st31276a wrote on 2026-03-13, 09:11:

Twisted Six wrote on 2026-03-12, 21:25:

In 2006 I was running a Supermicro X5DAL w/ 2x Xeon 3.06/533 CPU's w/2GB ram and a Radeon X1600 Pro AGP. Rocked back in the day.

In 2006 I started using a SE7525RP2 with 2x Xeon 3.0/800/2MB CPU's with 2GB DDR2-400 and a Geforce 6200 TC PCIe. Still rocks today.

👍

I've got a hobby build of a supermicro x6da8-g2; big eATX. The unofficial trickery with those is they'll run Paxville dual core skt604 processor (launched in 2005); a quad core system in those days was a big deal! It's running 16gb ram and a GT9800 PCIe GPU. The GPU is a couple years ahead (2008 iirc) but it plays nice with this hardware.

It will run Win7 with glee but later than that it doesn't do well with....10 won't get past the pre-checking, I never found a way around it.... It runs Linux Mint nicely....but with its lacking of instruction sets, modern stuff doesn't do too well on them. Regardless of the OS, that beast will keep a room warm in the winter!! Typical netburst era space heater!!

given the OP, i don't think the obviously-not$100 bitchin' CPU systems matter. S754 semprons were getting deep discounts later in '05 and would be perfect for 06Jank.

Early 2006 would have been a good time to pick up a used Socket A system for a reasonable price.

Twisted Six wrote on 2026-03-13, 15:43:

I've got a hobby build of a supermicro x6da8-g2; big eATX. The unofficial trickery with those is they'll run Paxville dual core skt604 processor (launched in 2005); a quad core system in those days was a big deal! It's running 16gb ram and a GT9800 PCIe GPU. The GPU is a couple years ahead (2008 iirc) but it plays nice with this hardware.

That x6da8-g2 looks like a seriously nice board.

Officially the SE7525RP2 does not support Paxville, I do not know of any trickery to make them work but it would have been nice back in the day. But even dual core with HT (showing 4 "CPU's" in task damager) was something that made you look twice.

Funny thing is, Vista ran faster on this machine than XP did. It was quite impressive.