VOGONS


Reply 100 of 142, by ODwilly

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FDIV P60 all the way 😉

Main pc: Asus ROG 17. R9 5900HX, RTX 3070m, 16gb ddr4 3200, 1tb NVME.
Retro PC: Soyo P4S Dragon, 3gb ddr 266, 120gb Maxtor, Geforce Fx 5950 Ultra, SB Live! 5.1

Reply 101 of 142, by popper

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In terms of subjective retrospective view at all the systems i used to use:

- i80386SX-20

I like underdogs and the good feeling of getting the last out of them: Running software, that wasn't meant to even get close to them. (if the instruction set is the limiting factor it becomes another story...) This SX was the first CPU i was using....

Remember: The term 'x86' points directly to what we retro-users are very familiar with (and definitely in need of): Compatibility! For me the 386 is the greatest CPU of all x86', because it did the biggest step forward in technology and is the base of all later used processors from then to our days now.

errare humanum est

Reply 102 of 142, by creepingnet

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I'm pretty much a fan of the 486 era hardware the most, not too old, not too new, can slide either way towards a more modern internet ready broadband happy box or towards an older pure-DOS machine with oldschool VGA and a smaller hard disk and still look and act the part. My 2 particular favorites are the DX2/66 and the DX4-100. That's the golden age when I got into PC gaming (circa 1992, age 9-10ish), that whole period of Ultima VI, Monkey Island, Freddy Pharkas, X-Wing, and shareware.....

The 80486 DX2/66 is like the Fender Stratocaster or the Ford Ranger of 486 CPUs, they were so popular they are still somewhat plentiful and easy to get ahold of for not too much money. They don't complain when heatsink-less, they have more than decent enough performance for my favorite era of DOS gaming, Windows For Workgroups 3.11 runs happily on them, that's what my current 486 boxes have in them (a home-built 486 desktop, and a Compaq Portable 486c that needs it's cracked LCD replaced).

Intel 80486 DX4-100 PT24C, to me it's like the perfect centerpoint to the entire PC generations, not too new to run original PC software (Turbo Switches, Moslo), but not too slow to do some light duty 3-D, USB, or even run something as new as Windows 2000 Professional. One of the best PC's I ever had had that chip in it, an IBM PC-330 100DX4, type/code 6571-W5K (Space Saver 486 PC-330 with a DX4100 CPU on 33MHz Bus with 540MB Quantum Fireball and 8MB of RAM originally). That thing ran stuff that REQUIRED a low-level Pentium to run including Diablo and even Postal: Special Delivery Edition (albeit the latter did have a few slow-down issues but it worked and it worked great considering the hardware).

~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 103 of 142, by petro89

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It's hard to pick one!

AMD 5x86 133: not my first CPU but I learned the most about computers with this chip so it has a soft spot for me.

AMD K6-3+ :I couldn't afford a P3 build but the this CPU was at least as fast if not faster with integer operations. Fast and snappy for its time.

AMD Athlon XP: this was the first CPU that truly truly blew me away. A powerhouse for its time.

*Ryzen 9 3900xt, 5700xt, Win10
*Ryzen 7 2700x, Gtx1080, Win10
*FX 9590, Vega64, Win10
*Phenom IIx6 1100T, R9 380, Win7
*QX9770, r9 270x, Win7
*FX60, hd5850, Win7
*XP2400+, ti4600, Win2k
*PPro 200 1mb, banshee, w98
*AMD 5x86, CL , DOS

Reply 104 of 142, by spolon

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80486
Intel Pentium MMX
Intel Pentium III
AMD Athlon XP
AMD Sempron
AMD Athlon 64

In order. 😜

Renan Spolon
www.muquiranas.com

Reply 105 of 142, by GeorgeMan

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No semprons, please! :p

Duron is ok.

1. Athlon XP 3200+ | ASUS A7V600 | Radeon 9500 @ Pro | SB Audigy 2 ZS | 80GB IDE, 500GB SSD IDE2Sata, 2x1TB HDDs | Win 98SE, XP, Vista
2. Pentium MMX 266| Qdi Titanium IIIB | Hercules graphics & Amber monitor | 1 + 10GB HDDs | DOS 6.22, Win 3.1, 95C

Reply 107 of 142, by Iris030380

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The Pentium 200 vanilla. Cost me a cool £200, which was a lot of money back then, but the difference in speed from my PR-100 was amazing. Quake timerefresh went from 10fps to 32fps. Let me play Screamer Rally, Forsaken and Quake II in Glide flawlessly. Impressed all my friends... apart from my friend Kris who spent more money on a Pentium 166MMX thinking the MMX tag would give him more frames than me.

It didn't... 🤣

I5-2500K @ 4.0Ghz + R9 290 + 8GB DDR3 1333 :: I3-540 @ 4.2 GHZ + 6870 4GB DDR3 2000 :: E6300 @ 2.7 GHZ + 1950XTX 2GB DDR2 800 :: A64 3700 + 1950PRO AGP 2GB DDR400 :: K63+ @ 550MHZ + V2 SLI 256 PC133:: P200 + MYSTIQUE / 3Dfx 128 PC66

Reply 108 of 142, by F2bnp

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Iris030380 wrote:

The Pentium 200 vanilla. Cost me a cool £200, which was a lot of money back then, but the difference in speed from my PR-100 was amazing. Quake timerefresh went from 10fps to 32fps. Let me play Screamer Rally, Forsaken and Quake II in Glide flawlessly. Impressed all my friends... apart from my friend Kris who spent more money on a Pentium 166MMX thinking the MMX tag would give him more frames than me.

It didn't... 🤣

It should have, thanks to the extra cache. Something else from the system was the culprit.

Reply 109 of 142, by Tiger433

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AMD 286 12 Mhz (That is first processor I used)
Pentium 133 (I used him with S3Virge and single Voodoo 2 12MB)
Pentium II 350 (With GeForce 2MX400 I played even Gothic2 on that and is slowed down only in city and most of the time I have him overclocked to 466 Mhz by changing FSB to 133)
Pentium III 866
Pentium IV Northwood 2.0
AMD Athlon 2000+
Pentium IV Northwood 2.8 with HT (I used that on ASUS P4P800 before MB has problem with capacitors and died but processor is still alive)

W7 "retro" PC: ASUS P8H77-V, Intel i3 3240, 8 GB DDR3 1333, HD6850, 2 x 500 GB HDD
Retro 98SE PC: MSI MS-6511, AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 512 MB RAM, ATI Rage 128, 80GB HDD
My Youtube channel

Reply 110 of 142, by Munx

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Though call. List could change depending on the time of day but now I would put my top 5 like this:

Pentium II - Very versatile and just a huge leap for gaming. Also slot CPU's are cool.

AMD K5 - Guess I like it for being the underdog. Despite having better per-clock performance still couldn't match up to what intel had at the time. Had this been released a year or maybe even 6 months earlier it could have succeeded.

Pentium III - The last big "leap" in CPU space, everything slowed down (or even got worse with early P4's) after this.

i486 DX2 - Just a staple of 90's pre-Quake gaming. THE CPU for Doom.

Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 GHz, might be Winchester, don't to remove the heatsink to find out, I know its 90nm) - Just the first CPU I started tinkering with - OC'ing, benchmarking and the likes. The fact that it wiped the floor with much higher clocked P4's all my friends had also helps.

My builds!
The FireStarter 2.0 - The wooden K5
The Underdog - The budget K6
The Voodoo powerhouse - The power-hungry K7
The troll PC - The Socket 423 Pentium 4

Reply 112 of 142, by Caluser2000

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For nostalgia reasons the 286. A 286/16 was the first system that was solely my own, installed an OS on(DrDos 6.0),added peripherals, upgraded ram and hdd etc. on. 486DX/66 would be next because I replaced the 286 mobo with a 486 mobo containing that processor. After that would be Pentium 200mmx. I've a soft spot for early ARM aka Acorn kit and pick up what ever I can get my grubby mits on software or hardware wise.

Last edited by Caluser2000 on 2015-05-16, 05:55. Edited 1 time in total.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 113 of 142, by Iris030380

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Munx wrote:

i486 DX2 - Just a staple of 90's pre-Quake gaming. THE CPU for Doom

Totally .

I5-2500K @ 4.0Ghz + R9 290 + 8GB DDR3 1333 :: I3-540 @ 4.2 GHZ + 6870 4GB DDR3 2000 :: E6300 @ 2.7 GHZ + 1950XTX 2GB DDR2 800 :: A64 3700 + 1950PRO AGP 2GB DDR400 :: K63+ @ 550MHZ + V2 SLI 256 PC133:: P200 + MYSTIQUE / 3Dfx 128 PC66

Reply 114 of 142, by candle_86

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Athlon XP 1700+ Palamino, I had my original chip until this March when I gave it to my girl to wear around her neck. The chip died from a lighting strike back in 2004, but It was the first CPU I paid for 😁

Reply 115 of 142, by firage

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Pentium III (Tualatin), and second place goes to i486DX2. Perfect for Win9x and DOS respectively, and I wasn't able to have them when they were new.

My big-red-switch 486

Reply 116 of 142, by kanecvr

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No1: AMD K6-2 -> about as fast as a PII, but way cheaper. Great upgrade for socket 7 systems that supported 2.2v Vcore. It was the heart of my first gaming computer.
No2: Cyrix 586 133MHz -> this was in my first ever PC. Fastest 486 CPU I've ever used. Could run Pentium games at decent framerates.
No3: AMD K7 Socket A CPUs. Cheap and fast. Still remember rocking GTA3 on my dirt-cheap 950MHz duron + Radeon 7500.

* Back in the day I never fancied slot 1 machines for their poor price / performance ratio. I remember a PII 400 + 440BX cost almost two times more then a K6-2 450 + MVP3. That's 100% more money for 15-20% better performance in some FPU intensive games.

^^ This was the decision I had to make in December 1998. Never regretted it, even after seeing several PII machines my friends bought. Because I went with a Super 7 platform I was able to afford 64MB of ram and an ATA66 6.2GB HDD vs 2GB HDD and 32MB of ram I could get with a 350MHz PII. It played everything I threw at it up until early 2003 when I moved to socket A.

Reply 117 of 142, by feipoa

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kanecvr wrote:

No2: Cyrix 586 133MHz -> this was in my first ever PC. Fastest 486 CPU I've ever used. Could run Pentium games at decent framerates.

What is the story behind how you obtained one of these very rare CPUs? Was it part of an Evergreen upgrade? Are you sure it wasn't an AMD chip?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 118 of 142, by kanecvr

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feipoa wrote:
kanecvr wrote:

No2: Cyrix 586 133MHz -> this was in my first ever PC. Fastest 486 CPU I've ever used. Could run Pentium games at decent framerates.

What is the story behind how you obtained one of these very rare CPUs? Was it part of an Evergreen upgrade? Are you sure it wasn't an AMD chip?

Very sure. Took the machine apart countless times. Green heatsink reading Cyrix 586-133GP with a small fan bolted on top. Changed the fan like 3 times during the PC's lifetime. The 133 gets quite hot, and if the fan wasn't working, it would glitch and freeze within minutes of turning it on.

The machine I had was made by REL computers - a romanian company that's still around, but they don't sell custom PC's any more. Motherboard was a VIA based FIC 486-VIP-IO2 (green PCB version). Cirrus Logic PCI card, 8MB of ram, 800MB Quantum Fireball HDD (witch I killed), 14" Logic or Logix monitor, keyboard and mouse - and that's about it. My dad got it from work - he was supposed to use it but he had neither the time or patience to learn how to use a computer, so he gave it to me. I have no ideea how the company came to use 133 Cyrix CPUs in their machines, but I do know that in '98 they were selling other Cyrix 686 based machines. Most of the machines in their catalog were Cyrix based, and a few had AMD CPUs.

As you can see from my sig, I'm trying to recreate it, but it's not quite right and I'm not sure it will ever be. For starters, I can't find the exact case anywhere. I found a similar, albeit older model (I have two of them), but it's slightly different than what I had. The case and PSU were made by "Sunshine" or "Sunshine Computer" - can't find anything about them on google, but cases and PSUs keep popping up in computer shops and recycling centers, so I assume they were quite popular in Romania. The Cyrix 5x86 100 was donated by HighTreason, and I'm quite happy with it. I'm not going to hunt for the 133MHz model due to it's price and rarity. In fact, I've never seen another Cyrix 586 apart from the one I owned. The FIC 486-VIP-IO is quite different form the IO2 version I had - it performs much worse for one, and it's plagued with bugs, but it's the best socket 3 motherboard I have (in proper working order). I did get the exact model of Cirrus Logic PCI card, but because the MB performs so slow, I swapped it for a VLB version with a similar chipset. Still looking for the exact case, a Voodoo 1 (I have 3 voodoo 2 cards, but can't seem to source a V1 locally), more FPM ram (very hard to find where I live) and if I'm lucky the 486-VIP-IO2 to replace it's shitty counterpart currently in the system.