ECS had K7SEM kit with built-in Duron 850. Other than that, is it possible you ran your Duron 1200 at 800 MHz because the motherboard defaulted to 66 MHz FSB?

The K7SEM with soldered processor is the same board as the PCChips M810CLR (PCChips belongs/belonged to ECS, and released some of their boards under both brands).
I found this googling some more. Apparently, PCChips/ECS decided it would be good to "rebrand" the processors with their own PR system by putting a sticker on the CPU fan and calling it a day. I was not crazy, apparently, I had a 850MHz Duron rebranded as a "Duron 1200".
Not gonna buy one with a soldered processor, though. Worst case scenario I'll buy the later M810 revisions with a socket (they must be better than the earlier ones... I guess?) and a Duron 850 (and maybe a real 1200 too, just to see what I was missing). Weird that such a cheap (and dare I say reliable) chipset wasn't more widely used. I'd still rather have a motherboard from a good brand rather than a PCChips/ECS board.

alexanrs wrote:

[*]Processor: I'm VERY confused by one detail. I KNOW, for a fact, that the processor was refered as "Duron 1200" when I bought it, but I also remember it running at 800-ish MHz. After some reading I did not really find evidence that Durons ever used a PR rating system, so I thought I did have a 1200MHz Duron... But recently I came across some random post in a forum that claimed that a 850MHz Duron was referred as Duron 1200. So... what did I have?!

I think you're right, no PR for Durons.
Which means there are two possibilities:
1) The CPU you bought was falsely labeled as a Duron 1200, and is actually a Duron 850.
2) The CPU is indeed a real Duron 1200, but for some reason the system is not configured correctly (probably the multiplier), and it runs at 850 MHz.

The actual model should be printed on the CPU, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Dur … n_D600AUT1B.jpg
So you could check if it says D850 or D1200, then you know for sure what you have.

What the BIOS or CPUID utilities report is not reliable on AMD CPUs. The identification string can be overwritten by software, and most BIOSes will write it on bootup (which is funny, because some BIOSes use all-caps 'ATHLON' or 'DURON', where others use 'Athlon' or 'Duron' instead, for the exact same CPU. I actually wrote some code that wrote "AMD Pentium 4(tm)" into it, for teh lulz).

Scali wrote:

1) The CPU you bought was falsely labeled as a Duron 1200, and is actually a Duron 850.

PCChips strikes once more!

Scali wrote:

The actual model should be printed on the CPU, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Dur … n_D600AUT1B.jpg
So you could check if it says D850 or D1200, then you know for sure what you have.

What I -had- and am trying to recreate, actually. Sadly my father sold that PC when I got my Athlon 64 as a way to amortize the costs of the newer PC. And that thing has 0 possibility of still being alive today: it was already crapping out when he sold it years ago (PSU randomly turning off, processor overheating, hand-me-down MX 440 on the verge of death with artifacts, etc.). It was probably scrapped long ago - wich is sad as I'd like to have at least the case back (I hated it, but now I miss it thanks to nostalgia).

Perhaps build a socket A machine with another chipset on a good quality board and then use a SiS 6326 or 315 graphics card? Might give you the same feel but a little more reliability? I have a ASUS ViA KM400 board with a semperon 2.8 & SiS 315E AGP card, it's how I found it and I'm loathe to change it after all these years and it works very well. SiS video is very under rated in my opinion, they are pretty decent considering the price at the time. Some of the P4 SiS chipset are pretty desirable today as well, they are the only ones I know of that support 3.3v AGP and Voodoo for a start.

BSA Starfire wrote:

Perhaps build a socket A machine with another chipset on a good quality board and then use a SiS 6326 or 315 graphics card? Might give you the same feel but a little more reliability? I have a ASUS ViA KM400 board with a semperon 2.8 & SiS 315E AGP card, it's how I found it and I'm loathe to change it after all these years and it works very well. SiS video is very under rated in my opinion, they are pretty decent considering the price at the time. Some of the P4 SiS chipset are pretty desirable today as well, they are the only ones I know of that support 3.3v AGP and Voodoo for a start.

Nostalgia is dumb xD Honestly, a low-end K7 Duron isn't really that useful for me, as just about anything I could do on such a system could be done on my Athlon 64 3000+- that motherboard even has Windows 98 drivers if I ever want to downgrade it from XP - or my older systems. I just want my old system back.

Looking back, this was my favourite system EVER. With no other PC ever in my life I felt such a difference after an upgrade, as the previous PC was a cheap Cyrix MII-333, and also upgrading from it was the least impressive upgrade ever when it got replaced by the aforementioned Athlon 64 3000+... the proc was a lot faster, but the dreadful 64-bit FX 5200 it came with held it back and made the machine perform no better than the Duron+MX440 AGP8x in some games back then.

BSA Starfire wrote:

Perhaps build a socket A machine with another chipset on a good quality board and then use a SiS 6326 or 315 graphics card?

No, the 6326 would be very underwhelming, 730S integrates 305. Even 315 performs far slower than MX440.