I just squeezed every drop out of it first and the most demanding game I remember playing on that SS7 was Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) on a 3Dfx @25fps and that was when I tried many alternative graphics cards to get the FPS back up hence the GF3 failed experiment.

I also remember chasing FPS against my brother's i440BX slocket running a Celeron @1GHz, but memory is fuzzy and maybe the real chase was with my "new" Duron - the machine I miss most because it was unfinished business. It might have been days or weeks old when I left..

Spent the weekend benchmarking my Pentium 4 with OttoPS's newly released "P4Tool": [b]p4tool - performance control utility for Pentium 4 / NetBurst[/b]

This tool enables more throttling options for Pentium 4 (Netburst) systems. Just based on my initial testing it can throttle the system between mid-range Pentium and 386 levels of performance.

Since a lot of speed sensitive titles of the early to mid 90s fall into this range, this makes the Pentium 4 even more versatile at hitting these performance levels.

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-04-05, 14:26:

ss7 was dead in 2001. Nobody expected anyone to try playing modern 3d games on a Ford Pinto of computers. At that point you cant really blame computer magazines for socket 7 Stockholm syndrome 😀

Spare a thought for me having a regular Socket 7 PC until 2006. Although in 2001 there was turning point where I went to the shops with my dad on my birthday to buy some PC games, but ended up walking out with a PSone instead - that started my switch to being mostly a console gamer. In retrospect I wish I used that money to put into a graphics upgrade over what I believe was still a Virge DX in the family PC, and CPU upgrade to 233 MMX if it wasn't already maxed out. My friend's dad was a massive computer nerd and could have helped out on that. Ah well, I was only a young lad back then.

giantenemycat wrote on 2026-04-05, 15:33:

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-04-05, 14:26:

ss7 was dead in 2001. Nobody expected anyone to try playing modern 3d games on a Ford Pinto of computers. At that point you cant really blame computer magazines for socket 7 Stockholm syndrome 😀

Spare a thought for me having a regular Socket 7 PC until 2006. Although in 2001 there was turning point where I went to the shops with my dad on my birthday to buy some PC games, but ended up walking out with a PSone instead - that started my switch to being mostly a console gamer. In retrospect I wish I used that money to put into a graphics upgrade over what I believe was still a Virge DX in the family PC, and CPU upgrade to 233 MMX if it wasn't already maxed out. My friend's dad was a massive computer nerd and could have helped out on that. Ah well, I was only a young lad back then.

Holy smokes, so are you saying you were using a Virge DX and a Pentium 233 MMX still in 2005-2006?

(BTW, since you mentioned consoles, I have to ask... is your username a reference to the "Giant enemy crab" line from Sony's E3 2006 press conference?)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-04-06, 06:07:

Holy smokes, so are you saying you were using a Virge DX and a Pentium 233 MMX still in 2005-2006?

(BTW, since you mentioned consoles, I have to ask... is your username a reference to the "Giant enemy crab" line from Sony's E3 2006 press conference?)

Maybe not even 233 MMX. All I can definitively say is at the time my dad bought the PC from his friend (some point between Aug '98 - Feb '99), it had a Pentium ranging from 166 -233 MMX. At least 32MB SDR. Virge DX/GX. ALS120. HDD was probably between 1.x - 2 GB. Whatever the config was, I don't think it was upgraded at all over its life. Sometime in the early 2000s my dad tried to upgrade the RAM, but he said it didn't work or didn't fit. A different family friend also came to fix it in 2000-2001, although I think it was just a Windows problem. He's the only one who would have known how to upgrade it, but I don't think he did.

There's a whole story I could tell about my quest to identify that PC, I will probably make a thread about it with all the twists and turns at some point.

(And yes, my username is a reference to that 😉)

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-04-06, 06:07:

Holy smokes, so are you saying you were using a Virge DX and a Pentium 233 MMX still in 2005-2006?

There was a kind of "minimum spec office/websurfer" moving target, where you could get by with a fast 486 until about 2000, then a pentium for a couple of years, then fast socket 7 lasted until about the date mentioned, then about 1ghz from then until 2010ish, then 2 ghz 32bit until about 2015... just staying at the edge of lowest supported config for browsers on out of date windows. Linux users could probably be a couple of years behind that, but drop out of the window and you are doing too many workarounds and not keeping up with "modern" web. Like you can put puppy on a Pentium II and do a lot now, but gotta pick and choose what you do. I am talking more the bottom edge of necessities, like your bank's website, any local, regional, national govt stuff you need etc.

Not quite sure where the line is now, but I think you can still do pretty well with a Core2 and Win10.

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 15:27:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-04-06, 06:07:

Holy smokes, so are you saying you were using a Virge DX and a Pentium 233 MMX still in 2005-2006?

There was a kind of "minimum spec office/websurfer" moving target, where you could get by with a fast 486 until about 2000, then a pentium for a couple of years, then fast socket 7 lasted until about the date mentioned, then about 1ghz from then until 2010ish, then 2 ghz 32bit until about 2015... just staying at the edge of lowest supported config for browsers on out of date windows. Linux users could probably be a couple of years behind that, but drop out of the window and you are doing too many workarounds and not keeping up with "modern" web. Like you can put puppy on a Pentium II and do a lot now, but gotta pick and choose what you do. I am talking more the bottom edge of necessities, like your bank's website, any local, regional, national govt stuff you need etc.

Not quite sure where the line is now, but I think you can still do pretty well with a Core2 and Win10.

Yeah, I guess it just struck me as funny that those specs still met that minimum spec at that point.

Thinking about it now though, I am trying to remember when I upgraded my aunt and uncle from their Pentium 200Mhz Gateway 2000 desktop (not tower)... it may have actually been later than that! It still ran BEAUTIFULLY in Windows 95\98 (can't remember exactly what version it had). But the system was just so old and unsecure for internet use at that point that it was time to move on.

I can't remember what they upgraded to. I know I set them up with a used Inspiron 530 tower eventually... but that was probably 2014-2016 or so.

... oh! I think I remember now. Before I gave them the Inspiron 530 I think they had an AMD-based Dell desktop of some sort. The Inspiron C521 looks similar to what I remember. I'm guessing it had a Sempron or some other low budget single core processor. I bet they got that sometime around 2006 or so... but it's hard to say.

So yeah, based on that I would agree that 2005-2006 does seem about the cutoff for a Pentium MMX being usable as a daily internet\email machine. Just can't imagine becoming a computer enthusiast after that. 😁

EDIT: Oh wow, I found an email I sent my aunt to test their email setup in July 2007... that was most likely when I upgraded them from the old Pentium to the Sempron system. Crazy!!

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 15:27:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-04-06, 06:07:

Holy smokes, so are you saying you were using a Virge DX and a Pentium 233 MMX still in 2005-2006?

There was a kind of "minimum spec office/websurfer" moving target, where you could get by with a fast 486 until about 2000, then a pentium for a couple of years, then fast socket 7 lasted until about the date mentioned, then about 1ghz from then until 2010ish, then 2 ghz 32bit until about 2015... just staying at the edge of lowest supported config for browsers on out of date windows. Linux users could probably be a couple of years behind that, but drop out of the window and you are doing too many workarounds and not keeping up with "modern" web. Like you can put puppy on a Pentium II and do a lot now, but gotta pick and choose what you do. I am talking more the bottom edge of necessities, like your bank's website, any local, regional, national govt stuff you need etc.

Not quite sure where the line is now, but I think you can still do pretty well with a Core2 and Win10.

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember giving away my used ram that i had in stock (the ones too small to sell) just to be a less painful process

By 2005 even a K6-2 500Mhz was obsolete and STILL found people with that Compaq Presario 7478 (and similars) with that DOG slow Seagate 10GB with the black cover around and 192mb of ram (64 original), oh God...
One kept his Pentium 3 1Ghz running until 2015 for general use, especting that i do some voodoo magic to make it fast.
Another kept using an Athlon xp 2000+ with a massive 25GB PST on outlook at least until 2016 and refused to upgrade (she wouldnt listen), and blamed me that it took ages to load. I kindly sent her to suck a d...eventually.

dont get me wrong, i have no problem keeping old computers for only one task (like the 386 at the hardware store for an excel list), but cmon! dont you value your time?

My parents had a 2.53GHz P4 until 2018 and expected me to make it play YouTube smoothly. I ended up giving them money to buy a new one.

They still have it, but it hasn't been turned on since transferring their data to the new computer. It blew its caps about a third of the way into its extended life, but it was somehow still stable. It never got recapped. All it got in those 15 years was two RAM upgrades and an optical drive replaced.

Living wrote on Today, 00:24:

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember givi […]
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BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 15:27:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-04-06, 06:07:

Holy smokes, so are you saying you were using a Virge DX and a Pentium 233 MMX still in 2005-2006?

There was a kind of "minimum spec office/websurfer" moving target, where you could get by with a fast 486 until about 2000, then a pentium for a couple of years, then fast socket 7 lasted until about the date mentioned, then about 1ghz from then until 2010ish, then 2 ghz 32bit until about 2015... just staying at the edge of lowest supported config for browsers on out of date windows. Linux users could probably be a couple of years behind that, but drop out of the window and you are doing too many workarounds and not keeping up with "modern" web. Like you can put puppy on a Pentium II and do a lot now, but gotta pick and choose what you do. I am talking more the bottom edge of necessities, like your bank's website, any local, regional, national govt stuff you need etc.

Not quite sure where the line is now, but I think you can still do pretty well with a Core2 and Win10.

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember giving away my used ram that i had in stock (the ones too small to sell) just to be a less painful process

By 2005 even a K6-2 500Mhz was obsolete and STILL found people with that Compaq Presario 7478 (and similars) with that DOG slow Seagate 10GB with the black cover around and 192mb of ram (64 original), oh God...
One kept his Pentium 3 1Ghz running until 2015 for general use, especting that i do some voodoo magic to make it fast.
Another kept using an Athlon xp 2000+ with a massive 25GB PST on outlook at least until 2016 and refused to upgrade (she wouldnt listen), and blamed me that it took ages to load. I kindly sent her to suck a d...eventually.

dont get me wrong, i have no problem keeping old computers for only one task (like the 386 at the hardware store for an excel list), but cmon! dont you value your time?

Linux on an SSD can extend the life of many PCs, but the physical constraint is kernel encryption/decryption written for SIMDs that changed with CPU designs. Technically, slower emulation could provide an operational glue but the explosion in tracking is the killer because that's extra web calls for each user interaction - and each web call hits that encryption/decryption. The only way to evade all of that is to offload the encryption/decryption/tracking to a server. Some services do that (e.g. Opera Mini, Amazon Silk) but their focus is on offloading the rendering so they are only helping through side-effect rather than by design.

MattRocks wrote on Today, 06:47:

Living wrote on Today, 00:24:

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember givi […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 15:27:

There was a kind of "minimum spec office/websurfer" moving target, where you could get by with a fast 486 until about 2000, then a pentium for a couple of years, then fast socket 7 lasted until about the date mentioned, then about 1ghz from then until 2010ish, then 2 ghz 32bit until about 2015... just staying at the edge of lowest supported config for browsers on out of date windows. Linux users could probably be a couple of years behind that, but drop out of the window and you are doing too many workarounds and not keeping up with "modern" web. Like you can put puppy on a Pentium II and do a lot now, but gotta pick and choose what you do. I am talking more the bottom edge of necessities, like your bank's website, any local, regional, national govt stuff you need etc.

Not quite sure where the line is now, but I think you can still do pretty well with a Core2 and Win10.

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember giving away my used ram that i had in stock (the ones too small to sell) just to be a less painful process

By 2005 even a K6-2 500Mhz was obsolete and STILL found people with that Compaq Presario 7478 (and similars) with that DOG slow Seagate 10GB with the black cover around and 192mb of ram (64 original), oh God...
One kept his Pentium 3 1Ghz running until 2015 for general use, especting that i do some voodoo magic to make it fast.
Another kept using an Athlon xp 2000+ with a massive 25GB PST on outlook at least until 2016 and refused to upgrade (she wouldnt listen), and blamed me that it took ages to load. I kindly sent her to suck a d...eventually.

dont get me wrong, i have no problem keeping old computers for only one task (like the 386 at the hardware store for an excel list), but cmon! dont you value your time?

but the explosion in tracking is the killer because that's extra web calls for each user interaction - and each web call hits that encryption/decryption. The only way to evade all of that is to offload the encryption/decryption/tracking to a server.

Ad blocker plugins and pi-hole type boxes help a lot, less garbage, less CPU work.

BitWrangler wrote on Today, 12:29:

MattRocks wrote on Today, 06:47:

Living wrote on Today, 00:24:

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember givi […]
Show full quote

i REALLY hated doing repairs on site for these kind of people who lived on the edge. All took 4 or 5 times more, i remember giving away my used ram that i had in stock (the ones too small to sell) just to be a less painful process

By 2005 even a K6-2 500Mhz was obsolete and STILL found people with that Compaq Presario 7478 (and similars) with that DOG slow Seagate 10GB with the black cover around and 192mb of ram (64 original), oh God...
One kept his Pentium 3 1Ghz running until 2015 for general use, especting that i do some voodoo magic to make it fast.
Another kept using an Athlon xp 2000+ with a massive 25GB PST on outlook at least until 2016 and refused to upgrade (she wouldnt listen), and blamed me that it took ages to load. I kindly sent her to suck a d...eventually.

dont get me wrong, i have no problem keeping old computers for only one task (like the 386 at the hardware store for an excel list), but cmon! dont you value your time?

but the explosion in tracking is the killer because that's extra web calls for each user interaction - and each web call hits that encryption/decryption. The only way to evade all of that is to offload the encryption/decryption/tracking to a server.

Ad blocker plugins and pi-hole type boxes help a lot, less garbage, less CPU work.

Performance under vanilla conditions is what determines if the CPU is going to be supported in the software stack. Once dropped from the stack, there's no way for the CPU to execute necessary encryption/decryption routines.

Last night I started digging into that emachines el1300g I had returned to me.

Its plastic front has yellowed to a fun shade of ivory, but I can live with that.

The 2gb modules I popped in it dont work, but the 1gb ones I salvaged from work do.

It's extreme on the corners-cut aspects. It lacks ide emulation on the sata controller. I spent a fair amount of time last night trying to add uniata to an nt4 install iso, since I want to try putting wine libraries on it to see if hardware dx9 is possible, since it has a forceware supported igp, that exposes opengl 2.0 ICD, which is 'sufficient', according to what I have read.

I'd like to see this thing do something neat that way, as well as dualboot with svardos.

I was not successful, as you have to put all kinds of stuff in 3 different places, with poor/nonexistent documentation on how to properly form the declarations.

I may end up having to resort to trickery to get nt4 on this thing though. I may have to resort to putting the spinning rust I put in it, inside a drive cradle then cooking a raw disk vmdk, and then using virtualbox to get it installed initially, and uniata popped on.

It has no FDC, so I fundamentally cant 'press F6'.

Was helping my dad sort out some stuff and found these. The speakers must have been the set we got with our first PC, but I can't find much of anything about them by searching for CSW20.

I found a 'spare parts' supplier for those at least!

https://www.parttarget.com/5965-01-495-0316_5 … 15-CCB9D0A0095D

Lmao

giantenemycat wrote on Today, 15:38:

Was helping my dad sort out some stuff and found these. The speakers must have been the set we got with our first PC, but I can't find much of anything about them by searching for CSW20.

I love finding old manuals from old computers and so on we used to have. I found the manual for the packard bell my dad bought and we ended up spending over 600 dollars upgrading the ram on a while later. I also remember the day we went to a computer store and bought our first CD ROm upgrade. I still have the decoder card that came with it. I wish I had the box still ....

Yeah I recognise those speakers by sight. Probably only came with systems or multimedia kits or something and weren't really a standalone product. Coming in an era where everyone was getting "free" 2-7W speakers with their system, this sort included, and standalone sets were higher power.

I dont know if its retro, but i think the PS3 and xbox 360 are now retro. I repaired a set of active 3D glasses for the Sony 3D display. All of them have an issue where the battery will die and not charge again. I have 3 pairs. I replaced the batter in one and it worked. So now im confident to replace the batteriesin the remaining 2. I tested it and it worked perfectly the Display is great and I'm lucky I got it one day from EB when they were clearing them out. I also found a couple extra pairs of glasses brand new in box at a thrift store. They wanted like 60 dollars each. I told them about the battery issue and that these most likely dont work. They let me open then and try to cahrge them. THey obviously did not work. So they let me have them for 10 bucks for both.