VOGONS

One PC to rule them all?

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First post, by Half-Saint

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Is there such a thing? I do enjoy tinkering with old hardware but even in the new house, I will not have the space for 5-6 different machines.

I have a modern PC with Windows 10 (for now) that I use for modern games.

For retro gaming, I have my mom's old turbo XT for DOS, a Super Socket 7 system for Windows 98 as well as a 486DX2/66 VLB system for late DOS games. I just put together a socket 370 Pentium 3-S system because I had to. The problem is that there is a lot of overlap with different processors, operating systems and whatnot. I have no idea what would be good enough to cover as much as possible. My memory is also fuzzy, back in the day we just used what we had... upgraded as we went along and didn't think much about anything else just as long as we could squeeze another few extra fps out of the system. I remember I used two different Athlon XP systems between 2001 and 2008ish with Windows XP SP3 (first one was T-bird 1,4 GHz and second was a Barton M 2,4 GHz with nForce2 motherboard).

How do you combine this mish-mash of memories and components into something tangible and practical? I don't have a clear goal of what I want, that is also probably an issue.

I know this has been discussed to the death but I'm still hoping for some new insights.

Cheers

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Reply 1 of 2, by Shponglefan

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I've done a lot of experimenting with industrial Pentium 4 motherboards with ISA slots. In my experience, these can be versatile retro setups especially for a rapidly changing period from the late 80s to late 90s.

Pentium 4 processors have a lot of throttling options, so they're quite versatile for retro gaming. And paired with a motherboard with ISA slots and DMA support, you can have native ISA sound card support under DOS.

I've got one completed system here based on a 3.4GHz Cedar Mill Pentium 4 processor: Pentium 4 Multi-OS Build Log (DOS/3.11/95/NT4/98/2k/Me/XP) This was an experiment to see how many different operating systems I could cram into a single PC. It ended up being one of my favorite builds and I was surprised at just how versatile it is. I've had it throttled down to 286-12MHz level of performance.

I'm also experimenting with a lower-speed (1.6 or 1.8GHz) Pentium 4 socket 478 setup with triple graphic cards (ISA, PCI and AGP). With the right throttling tools, it's possible to throttle lower speed Pentium 4's down to 386 speeds without relying on OCDM or ACPI throttling (since that can cause issues with some games). Paired with a native 1990s ISA graphics card, you effectively get the equivalent of both a native 1990s VGA speed combined with 386 CPU performance.

And then at the high end, you can cover up to 2000/2001 era performance at 1.6 or 1.8GHz with an AGP card.

Pentium 4 Multi-OS Build
486 DX4-100 with 6 sound cards
486 DX-33 with 5 sound cards

Reply 2 of 2, by Shponglefan

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Just to show what is possible when throttling Pentium 4 processors, these are some performance comparisons for both my Cedar Mill 3.4GHz LGA775 system and a Northwood 1.6GHz socket 478 setup.

The attachment Pentium 4 HT 651 (Cedar Mill) - PC Player Benchmark (320x200).png is no longer available
The attachment Pentium 4 1.6GHz (Northwood) - PC Player Bench 320x200.png is no longer available

For chart reference:

12x to 17x = Cedar Mill processor multiplier settings
CE = full cache enabled
CD = full cache disabled
L1D = level 1 cache disabled
DS = debug store enabled (P4Tool)
DS + BTS = debug store and branch trace store enabled (P4Tool)

Pentium 4 Multi-OS Build
486 DX4-100 with 6 sound cards
486 DX-33 with 5 sound cards

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