Having worked with lots of gear, and as harsh as it sounds, stick to Intel processors, Intel chispets and Nvidia graphics cards. Life is really easier 😀

Late Socket 478 AGP boards are very good for games such as Splinter Cell. But once you go with newer games the demands sky rocket. Pandora Tomorrow struggles on the FX5950 Ultra and only a GeForce 7 runs it smoothly at 1600 x 1200.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Having worked with lots of gear, and as harsh as it sounds, stick to Intel processors, Intel chispets and Nvidia graphics cards. Life is really easier 😀

Late Socket 478 AGP boards are very good for games such as Splinter Cell. But once you go with newer games the demands sky rocket. Pandora Tomorrow struggles on the FX5950 Ultra and only a GeForce 7 runs it smoothly at 1600 x 1200.

My experience with chipsets other than Intel isnt that bad when it comes to stuff later than VIA KT266/KT333.

KT400/600 and Nforce2 are pretty decent for Socket-A but does usually not support ISA or universal AGP.
VIA K8T800 Pro, Nforce3 250 and Nforce4 are solid K8 platforms and so on.

My experience of the earlier VIA socket A offerings such as VIA KT333 is just plain bad but its the only platform with both enough speed to feed late AGP cards and 3.3V support for early AGP cards.
If I want to be able to test "ALL" AGP cards in the same system I do not see many other choices. Well there is i815 but a P3 1400-S is not as fast as my 2GHz Athlon XP 2400+.

For some reason I feel more like building a total overkill Pentium-D rig to see what type of performance I can get with a Netburst CPU and some semi modern GPU.
Will it handle Crysis?

Not well. P4 stuff belongs in the trash IMO

Having worked with lots of gear, and as harsh as it sounds, stick to Intel processors, Intel chispets and Nvidia graphics cards. Life is really easier 😀

Agreed about Intel. Now more than ever AMD processors are slipping further and further behind Intel.
The are back to cranking up the clocks to try to make up for it which of course makes the heat output skyrocket.

That said, I will never buy a recent NV GPU for various reasons.

smeezekitty wrote:

For some reason I feel more like building a total overkill Pentium-D rig to see what type of performance I can get with a Netburst CPU and some semi modern GPU.
Will it handle Crysis?

Not well. P4 stuff belongs in the trash IMO

Hmmm, belongs in the trash and wont handle Crysis well?
This sounds a bit like a challenge and I need an excuse to try out my "new" Geforce GTX 285.

I am sensing a super clocked Pentium D build in Skyscraper's future 😁 :insert challenge accepted Gif:

Received an ATi Radeon X1550 today, installed it into my Sony Vaio home theater PC with a Pentium 4 HT 650 and 768MB DDR running Windows 10 Technical Preview 😀 very snappy system for being so old.

AlphaDangerDen wrote:

Received an ATi Radeon X1550 today, installed it into my Sony Vaio home theater PC with a Pentium 4 HT 650 and 768MB DDR running Windows 10 Technical Preview 😀 very snappy system for being so old.

Umm how?

Doesn't W10 need SSE2? And PAE?

Windows 8 does.

Also, W10 Tech preview was sluggish on my Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 2.86GHz, 4 GB of RAM
and a Radeon 6670 DX11 card so color me skeptical

smeezekitty wrote:

Umm how? […]
Show full quote

AlphaDangerDen wrote:

Received an ATi Radeon X1550 today, installed it into my Sony Vaio home theater PC with a Pentium 4 HT 650 and 768MB DDR running Windows 10 Technical Preview 😀 very snappy system for being so old.

Umm how?

Doesn't W10 need SSE2? And PAE?

Windows 8 does.

Also, W10 Tech preview was sluggish on my Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 2.86GHz, 4 GB of RAM
and a Radeon 6670 DX11 card so color me skeptical

I know Windows 8 does, but I have no idea if Windows 10 Preview or the release version does. Granted I was running it at a fairly low resolution, maybe 1024x768, because I was using a CRT monitor. I'll upload pictures later, might start a thread just on this subject.

Don't P4 processors support both PAE and SSE2? If so Win8/10 should work fine.
I know Win8 runs fine on my Athlon64... Windows 8.1 and 10 do not boot, though

alexanrs wrote:

Don't P4 processors support both PAE and SSE2? If so Win8/10 should work fine.
I know Win8 runs fine on my Athlon64... Windows 8.1 and 10 do not boot, though

I looked it up and it turns out it is a newer P4 with 64 bit.

The original P4 is 32 bit and has no PAE and won't run 8/10

Put an extra 16mb of EDO Dimm ram into my K6-233Mhz machine that already has 32mb of EDO Simm. It has made games like MIdtown Madness and Quake II noticably smoother now that they aren't using pagefile so heavily. Midtown Madness must have been running at a frame every other second before. I guess the System Requirements on the box meant the low end.. 🤣 🤣

Scored a large lot off boards off eBay on a $0.99 bid 🤣, two socket 4 boards (one is very picky about ram) a dual socket Tyan Tomcat socket 7 woot woot, a strange Pcchips socket 423 board with VIA chipset that might be 3.3v compatible, a few other goodies.

Blurredman wrote:

I guess the System Requirements on the box meant the low end.. 🤣 🤣

They almost always do.

Today I received the game port card and played Lotus III with my son and wife. Works great in my 286. 🤣

I was going through one of my junk piles and found an ESS Maestro-2 PCI sound card. Dunno if it works, might pull out my K6-2 to test it and an S3 Sonic Vibes sound card I've had laying around for a while.

Iam stuck for the moment, waiting on parts to receive..

Tried this P3B-F I found yesterday. Guess what? It worked great!

... for five minutes, that is. It locked up suddenly while changing some BIOS settings, and after that I couldn't get it to boot again. POST card didn't show anything at all, no signals on any bus. All chips except the northbridge and clock generator stayed ice cold. Yep, it's completely dead.

Two hours later I desperately hit the power switch again. All of a sudden it boots like nothing ever happened. What?!

Seriously, what is it with these boards? I got three of these now and they all seem completely unreliable.

jwt27 wrote:

Tried this P3B-F I found yesterday. Guess what? It worked great! […]
Show full quote

Tried this P3B-F I found yesterday. Guess what? It worked great!

... for five minutes, that is. It locked up suddenly while changing some BIOS settings, and after that I couldn't get it to boot again. POST card didn't show anything at all, no signals on any bus. All chips except the northbridge and clock generator stayed ice cold. Yep, it's completely dead.

Two hours later I desperately hit the power switch again. All of a sudden it boots like nothing ever happened. What?!

Seriously, what is it with these boards? I got three of these now and they all seem completely unreliable.

Maybe a capacitor problem? These things will dry out over a couple of years.. For to be sure, i should replace those..

Robin4 wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

Tried this P3B-F I found yesterday. Guess what? It worked great! […]
Show full quote

Tried this P3B-F I found yesterday. Guess what? It worked great!

... for five minutes, that is. It locked up suddenly while changing some BIOS settings, and after that I couldn't get it to boot again. POST card didn't show anything at all, no signals on any bus. All chips except the northbridge and clock generator stayed ice cold. Yep, it's completely dead.

Two hours later I desperately hit the power switch again. All of a sudden it boots like nothing ever happened. What?!

Seriously, what is it with these boards? I got three of these now and they all seem completely unreliable.

Maybe a capacitor problem? These things will dry out over a couple of years.. For to be sure, i should replace those..

I planned this already and have a bag full of polymer caps waiting to be soldered in. But I want to install them in a board that's at least somewhat stable or else it would be wasted effort.

Im building a nice AM2 system to pit against my overclocked Pentium D system.

For once a motherboard bought as "untested" worked (so far at least) without issues.
The Athlon X2 6000+ I bought a couple of years ago but never used also seem to work fine.

I noticed that the CPU had 3 charred VCC pins but the thing that finally gave way must have been on the other end 😀

Installed Windows 95B onto my 486 system (SX-33mhz),
16mb ram, 405mb hdd, trident 8900b graphics, 3com 3c509 etc
using the vl-bus I/O card, it has primary and secondary IDE channels which is pretty handy, because the sound card does not have it's own.
I tried to get my 2mb vl-bus graphics card (I don't even know what it is), to work but it refused unfortunately. 😠

God it's soooo slow 🤣 🤣