The i915 chipset only supports single core Pentium 4's and Celerons. A 3.8 p4 keeps up on the web very well in my experience.

candle_86 wrote:

I dont need to run my own tests when every review ever done supports my claims, but your just some fan boy, you struck a nerve because my tolerance for what I consider idiots is being tried by you. I have zero tolerance for self righteous fanboys. You ignore evidence and you make false assumptions yet provide no proof for those assumptions, had this been a regulated debate you'd have lost. Please stop speaking until you are able to extract your head from your ass.

The sad part is even Intel didn't want P4 to stick around. It was truly a poorly designed architecture. Slow and hot.
If I have my facts straight, the only reason it was around so long was Pentium M/Core 2 took too long.

I would just jump to Core2 if you are going to upgrade from the P3s. It has much more expandability (things like SATA, PCI-E)
and it is much faster and cooler than P3 for the same work load. It is fairly cheap too.

And you can even get 775 boards that still have serial ports and floppy controllers.

The GA-8S661FXM supports the Pentium D and is the only one out of them that I could find that supports a dual core cpu. I would suggest that board and one of the i915 Asus boards for systems maxed out. EDIT: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2186 here is the Gigabyte support page.

When I think of P4, I primarily think of it's days in competition with the K7 AthlonXP, not the Athlon64. K8 was a very different chip and seems to represent the dawn of a different era to me, though I realize it did overlap with the late P4s. So if we're talking Prescott vs K8, yeah the K8 is definitely a better CPU. I love the K8.

Athlon XP wasn't convincingly superior to the P4, but it's great appeal was that it was cheap. I never would have spent the money on a P4 back then, but that's not an issue anymore. Therefore I find I'm more able to take interest in P4s today.
P4 has better chipsets and I believe it generally is easier to find high quality boards for it. Athlon boards were mostly designed for low income gamers who wanted performance for the least amount of money. I include myself in that group, and it did the job but I don't think it proved superior to P4 outside of the cost issue. When factoring in the motherboards and chipsets, I think P4 was more ideal for somebody who didn't mind the cost.
That said, Athlon boards did get better over time. They started out pretty awful ghetto IMO, but by the time you get to the nForce2 they had some really nice ones.

2 or 3 years ago I was looking into building a file server and considered a bunch of options ranging from P3, P4, Athlon MP and K8 boards.
There are good P3 server boards, but I wasn't satisfied with their PCI bus limitations. I didn't find many options for Athlon MP and it didn't seem to have good server chipsets available, the AMD 760MP was really for workstations. They had similar PCI limitations as the older P3 boards I had looked at.
I was impressed by the P4 Xeon boards - good ones are easy to find and cheap. They had way more PCI-X capability than AthlonMP boards, so it's easy to see why nobody built AthlonMP servers back then. AMD didn't become competitive as a server platform until the K8, which was quite a revolution.

Even for workstations the AthlonXP is still a bit challenged because high end software was carefully optimized for P4. Athlons were mainly competitive in consumer apps because those apps probably weren't as optimized in general. Inexpensive consumer software would not see the level of careful optimization that was required to get the best out of a netburst chip. The Athlon wasn't as sensitive to optimization, and that fact is it's strength.

feipoa wrote:

Don't i915 boards support some socket 775 core 2 duo chips? In that sense, wouldn't the i915 boards be better in terms of speed compared to the i865/i875 boards? If so, and if I had to select the two best motherboards from the list for everyday web browsing and other day-to-day usage, wouldn't the Asus P5GL-MX (i915 w/PCIe x16) and the SuperMicro H8SSL-R10 (ServerWorks HT1000 with dual core Opteron 185) be the best choices?

I am still using a dual PIII Tualatin for my day-to-day computer needs. I figure it does'nt have much time left for such usage. I salvaged the two least ugly desktop towers from that lot, so I have space for 2 motherboards. I am not sure if the SiS 661FX chipsets support core 2 duo, but the boards in my possession are limited to 2 GB.

Based on the overwhelming number of responses, I have decided to trash 24 of the boards on the list.

Thats the thing, 865pe supports the Core 2 Duo (not all boards, but the chipset) but i915 dosnt.
The lack of dual or quad CPU support was to keep manufacturers from building dual CPU boards with the chipset.

In 30 years when my P4 boards are worth a fortune I will think of you 😉

feipoa wrote:

Don't i915 boards support some socket 775 core 2 duo chips? In that sense, wouldn't the i915 boards be better in terms of speed compared to the i865/i875 boards? If so, and if I had to select the two best motherboards from the list for everyday web browsing and other day-to-day usage, wouldn't the Asus P5GL-MX (i915 w/PCIe x16) and the SuperMicro H8SSL-R10 (ServerWorks HT1000 with dual core Opteron 185) be the best choices?

I am still using a dual PIII Tualatin for my day-to-day computer needs. I figure it does'nt have much time left for such usage. I salvaged the two least ugly desktop towers from that lot, so I have space for 2 motherboards. I am not sure if the SiS 661FX chipsets support core 2 duo, but the boards in my possession are limited to 2 GB.

Based on the overwhelming number of responses, I have decided to trash 24 of the boards on the list.

don't trash them, ebay them. Heck id buy the Gigabyte GA-7VM400AM off of you simply because my KT333 board is acting flaky and I'd find SATA ports very useful 🤣.

Folks have mentioned P4 Xeons. A while ago I acquired 6 Nocona/Irwindale boxes in similar circumstances to the OP. I kept one intact (upgrading it to 2 CPU) and broke up the others for parts, trashing the cases. I'm using one of the mobos in my file server, which used to be a twin-Tully box. Everything else is in storage. The mobos use proprietary power supplies so are probably worthless. When I need the space I'll probably just throw them out.

There are 46 boards in total. I will likely recycle these:
6x S845WD1-E
6x D845GEBV2
3x MX46-800N
1x 8S661FXMTIU
1x GA-7VKMP
4x IBM eServer330

OK, 21 boards. While I had high hopes for the IBM dual PIII-Tualatin, my research indicates it to be the ServerWorks III LE chipset, which does not support dual channel memory. It also is the slower PCI-X variant, with only a 33 MHz bus.

These Intel i845 boards are not worthless or even hard to sell. People like me use them as replacements for OEM boards with bloated caps when fixing peoples old systems.

They are not worth much though.

What about the RDRAM boards? Are they worth anything?

2fort5r wrote:

What about the RDRAM boards? Are they worth anything?

If the memory isnt included they will probably be alot harder to sell...
On the other hand for Vogons people they are probably the most interesting boards...

feipoa wrote:

Don't i915 boards support some socket 775 core 2 duo chips? In that sense, wouldn't the i915 boards be better in terms of speed compared to the i865/i875 boards? If so, and if I had to select the two best motherboards from the list for everyday web browsing and other day-to-day usage, wouldn't the Asus P5GL-MX (i915 w/PCIe x16) and the SuperMicro H8SSL-R10 (ServerWorks HT1000 with dual core Opteron 185) be the best choices?

I am still using a dual PIII Tualatin for my day-to-day computer needs. I figure it does'nt have much time left for such usage. I salvaged the two least ugly desktop towers from that lot, so I have space for 2 motherboards. I am not sure if the SiS 661FX chipsets support core 2 duo, but the boards in my possession are limited to 2 GB.

Based on the overwhelming number of responses, I have decided to trash 24 of the boards on the list.

P3s are still nice HW and are surprisingly good with modern things, (I run Windows 7 on mine) but using it as your only modern system is strange, especially as browsers are pretty demanding.

The SiS 661/671 blows chunks. I've used it as a daily driver paired with a P|D 925 until last year. If the odd SATA controller that really hates being in AHCI mode doesn't get you, or the IGP that only works right in Vista, the Ethernet controller with crashy drivers will. My Core 2 Duo (E6850, 2007) system that I have for games uses the Q45 chipset, the last Core2 one and the last DDR2 one, though you should really get DDR3 if you get one.

However, Core 2 is almost over the hill, despite how well it has held up due to the requirements plateau nowadays. I really recommend you save up and wait for Skylake. Low end hardware nowadays can thrash anything Core 2. The modern Pentium (Haswell, G3220, 2013) in my server scores higher in GeekBench than my Core 2 and the i5 (Arrandale, 560M, 2010) in my laptop, and slices through several virtual machines in ESXi like butter. Unless you already have good Core 2 hardware available to you, just skip right ahead to Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake. A Pentium might be enough, (they're fast and dual core and cheap, what's not to like?) but an i5 will scream. Hell, even one of those 70$ Bay Trail tablets will be faster than your P3.

re calvin

Telling feipoa that a Core 2 Duo or Pentium D is to slow to use as main computer is like telling your grandfather his old car isnt good enough because of the noise inside when running on the highway 😜

Skyscraper wrote:

Telling feipoa that a Core 2 Duo or Pentium D is to slow to use as main computer is like telling your grandfather his old car isnt good enough because of the noise inside when running on the highway 😜

My 1979 Mercedes-Benz still gets me where I want to go, just as my dual Tualatin still renders web pages in a time frame that I can tolerate.

feipoa wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

Telling feipoa that a Core 2 Duo or Pentium D is to slow to use as main computer is like telling your grandfather his old car isnt good enough because of the noise inside when running on the highway 😜

My 1979 Mercedes-Benz still gets me where I want to go, just as my dual Tualatin still renders web pages in a time frame that I can tolerate.

Exactly! 😀

feipoa wrote:

For the i915 boards, the Acer/Gigabyte 8I915AE is limited to 2 GB, which makes the Asus P5GL-MX more appealing with a 4 GB limit and PCIe x16. The 3rd i915G board is an Intel D915GAG, however the PCIe x16 slot was never soldered on. It has only a PCIe x1 slot, 2 PCI slots, and an onboard Intel GMA900. Is the Intel GMA900 any good, or is a PCIe x1 graphics card preferred in such situation?

Since you are explicitly asking about web browsing: Since GMA900 doesn't do Aero or Flash acceleration (probably also not much video acceleration of any kind, and don't start talking about 3D acceleration) any sufficiently modern PCIe card would probably be a big plus. Maybe the machine will even benefit from a discrete video card not leaching RAM bandwidth.
If you don't watch videos online this might not matter much, though.

All HT capable Pentium 4 should be able to run Youtube 480p with only CPU decoding.
The top Prescotts (3.6 and 3.8 ) should handle Youtube 720P.

This is using Flash, HTML5 seems to perform worse so far. If the board has a PCI-E X16 slot then like other members suggested get a low power card like the AMD HD 5450, they usally sell for ~$5.

Skyscraper wrote:

All HT capable Pentium 4 should be able to run Youtube 480p with only CPU decoding.
The top Prescotts (3.6 and 3.8 ) should handle Youtube 720P.

This is using Flash, HTML5 seems to perform worse so far. If the board has a PCI-E X16 slot then like other members suggested get a low power card like the AMD HD 5450, they usally sell for ~$5.

well honestly even a non HT P4 if paired with a modern gpu can play back 720p content, as the video card will do the work.

candle_86 wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

All HT capable Pentium 4 should be able to run Youtube 480p with only CPU decoding.
The top Prescotts (3.6 and 3.8 ) should handle Youtube 720P.

This is using Flash, HTML5 seems to perform worse so far. If the board has a PCI-E X16 slot then like other members suggested get a low power card like the AMD HD 5450, they usally sell for ~$5.

well honestly even a non HT P4 if paired with a modern gpu can play back 720p content, as the video card will do the work.

That is why I stated "with only CPU decoding." 😀
Not all boards have a PCI-E X16 slot and decoding capable AGP and PCI cards are not free.

Are there any AGP cards capable of decoding youtube content?!