I had a slot A Athlon 700. First PC I built myself with a NVIDIA Riva TNT2, 768MB of RAM, some VIA motherboard, and Windows 2000. Woo. Gotta love the golden fingers for overclocking.
This era was just before I could actually afford to buy new hardware. Around the release of this beast I was still rocking a 486DX2 I built in at the tail end of '97 for 100 bucks! I mostly used that till 2000 when I got myself a K6/2!
In 1999, I was a bit "behind" everyone else - so I was using a P3-500 , Compaq Presario 59XX, with an ATI Rage Pro combined with an Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 (yes, it was beginning to show it's age then - but the Rage Pro did ok in the games where glide was not an option). I had 512MB RAM, 13GB + 20GB, I changed the audiocard from some unknown to the SB AWE64 (because I needed better Midi). It was a quite capable machine though - especially the 19" screen that followed was absolute awesome. I actually miss that screen - it was heavy as f*ck - but damn it was nice to play on compared to my friends 17" screens.
that 500 was probably, almost certainly, a katmai core (coppermine started at 533 aside engineering samples) so you would have had a solid stable system no matter what windows you wanted to run. even ME would have given you no trouble. (and if you were lucky enough to have a katmai based xeon.... pure gold for windows ME)
Місяць тому
😮yeah those CRT, horrendous weight, but awesome screens nonetheless
I had a socket Celeron II 650 (100Mhz FSB) which I overclocked all the way up to ~130Mhz FSB which gave me an overall boost to ~850Mhz. Worked flawlessly. I used a copper cylindrical cooler. Cool, quiet, and a lot faster than I paid for. If I went much higher it did get unstable. Back in those days I used Win98 with Litestep and a cool desktop, but eventually upgraded to Win2k. Eventually I experimented with water cooling it, not that it needed it, and it performed well. I used a copper block bought online and a fish tank reservoir. My friend suggested a part anti-freeze part water mixture. The copper block with aluminum connectors and the aluminum radiator eventually galvanized or something. The connectors on the copper block sheared right off. After drying the motherboard off in the tub it worked again and I used it for years. That thing was a great value!
Nice vid Phil! Here's a bit of my hardware history around 2000. In december 1999 I was still on my first build (Pentium II 300, Asus P2L97, ATI Expert@Play AGP, Seagate 6.4GB), only thing that changed were the RAM because of stability issues (I had 64MB PC66 originally, a double height stick with 32 chips, exchanged it for a 128MB PC100 stick). In late 1999 I sold my Creative DVD ROM kit to finance a new graphic card, I wanted the ATI Rage Fury MAXX but fortunately I ended up with the Creative 3DBlaster Annahilator Pro (GeForce DDR) instead. My new graphic card caused some issues with my motherboard as it couldn't provide enough power so I exchanged it for an Asus P3B-F. Some days later the PSU died so I got a new one as well. Middle of June 2000 I upgraded the CPU with a Celeron 566 that I ran at 708MHz on air cooling and later 850MHz on water cooling. In October 2001 I went AMD (Athlon MP 1,2GHz, Epox 8KHA+) with a new rig, only my hard drives and graphic card came from my old one. I kept my old rig too, and actually upgraded the CPU once more to a Celeron 1.1GHz "Tualatin" that I ran at 1540MHz (4.5 times faster than my original Pentium II).
Just to make a different comment, I had absolutely no money at the time and I struggled with my K-6 2 until I had money to upgrade to an Athlon! loving the videos!
Excellent review! This is from an exciting period in computing. Its interesting to see the 600EB keep up with the 700E. The 133MHz FSB is equivalent to adding 100MHz to the core clock of the P3 with 100MHz FSB. I build my gaming PC around the P3 800 with 133 FSB back in the day with a Geforce2 GTS. Was a killer gaming PC for almost 2 years, which is an eternity back then. The system was based around an Abit BF6 (440BX board), and was eventually upgraded to a Tualatin 1.4, and continued to serve as a secondary system until 2007 when it was stolen. I recently re-built a similar configuration based around the 815 chipset for some retro gaming.
Yea, you can add 100 MHz for the EB models. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues. I've got a few more S370 CPUs I bought on eBay, but they haven't arrived yet. What else in your i815 machine?
PhilsComputerLab it's a Tualatin P3 1.4, 256mb of pc133 ram, Asus TUSL2 mobo, and the graphics card rotates between a voodoo 5 5500 and GeForce 3. I run mostly windows 98 games, and a few late dos Era games. I have an original pentium system on a super socket 7 for older games.
Hello! I'm following you for a couple of months, I love your videos. I feel a great nostalgia when seeing the computers that you are putting together and doing tests. I have some parts to put together two old computers, I will try to make a video similar to yours but I am not up to it. I do not have many components, just the ones I kept. A big greeting from Argentina
I had (and still have) a P3 800 (and later P3 1000) mounted with a socket 370 adapter card on an Abit BE6-II. With 256MB of RAM and a Matrox G400Max, this system did well for years.
My experience with an EB processor from Intel came when a lightning strike took out my Pentium III 700MHz Slot 1 system. I upgraded to a Pentium III 800MHz EB CPU using an Intel 815 chipset which officially supported the 133MHz FSB speeds, and was just as reliable as my previous 440BX chipset platform except that it maxed out at 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB. Around the same time memory prices started falling so packing the system with all 512MB was relatively cheap.
Can't say for 1999-2000, but by the time 2006-2009 was a thing, PIII boxes were EVERYWHERE. people couldn't get rid of them fast enough there was always a diamond in the rough PIII box out at the curbside during bulk waste day and I was well aware of dates for these days and would go out one or even two days before and yank up the nicest systems I could get my hands on at the curb with my bike, which I fitted out with clamp baskets and bungie cords. For a time, I had a 9800 Pro, a USB2 card, an Audigy 2 ZS and both a 36GB SCSI boot disk on internal SCSI and an 80GB IDE drive (black-top WD I think) in a Dell Precision Workstation 420 with dual PIII 933 Slot 1 CPUs and a gig of PC800 RDRAM. it was probably the fastest box I had of the era and it really sucked because it only had an AGP Pro 4X slot. I can remember trying to run Vista on the thing and it was just a dog. XP ran great however, and SP3 at that (why SP1 for the videos?). I still have the machine but it's a shell of its former self. the 2GB of RDRAM I slapped into it don't work for it as it's the wrong latency, and is instead intended for a Dell OptiPlex GX400 in my posession with an S423 P4 1.8 in it and also in need of some TLC (and upgrades, a-la PCI 9400GT, probably.) the main machine I was using in 2009 for browsing the internet and playing older games (UT99, GTASA, Quake, Quake 3 Arena, and some other titles) was an OptiPlex GX110 based on the 810 chipset. PIII 1GHz/256/133, 512MB PC133, 120GB + 80GB + 10GB scratch HDDs, PNY FX5200 256MB, Audigy 2 ZS Gold, two USB2 cards, Intel Pro1k GigE card, and a nice chunky 120mm fan over top of the cards ziptied down to keep everything cool. 16x DL DVD burner as well. Ran a pirated copy of XP which came with the machine for a time that I cleaned up, and then from there I moved the machine to Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs in 2010 as I was noticing slight hiccups doing certain tasks, and any increase in speed could have essentially been placebo, but I know for a fact FLP runs extremely well on older Pentium II 233 to Katmai 550 based machines, so long as you give them enough RAM to play with. that might be an interesting test to play with in the future... both trying out POSready 2009 and FLP on these older systems in conjunction to a normal XP SP3 install. (note that FLP shares a service pack with Windows Embedded Point of Sale and will need this to go to SP3.) Out on the internets is a bencher for UT99 that runs a specific benchmark but I have no idea where to tell you to find it. this might be something to add to the benchmarks in the future.
I often use UTBench to test performance. Searching this in Google gives a few places to download the demo. To use it, copy the .dem file to the UnrealTournament\System directory. At the console type: timedemo 1 demoplay utbench.dem After the benchmark runs, look in the console and you will see minimum, maximum and average FPS for the demo.
Yeah, I noticed XP SP3 on 128 MB is struggling just keeping itself running. Had the opportunity recently to setup an old laptop (P3 750, 128 MB, Rage 128 Pro) and with nothing installed except the OS and drivers I had whopping 20 MB free memory.
=Sudos. I used to work for the an Embassy/residence in 2002/3 in Mayfair. Mondays was Big Rubbish day which meant the residents in Mayfair used to leave out their unwanted fridges/furniture including all their older PCs the night before (Sundays) So if I was working night shift I would walk around the area collecting all the dumped PCs. Because they were extremely rich there was some amazingly high spec "crap" which on occasion was only a year old. As I was a chauffeur -(which meant I did very little as it was usually empty, just the Phillipino staff and me alone in this big building )- I stashed all my finds in their garage driving up the next day- (I normally used the Tube)- to collect my treasure trove to take home.There was some beautiful all in ones but I was very selective as I only wanted gaming capable tech, so I usually passed over a lot of good stuff. I didn't need it. However one week for my mates I decided to collect ANY good nick PCs so by early Monday morning I had about ten huge PCs all stashed in their garage.ready to collect the next night. Well that week my luck ran out big time. I was woken that afternoon ( I slept in the day at home, obviously)by a call from a frantic head of the staff, a very nice Phillipino guy ( for whom I collected cameras which I also found on my trawls)telling me the Royals had turned up unannounced ( which they did maybe twice a year) and were very upset that they couldn't get their big S-class Mercs in the garage because it was full of computers. So I got sacked (quite right, I deserved it) but also lost all those PCs as well! I then went to work for Tesco Dotcom delivering food and just like you I was picking up any PC junk lying around and confirm what you said about there being a LOT of it. This is before we started recycling our rubbish but your post took me right back to those days. P 3 and P 2 stuff was everywhere but if it didn't have a AGP slot it stayed where it lay. When Greenwich council were updating their PCs there were huge skips FULL of perfectly good hardware, mainly Cyrix stuff which I didnt realise had a high gold content. Suffice to say I didn't pick any of it, but of course I kick myself now for all that gold I passed up. I apologise if I went on a bit but then it was so much easier to get your hands on unwanted tech. Now you cant even get it at your local tip because of Political Correctness gone mad. This is to show the younger guys here what it was like back in the day. I remember I hardly ever came across RAMBUS and usually it only came in pre built systems. I do remember they had these blank sticks they needed pairing up with, which shows how crazy expensive it was.
Man what a great story! I can't believe they just chucked their computers. What I take away from this story is that whenever you have a good thing going, don't get greedy, as that's when it falls apart. Thanks for sharing!
A few years ago, I had a Fujitsu Siemens Scenic PC, it had s370 P3 1000 EB, intel i815 chipset AND one ISA slot. A Sound Blaster AWE 32 was installed on that slot :) It was their proprietary board, it would have been interesting to find if it had some kind of a bridge chip for ISA or not.
I had a celery 400, I think it was lightly overclocked to around 600. The mobo was a via chipset, and it wasn't long after 2000 that I upgraded the graphics card to a Hercules 3D Prophet 2 GTS 64MB. Not sure about the exact timeline, but I was running a Panasonic SCSI slot loading CD burner, which was awesome. It never suffered from buffer underruns since it was entirely separate from the IDE controller, and burning from one drive to another was also perfect since SCSI drives transfer data directly from one to the other, without having to go through the host system, as it would with IDE. I later upgraded it to a DVD burner (also Panasonic, and slot loading). But I digress. When I bought the GF2 card, my friends told me I was crazy for spending so much on a graphics card, but not upgrading the celery CPU. They shut up after seeing the performance I was getting at a LAN party!
To share a sort of story , I actually bought a system with Pentium 4 and with 512 MB of RDRAM when I was 15, and that is when I learned the hard way that I needed a dummy ram stick in the other slots where I don't use ram sticks. but later I did upgrade it to 1GB ram and that worked fine. and I actually still have those RDRAM stick in a anti static bag :P
They are actually still worth something. People didnt bought them back then and now they are quite rare. Would be interesting to build a nice Northwood/RDRAM system as a retro machine.
Yeah, the P4 with kinda flew with RDRAM but then the Dual channel DDR systems weren't that far behind either. RDRAM on the PIII was unnecessary though until maybe around Tualatin but it was better to go with SDRAM or DDR
i just realize something this day 4 days later i made this first commant, i wasn't 15 when i bough the RDRAM P4 system, at that year of 15 i bough my AMD k6-2 550 mhz system. this was around year 2000 :-P
I still have my Abit BX6 2.0 board. It was a simple matter of raising the FSB to 133 to get a Celeron 300A to run at 450Mhz. Good times. This was actually my last Intel build for almost a decade.
At the time, I had a Via-C3 667 sold as: "1GHz PR" - "Samuel 2" core and later, as the computer was shared with my brother, he would get the VIA and I've had a P3-500 Slot-1. We never had a Rambus system, but in Eastern Europe the P3 Cooperine or P4 were overly pricey. Around 2 years later, my aunt bought an Athlon 1800+, so what can I say: - P4 was a linked with Rambus making everything overly expensive. I knew only two people in entire IT university that had them initially, from some dozens of colleagues. AMD was the king, some people would argue that Coppermine's Celeron is a good deal, but none was pro-P4 or P3. - Via-C3 667 was running neck on neck with a P3-500 which was second hand - I remember that at the time, the single way to counter a slower CPU was only to buy a lot of memory, and we were using XP flawlessly - Via-C3 was kind of "SOC" with everything soldered, you could not change the video card, but it would have 2 slots of memory, so we upgraded it till 256MB of memory and we would run Linux and XP. - Linux was amazingly compatible to Via platform at the time, and P3 was not
The Pentium III 500E was a 'special' release from Intel around 1999. It was rumoured to run on a 133mhz bus and was very cheap ( about $250). I rushed out and bought it and had this cpu in a slocket running at 667mhz on my AX6BC Pro. Coupled with 512mb of insanely fast Transcend ram. It ran for many years until I gave it to a relative. It never faltered ever. Thanks for the great memories.
In august 2000 I had bought and assembled my first PC. It had Chaintech 6BTM (i440bx) motherboard (widely recommended in our russian FIDO segment as one of the most stable MBs at the time), Pentium III-500 (Katmai, Slot 1), 2x32 MB PC-100 RAM, 8 GB Seagate HDD, simple AGP Trident video card, ASUS S400 CD-ROM drive and a noname case. I brought all the hardware home, assembled the parts together, connected the case to the monitor, turned everything on... and nothing happened. Only fans in the case started, but no sound from PC speaker, monitor didn't awake. I was very frustrated. I checked the connections many times - everything seemed to be connected properly. After few hours it turned out the IDE cable was connected to the motherboard the wrong side (there was no key on the cable connector). The MB wasn't able to start or to indicate the error. The computer worked fine till 2006 (but I needed to replace capacitors on the MB to get it back to life) and then I played with it for some time as an OpenBSD server. It was pretty stable.
In the day I used to run an Asus P2B-D dual slot 1 motherboard that got started with 2 Pentium II 400MHz, and was upgraded later to 2 Pentuim III Coppermine 850MHz It was running Windows XP Pro, upgraded later to Windows XP Pro x64 dual booting to Linux. It was a beast..
These were the "good ole days" upgrading either my videocard or cpu every fucking 6- 9 months, around here i had a 500 mhz coppermine p3 with voodoo 2s in sli and like 128 mb ram and a 30 gig hdd. Next comp was a 1ghz Athlon with 256 mb ram and a voodoo 3, a tiny bit later a athlon 1.4 thunderbird with 4 40 gig hdd in raid 0 and a geforce 256. And a tiny bit later.......
I had (still have) a PIII500e. It run fine at 667mhz, and even worked for the odd benchmark at 750mhz with a TEC module. The issue i had with my BX board (SOYO SY-6BA) though was the PCI bus speed didn't have dividers for anything above 100mhz FSB, so your PCI speed would run way over spec
I remember my mom having a p3 600eb slot 1 on a intel 820 with the defective intel mth (memory translator hub) as this motherboard uses sdram but the i820 works with rdram. we didn't ended up having issues with this computer, random crashes or anything. I was using it over my aging own p233mmx/v2-sli. it did work great, and remember playing black & white on it quite a lot.
Nice video !!!. Back in 2000 to 2001 we have pretty an offimatic machine. It was a budget clone, but got the job done and got tired of people telling how miserable this PC was (PC Chips 850) but hey ... It worked fine for us and still powers up nice. It used AMD K6II 500 Mhz, It was a really good value. At this time, 500 to 600 Mhz, PIII or Celerons were the most common systems you could find in drugstores that have many of them networked just for gamming. But the K6 was not enough for certain things .... like the ones required by the university. Poorly made scripts with errors (well, I was learning) take tons of time on Matlab and tired of waitting 2 hours each time to get more errors I grab my CD and went to one of this drugstores. One in particular imported SPECTACULAR HW for its era, 850 and 900Mhz machines with 256MB RAM and powerfull graphics cards. The machines were by far the most powerfull around starting with the case itself. So rare and fast that people keep asking the owners where did they got this HW. I paid for a gamming PC (you could pick a "only internet" and a "gamming" PC) get the permission to install Matlab on it and it was insane fast. I finished my work in two hours. How weird this was, I was in the middle of people shoutting and shutting themselves in the game, one of them even broke the keyboard. Sure it was weird for the other buddys there, using a proper gamming system for nothing but a white command promt LOL. My "gamming" setup was a P1 100Mhz enough for VICE and CCS and minimal for MAME depending on the ROMS.
I'd love to see you do something with the Intel L440GX motherboard, the one that can do dual pentium 3 slot 1s. Warning for you if you do though, it's limited to 100MHz FSB and will actually refuse to boot with any 133MHz FSB cpus. It's got a great SCSI chip onboard and a great chipset in general though, and the board is comically huge. I feel like dual Celeron 1100MHz with a really good AGP video card would be an impressive machine for that board, in fact I'd love to try it, the only issue is slotkets seem rare on American eBay atm.
I am still amazed how good the pentium 3 is that it was good enough for day to day computing as well even youtube till around 2009 or so. Still a little pissed after all these years about Intel gimping the 815 chipset (ram limit). Should have done 1gb out of the box or even 2GB like the i840 chipset.
Bit it makes a decent platform for a fast Win 98 machine. More than 512 MB isn't supported by the OS anyway and with something like a SB Live or Audigy the lack of ISA isn't really an issue. And still faster than VIA on S370.
I was using a P2-266 back in '99. I didn't get into PIII until 2003, when I replaced my terribad 1.8GHz P4 with a PIII-S, clocked it up to 1575 on a Apollo Pro266T DDR motherboard, and slotted in a shiny new Radeon 9800 Pro. That thing was just so awesome. I spent hours and hours playing Painkiller, Splinter Cell 1 & 2, Vice City, Far Cry, Doom 3, Thief 3, and many other games on that machine. In fact, I enjoyed that rig so much that I recently spent way too much money recreating it. Got myself the same QDI Advance 12T motherboard that my original machine had. I'm even replaying all of those old games!
Nice thing about the 266T is that it lets you take cheap CL3 DDR400 memory and run it at 300MHz (to match the 150MHz FSB) with very good 2-2-2-5 memory timings. There's also a dedicated 266MB/s bus between the Northbridge and Southbridge. It doesn't use the PCI bus to link the two like the older Apollo 133 did.
You really know your stuff! I only recently read up how they the North- and Southbridge were connected with the PCI bus and how the i810 chipset changed all that. It's so interesting to experience all this stuff :D
Another great video Phil! I had one of those Aureal Vortex 2 sound cards, ah the memories. I think it was a VideoLogic branded board? Good sound but MIDI over the joystick/MIDI port was erratic and I had to use an AWE64 at the time to get vaguely stable / lower latency MIDI in Cubase.
I think that socket 370 is the most intresting retro platform since it is quite modern and still has support for ISA cards. Same thing with late (2007-2008) socket 775 systems with their support for floppy drives and IDE hard drives. I had a socket 370 system myself, but unfortunately I had a 700 MHz Celeron and a dirt cheap motherboard. I'm not sure how much i missed because of this. If I decide to build a retro PC, it will definitely be from this time period.
I havn't tried it myself, but I'm quite fond of Taulatin CPU:s and Intel 815 chipsets. However, I'm not sure if the chipset supports ISA. I have an aptitude for the high end stuff in each generation. I have a computer with ASUS P5E3, Q9550 and Icy Dock trayless bays that I use for small scale kernel development and other testing, and I really like the onboard support for floppy, IDE hard drives and classic PCI slots.
I missed the Pentium 3 era but built a 1 Ghz AMD Athlon system instead in January 2001.Many years later I think in 2005 I acquired two Pentium 3 systems one system Slot 1 @650 Mhz and the other a Socket 370 system at 733Mhz.Just two months ago I acquired a 500 Mhz Slot 1 Pentium 3 system.These were monsters compared to my 1999 AMD K6-2 system @ 450 Mhz. When I bought my AMD K6-2 system I saw on television Intel advertisements about the new Pentium iii I felt that my new computer was obsolete right away though I didn't feel too bad as I was on a low end budget. It was a 3Dfx card the Voodoo 3 that was the savior as I could actually do some decent gaming.
I believe I was still using a 486DX 50 motherboard with an Evergreen processor running at 166Mhz, and 16Meg of RAM around that period. I got a true 166Mhz system which I used for about a year, then jumped straight to an AMD K7 Athelon, and then to a quad core Pentium 4. (or possibly 2 core, 4 thread, just prior to the Core architecture) I remember that period well, because I was heavily experimenting with OS at the time, having concluded that Linux was distinctly aiming at server use, and Windows wasn't fit to be let loose on the internet. So I used a lot of QNX, BeOS, SkyOS, Zeta etc. systems.
Ahhh, RDRAM. I was wondering when we'd get there. My college computer in 2001 was a P4 1.8ghz with 256MB RDRAM 800 non ECC. The mobo was a Monterey one and I had a powered by ATI Radoen 7000 with 64MB. It was an ok computer for a bit. Did some small upgrades like upping to 512MB of RAM later and putting in a Geforce 2 GTS Pro then an FX5200 so I could play Thief 3, then got a an FX 5900 Ultra later. Went to an Athlon 3200 up the road with a gig of RAM and finally got away from RDRAM. Was a fine day indeed heh
All I remember from this period is my duron, and how it beat the everloving crap out of anything intel offered when I overclocked it. That duron, 256mb RAM, and a TNT2 64 were all I could afford, but it still played that 3dmark 2001 matrix scene at a reasonable framerate. Good enough for me back then!
I was using the best board available. Asus p3v4x. You should really get one. Noone used rambus. That was the major part of intels p4 fuckup. The whole history of the p4 just just one huge fuckup. Anyway, get the asus board, it's got all the good slots.
Oh yea, just a shame I can't recall what overclock I got on it. :( I remember I did have all the slots filled up, (agp+6pci as the isa was shared), it was one packed computer. The only overclocks I can really remember that were great back in the days I got was a 200mmx @300 on an ax59pro, and a duron 600@1ghz on a modded a7v133.
That pencil mod was so good! tho I ended up using a more conductive connector. I think I held on to that CPU till I got an athlon xp 2500 that got clocked to the 3200 speeds out of the box!
I had a Compaq Presario with K6-2 533 MHz with 64 MB (later expanded to 128 MB), an OEM VIA Apollo MVP4-based motherboard and a Trident Blade 3D iGPU that fortunately had it's own chip on the motherboard. Performance was pretty decent with Windows 98 SE, but not so good with any Windows NT-based OS. Years later, I could replace it with a Pentium III 933 MHz, a GeForce 2 MX GPU, 192 MB of RAM and a ASUS CUV4X-E motherboard. The difference was huge in all aspects, even running Windows XP. I miss these times. Specially when I remember the launch of the Athlon 1 GHz and a little later, the Pentium III Coppermine with the same frequency.
Strange, I remember those VIA chipsets having been a big pain in the ass... I once had a K6-300 (don‘t remember the exact chipset, but it was VIA) and my sister an Athlon 1400 on a KT266, and I was only satisfied when switching back to intel chipsets.
By this time, I still had my P2 350MHz on a FIC VB-601 and I could not complain... Had a Hercules 3D Prophet MX with 32MB and i could run lots of crap on it :) I jumped from this system to a AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with a ASUS A7A266 (ALi Magik 1... Hey, I could re-use my old SDRAM and money was thight for DDR) ... Love your videos... Oh man, they bring me back.... Still have that A7A266 and CPU, but it wont boot... Best regards from Portugal
I built my first from-the-ground-up PC in 2000. I had a FIC AZ11 motherboard, AMD Athlon 1GHz CPU, 128MB RAM, and the notorious ATI Rage Fury Maxx graphics card (which I loved btw.) The system ran Win98SE at first, but later upgraded to XP and I had to ditch the Rage card for a vanilla GeForce4 MX440. The GeForce served my purposes and played all my games but in hindsight it's a lot less exciting than the earlier dual-chip graphics solution. Prior to this build I'd been running a drop-in AIO upgrade motherboard purchased from TigerDirect with a 233MHz Cyrix MediaGX CPU and integrated graphics and sound so this whole Athlon thing was a massive upgrade - and the Rage Fury Maxx was my first experience with a hardware-accelerated 3D card too!
I personally used the Athlon platform around this time starting with the slot A 600 in late 1999. At work we mostly built Intel systems for corporate customers, the 440BX and 815 chipsets were very stable. As for power hungry Athlon's the Thunderbird 1.4GHz was one of the most power hungry / Heat generating CPU's AMD released. Power consumption definitely improved with the release of Athlon XP series. In my time working in the industry I only ever built one Rambus system it was on a "confidential" sample Intel 820 motherboard. DDR exploits the double clock rate (dual edge clock triggering) with out the latency issues.
I'm pretty sure that the EB variants were more expensive than the E ones back then. I remember being able to get a pretty good deal on a P3 700E and then I slapped it in my BX board (Abit most likely, don't remember that well) with a slot adapter and set the jumper on the adapter for 133fsb mode and it ran at 933mhz without any problems. I think I could post at 1ghz, but it wasn't stable so I had to lower it down just bit from that. Still ran great though!
lots of systems: K62/400 oc to 450 MHz with a Diamond 2d card and a canopus voodoo2... after a while upgraded to a GeForce mx2, but kept the voodoo for glide games... This machine still runs, but i need to find time for a mayor rebuilt...
I love your channel, makes me almost a bit said that those times are long gone. Dont know why but even if tech was slower and not as advanced back then it was at least exiting and special. Anyway. Had the first slot 1 p3 550mhz "katamai "or something like that paired with an abit 440bx mobo, I think it was what you used and it was to me the most stable platform ever. Not even when I got my k7 750mhz a couple months later did the via mobos did change that. To be honest the biggest surprise was when later on I got a Asrock 939Dual-SATA2, to be honest it was a cheap plaything and all but damn was it good. Since then asrcok took over nr1 spot from Abit in my heart :P No but, nothing could compare to a old bx440 board especially a abit one with "softmenu" hehe. those where the times :)
PhilsComputerLab Probably the board I mentioned, it has also a proprietary connector over the pci-e for a cpu daughter board? www.asrock.com/mb/ULi/939Dual-SATA2/ If I remember correctly you need to make a hw-mod to be able to give the cpu more juice. fun and cheap board but it withstand everything I did to it.
straight out of vocational school, i build my first machine. A duron 800Mhz before that it was hand me downs and things pre P3. Been an AMD guy since 2001 :)
Hey Phil, really enjoy your channel and the content you produce. I stumbled here after searching for more information on a PC project I was doing, attempting to recreate a system from 1999. I've since subscribed just because I love learning about these old parts as well. I have a question for you that is completely irrelevant to all this though: What is the name of the song that you use for the benchmarks starting at 5:30? It's a really chill beat and I really liked it!
On a side note, there were also boards with bot socket 370 and slot 1(although couldn't be used in a dual cpu config), which are very cool, I'm not sure what chipset they use, although I do have one, need to have a look at it.
OEMs like HP even used both Slot1 and RAMBUS memory back in the day. I had an HP Vectra VL600 which had a Coppermine 600EB on Slot 1 with i820 chipset and RDRAM. It took the system forever to count all of its 512MB of RAM during POST, but it was rock solid otherwise.
I've got a 600eb slot1 version recently. Now I'm using it along with 440bx at 450 and 300 mhz. Very happy with it. Going to build voodoo-1 based retro pc. Have an idea to build a arduino-based fsb-selector (and agp-divider selector). Wonder if there are option to switch them without restart (somehom put a wait-states through pc/pci connector to motherboard and switch fsb during this period)
Like you, I took a break around that timeframe, hanging onto my Pentium III 450 for a good 4-5 years, upgrading to a used 550 at some point. Then I bought a "cookie cutter" Dell. I didn't build another until I went all out on the socket 775 Pentium EE release! I still have that monstrosity w/ quad-SLI and a case that had a built-in air conditioner!
Oh gosh, hard to remember around 2000 but I believe I was using XP, DDR RAM and an Athlon 800MHz overclocked to 900MHz with the pencil trick. Shortly after that, I had an Athlon 1400. I stuck to the ASUS A7V series like the A7V333. I never had Intel until my current i7 6700k but my dad gave me RAMBUS memory which I then sold on ebay for 3x times what he paid for it. RAMBUS was no longer being made then.
In the year 2000-2001? I was still using an AMD K6-2, dual booting Linux and Windows 98 due to the latter's instability. I didn't upgrade to an Athlon XP until 2003 or so when I finally upgraded to Windows XP, I believe.
ive had P3 600mhz one dont know what model, but i cud clock it to alil over 700, 133fsb, 128mb of ram (later upgraded to 256 or 512)and 20gb hdd, it was a prebuild from Fujitsu, and i installed a Voodoo 4(5?) 4500. man that thing was a beast, to me anyways.
I actually got the same AB-BX6 i440BX slot1 motherboard in a computer I still use and this computer is one of the most stable ones I had so far, I even got one PIII 600EB in my storage but for this rig I have stick to my PIII 550Mhz CPU because of the simply rock solid experience I had with it I don't feel like I want to change the story behind this custom built PC I had for so long now. In a way I still think the Slot1 CPUs was the best CPU ever made not just because they are big and look cool but also because they were so stable as well. I simply loved them from the first day I saw them
I hope you will make some tests comparing late Tualatin CPUs against early P4/Celeron ones. I upgraded from Pentium 3 800 to Celeron 1.7 Ghz and the difference was quite small. And overclocking of this Celeron was a joke - 300 Mhz more, still no real difference in speed. I would like to suggest more tests with overclocking - I heard that Pentium MMX could be overclocked well over 266 Mhz - insane! I had P166 MMX and it ran on 200 very well. Keep up the good job :)
Willamette Pentium 4 CPUs were a joke ... an expensive joke. The fastest Willamette was slower than the P-III Tualatin @ 1Ghz (the latter not being overclocked)
I was just a little child around the time of these systems, so I didn't have the comprehension for them and don't feel nostalgic to them, but I still love these systems regardless. I've got a Compaq Deskpro EP/SB series tower with a 450MHz Slot 1 Pentium III that I installed some ATi Radeon 9200 job into to play games on. I've got better systems for this purpose, but I like this one. Too bad I've never been able to get sound working in it. Either its original sound card is roasted well-done or the drivers I keep finding are bogus.
Hey Phil. Love your video's as always! Would be interesting for others to see perhaps if you can cover the speed difference between the 500 and 500e for example. There's quite a nice performance boost in some benchmarks due to the full speed cache even though it's halved in size. Also, I see you have a 500e and a 700e - Could you overclock them using 133 fsb and give people some idea of the possible free performance boost? I had a 500e back in the day, which was an upgrade from a k6-2 400. I managed 112fsb on this, which was the limitation of the QDI motherboard I had! Also, not sure if you have any of the Matrox G400 series cards, but these were interesting at that time, running great until you looked at some blood for example in Half-Life etc!
PhilsComputerLab I've got a bnib kt7a, and an nf7s! struggling to find a decent cooler over here (UK)! I can get the athlon 1.1 to nearly 1600 but it's very toasty!
Old used all copper coolers is the way to go I think. Especially for overclocking. For stock look out for the Arctic Copper Silent or something like that. I used it with the 3200+ without any issues.
I remember around that time I had a bunch of system failures, and also a complete hard drive failure for good measure. I can't quite remember what order I used things in though. I know I had a pentium 3 733 mhz system on an adapter card for a slot 1 board, but also a Duron 1 ghz system. For a really long time I had no 3d accelerator at all, before finally getting a Geforce 2 MX, which is my first 3d accelerator card, and actually my only nvidia card ever. (To be Specific it was a Gainward Geforce 2 MX golden sample.) It was a pretty good system... Until it died. In hindsight it was caused by a rampant bad capacitor issue that was going around in the early 2000's... I never used RAMbus with it - I could never justify any system high end enough to use it. Of course, as the owner of an n64 I did in fact have a system with RAMbus memory around... It's ironic considering just how eye-wateringly expensive that stuff was that by 2000 or so N64's were in the ~$100-200 range. Granted that's only 4 or 8 megabytes of RDRam, but still...
Celeron 300-A was my beast back in the day, could get 575mhz out of it, does not sound huge but thats over 75% overclock, would be like getting my 6700k now to 7.8ghz lol
I did not have my first useable PC until 2000 and that was a Dell Dimension 2200 except for being a solid machine it was a POS 1ghz Celeron 256mb ram 20gb PATA HDD and Win XP it didn't even have enough headroom to power a DVD-ROM my first real taste of PC gaming as I was stuck on warcraft and starcraft and red alert 2 as my Dell even fought to run games that old it was not until 2007 when I got my hands on an AMD Athlon XP based system with 512mb ram and a Geforce MX 220 I think which I did upgrade to a 440 and 768mb ram so I was really late to the game but still like watching videos and learning about what was out there that I could have had if i had a better job
I was given a dell dimension 8100 1.4ghz pentium 4 with 256mb rdram and a geforce 2 gts when some one upgraded around 2006 . It was a huge upgrade compared to the amd k6-2 350 overclocked to 400mhz in a asus p5a-b super socket 7 motherboard with 128mb ram with a ati rage pro that I had been using until then . Never had any issues with the ram, eventually upgraded it to I think 384, it was still pretty pricey . Wish i had kept it . I gave it to a neighbor several years ago .
Never used a socket 370 cpu in my main system. I did have a Slot1 450 MHz pentium3, but after the increased prices for the intel platform (ony RDRAM for p4), I decided to upgrade to an Socket A Athlon system with SDRAM which was quite powerful yet cheaper than any p4 platform.
I still own a Rdram motherboard and the RDram it'self. (gateway). It's a pentium 4 board. I run a 3.0 ghz cpu, very solid but hot. Very, very hot. Using only a 400 mhz FSB cpu it runs a bit cooler of course. It would be probably worth a review since it's considered pretty rate today. Good video as always my friend.
as allways ^^ a really good entertaining and informative video since 2003 i have a Pentium III -S running @ 1640MHz with RAM @ 156MHz sync CL-2-2-2 other specs are 2x32GB IDE SSD 1x400GB IDE HDD and later upgraded to an 6800Ultra on an Gigaby GA60XT RLY stable and overclockable > thanks to a changable PCI divider OS > Windows ME + Windows XP Pro SP3 i still love this machine and i´ll maintain it as long as possible ^^
Back then Phil I was fortunate enough to have a great Job and Wife who was also working, but enjoyed the Computer hobby as s much as I did. We had both lol, the Intel slot one variants AND AMD's K7-750Mhz (slot A), my wifes favorite. Seems to me we had a Supermicro Motherboard for the Intel, and a VIA for the AMD sorry I don't remember the Motherboard.
It's sad that after all these years I still remember those designations for Pentium III processors, probably because I was so obsessed with getting a new computer and researched the crap out of computers using Pentium processors. Once I got my new computer I started drooling over PCs with the AMD Athlon processors... =/ I just remembered the Pentium III systems running DDR RAM and a friend of mine got one from a boutique builder and the case looked like it was aluminium but it was kinda meant for servers.
yeah, his had a VIA chipset but I could not remember the manufacturer of the PC. All I remember was that it looked pretty utilitarian and was advertised for light server work but was outfitted for gaming. I had to make do with an HP PIII 800 and upgraded the GPU to a Radeon DDR and SoundBlaster Live! Platinum card. I originally wanted to get a Dell Dimension XPS B with an 866MHz PIII but the RAM upgrades made an already pricey PC even pricier so we pretty much settled on the XPS T with regular SDRAM... that was until my aunt somehow talked my parents into getting the HP.
Only if I could get those old Dell Dimension beige tower cases as that was the only thing that really separated my HP from the XPS T (after I swapped out the Vanta TNT2 , added in the sound card and increased the RAM to 512MB). I still have the complete system sitting next to my Athlon builds from 2002 - 2006.
In 2001-2002 I had a Pentium 3 600 with a bad motherboard (via chipset), it was really slow and the capacitors were inflated. I replaced them and it worked but, I bought a intel motherboard with a Pentium 3 550 and it worked far better
cool video as always. you cold also make a comparsion of p3 tualatin1.233 ghz vs athlon thunderbird 1333 mhz vs low clocked athlon xp palomino like 1500+. because this is what im about. as usualy thanks for super video.
RAMBUS was bad... My brother had one of those launch systems with the bug in the memory controller would crash all the time, I think before that, I remember getting a Pentium 233 MMX from Compaq... Socket 7 or something and with in a year PC's where like 3 times faster and uugghh!!! Not too much farther down the road I built a Pentium 3 733Mhz on an mobo from ASUS. Was really nice, and I enjoyed that for a long time, about that time was when I had purchased a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI edition :( the frown is because like 2 weeks after the company went out of business the card fried itself or something (it stopped working) so no warranty.... I wish I still had that card, it was a lot of fun for those GLide games. I can use a wrapper now with my GTX 980 but it still doesn't feel the same.
The Via Apollo MPV3 while good had some serious issues with certain PCI devices in particular the SB Live. If you used the right combination it worked stable.
I had an RDRAM system and I remember it being my most favorite system at the time, although I can't remember the specifics. Although I don't see why the complaints were valid, look at what we got now, we got ram that regularly comes with heatsinks and crap on it all the time now...
to me, this was the heyday of my system building glory, when AMD was just as viable as Intel. happily built and upgraded so many systems during the socket 7, socket 370 and socket A phases.
You may want to install the unofficial texture fix for GTA3. Because the colours of the cars look too dark, and that fixes it. Also, why is there no battery in the Dell motherboard on the lost shot in the video?
Is there slot 1 motherboard, that supports Tualatins, 133 Mhz FSB / RAM, have Universal AGP slot, WHILE still have a ISA slot for soundblaster compatilibity under DOS? I have retro PC BX440, with PII 400, but it's quite slow in later Win98 games, I want to have also real DOS with sounds, in one computer. Not sure, if I can use Tualatin with slocket in that board, but it runs only 66/100mhz FSB. Is there some 133 mhz one?
16 Year old me was plenty pissed about the entire RDRAM thing, An RdDRAM stick used to cost about 3-4 times as much as a SDRAM pc133 in my region. Built my first AMD machine back them with the Athlon 800 MHZ (Thunderbird core) and the VIA KT133 chipset.
![АЛАУДИНОВ у Скабеевой: эти их ВСУ нас НЕ ДОГОНЯТ 😁 [Пародия]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/an0anqU4WGQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I had a slot A Athlon 700. First PC I built myself with a NVIDIA Riva TNT2, 768MB of RAM, some VIA motherboard, and Windows 2000. Woo. Gotta love the golden fingers for overclocking.
This era was just before I could actually afford to buy new hardware. Around the release of this beast I was still rocking a 486DX2 I built in at the tail end of '97 for 100 bucks! I mostly used that till 2000 when I got myself a K6/2!
I love the reviews you do Phil. You give the context and history of the parts being reviewed. Shows you do the research.
In 1999, I was a bit "behind" everyone else - so I was using a P3-500 , Compaq Presario 59XX, with an ATI Rage Pro combined with an Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 (yes, it was beginning to show it's age then - but the Rage Pro did ok in the games where glide was not an option). I had 512MB RAM, 13GB + 20GB, I changed the audiocard from some unknown to the SB AWE64 (because I needed better Midi). It was a quite capable machine though - especially the 19" screen that followed was absolute awesome. I actually miss that screen - it was heavy as f*ck - but damn it was nice to play on compared to my friends 17" screens.
that 500 was probably, almost certainly, a katmai core (coppermine started at 533 aside engineering samples) so you would have had a solid stable system no matter what windows you wanted to run. even ME would have given you no trouble.
(and if you were lucky enough to have a katmai based xeon.... pure gold for windows ME)
😮yeah those CRT, horrendous weight, but awesome screens nonetheless
I had a socket Celeron II 650 (100Mhz FSB) which I overclocked all the way up to ~130Mhz FSB which gave me an overall boost to ~850Mhz. Worked flawlessly. I used a copper cylindrical cooler. Cool, quiet, and a lot faster than I paid for. If I went much higher it did get unstable. Back in those days I used Win98 with Litestep and a cool desktop, but eventually upgraded to Win2k.
Eventually I experimented with water cooling it, not that it needed it, and it performed well. I used a copper block bought online and a fish tank reservoir. My friend suggested a part anti-freeze part water mixture.
The copper block with aluminum connectors and the aluminum radiator eventually galvanized or something. The connectors on the copper block sheared right off. After drying the motherboard off in the tub it worked again and I used it for years. That thing was a great value!
Nice vid Phil! Here's a bit of my hardware history around 2000.
In december 1999 I was still on my first build (Pentium II 300, Asus P2L97, ATI Expert@Play AGP, Seagate 6.4GB), only thing that changed were the RAM because of stability issues (I had 64MB PC66 originally, a double height stick with 32 chips, exchanged it for a 128MB PC100 stick).
In late 1999 I sold my Creative DVD ROM kit to finance a new graphic card, I wanted the ATI Rage Fury MAXX but fortunately I ended up with the Creative 3DBlaster Annahilator Pro (GeForce DDR) instead.
My new graphic card caused some issues with my motherboard as it couldn't provide enough power so I exchanged it for an Asus P3B-F. Some days later the PSU died so I got a new one as well.
Middle of June 2000 I upgraded the CPU with a Celeron 566 that I ran at 708MHz on air cooling and later 850MHz on water cooling.
In October 2001 I went AMD (Athlon MP 1,2GHz, Epox 8KHA+) with a new rig, only my hard drives and graphic card came from my old one. I kept my old rig too, and actually upgraded the CPU once more to a Celeron 1.1GHz "Tualatin" that I ran at 1540MHz (4.5 times faster than my original Pentium II).
Just to make a different comment, I had absolutely no money at the time and I struggled with my K-6 2 until I had money to upgrade to an Athlon! loving the videos!
How did that upgrade feel like?
Excellent review! This is from an exciting period in computing. Its interesting to see the 600EB keep up with the 700E. The 133MHz FSB is equivalent to adding 100MHz to the core clock of the P3 with 100MHz FSB. I build my gaming PC around the P3 800 with 133 FSB back in the day with a Geforce2 GTS. Was a killer gaming PC for almost 2 years, which is an eternity back then. The system was based around an Abit BF6 (440BX board), and was eventually upgraded to a Tualatin 1.4, and continued to serve as a secondary system until 2007 when it was stolen. I recently re-built a similar configuration based around the 815 chipset for some retro gaming.
Yea, you can add 100 MHz for the EB models. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues. I've got a few more S370 CPUs I bought on eBay, but they haven't arrived yet. What else in your i815 machine?
PhilsComputerLab it's a Tualatin P3 1.4, 256mb of pc133 ram, Asus TUSL2 mobo, and the graphics card rotates between a voodoo 5 5500 and GeForce 3. I run mostly windows 98 games, and a few late dos Era games. I have an original pentium system on a super socket 7 for older games.
Hello! I'm following you for a couple of months, I love your videos. I feel a great nostalgia when seeing the computers that you are putting together and doing tests.
I have some parts to put together two old computers, I will try to make a video similar to yours but I am not up to it. I do not have many components, just the ones I kept. A big greeting from Argentina
Good luck! What parts do you have?
I had (and still have) a P3 800 (and later P3 1000) mounted with a socket 370 adapter card on an Abit BE6-II. With 256MB of RAM and a Matrox G400Max, this system did well for years.
My experience with an EB processor from Intel came when a lightning strike took out my Pentium III 700MHz Slot 1 system. I upgraded to a Pentium III 800MHz EB CPU using an Intel 815 chipset which officially supported the 133MHz FSB speeds, and was just as reliable as my previous 440BX chipset platform except that it maxed out at 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB. Around the same time memory prices started falling so packing the system with all 512MB was relatively cheap.
Can't say for 1999-2000, but by the time 2006-2009 was a thing, PIII boxes were EVERYWHERE. people couldn't get rid of them fast enough there was always a diamond in the rough PIII box out at the curbside during bulk waste day and I was well aware of dates for these days and would go out one or even two days before and yank up the nicest systems I could get my hands on at the curb with my bike, which I fitted out with clamp baskets and bungie cords.
For a time, I had a 9800 Pro, a USB2 card, an Audigy 2 ZS and both a 36GB SCSI boot disk on internal SCSI and an 80GB IDE drive (black-top WD I think) in a Dell Precision Workstation 420 with dual PIII 933 Slot 1 CPUs and a gig of PC800 RDRAM. it was probably the fastest box I had of the era and it really sucked because it only had an AGP Pro 4X slot. I can remember trying to run Vista on the thing and it was just a dog. XP ran great however, and SP3 at that (why SP1 for the videos?). I still have the machine but it's a shell of its former self. the 2GB of RDRAM I slapped into it don't work for it as it's the wrong latency, and is instead intended for a Dell OptiPlex GX400 in my posession with an S423 P4 1.8 in it and also in need of some TLC (and upgrades, a-la PCI 9400GT, probably.)
the main machine I was using in 2009 for browsing the internet and playing older games (UT99, GTASA, Quake, Quake 3 Arena, and some other titles) was an OptiPlex GX110 based on the 810 chipset. PIII 1GHz/256/133, 512MB PC133, 120GB + 80GB + 10GB scratch HDDs, PNY FX5200 256MB, Audigy 2 ZS Gold, two USB2 cards, Intel Pro1k GigE card, and a nice chunky 120mm fan over top of the cards ziptied down to keep everything cool. 16x DL DVD burner as well. Ran a pirated copy of XP which came with the machine for a time that I cleaned up, and then from there I moved the machine to Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs in 2010 as I was noticing slight hiccups doing certain tasks, and any increase in speed could have essentially been placebo, but I know for a fact FLP runs extremely well on older Pentium II 233 to Katmai 550 based machines, so long as you give them enough RAM to play with. that might be an interesting test to play with in the future... both trying out POSready 2009 and FLP on these older systems in conjunction to a normal XP SP3 install. (note that FLP shares a service pack with Windows Embedded Point of Sale and will need this to go to SP3.)
Out on the internets is a bencher for UT99 that runs a specific benchmark but I have no idea where to tell you to find it. this might be something to add to the benchmarks in the future.
I often use UTBench to test performance. Searching this in Google gives a few places to download the demo.
To use it, copy the .dem file to the UnrealTournament\System directory. At the console type:
timedemo 1
demoplay utbench.dem
After the benchmark runs, look in the console and you will see minimum, maximum and average FPS for the demo.
Yeah, I noticed XP SP3 on 128 MB is struggling just keeping itself running. Had the opportunity recently to setup an old laptop (P3 750, 128 MB, Rage 128 Pro) and with nothing installed except the OS and drivers I had whopping 20 MB free memory.
Thanks for sharing!
=Sudos. I used to work for the an Embassy/residence in 2002/3 in Mayfair.
Mondays was Big Rubbish day which meant the residents in Mayfair used to leave out their unwanted fridges/furniture including all their older PCs the night before (Sundays) So if I was working night shift I would walk around the area collecting all the dumped PCs. Because they were extremely rich there was some amazingly high spec "crap" which on occasion was only a year old. As I was a chauffeur -(which meant I did very little as it was usually empty, just the Phillipino staff and me alone in this big building )- I stashed all my finds in their garage driving up the next day- (I normally used the Tube)- to collect my treasure trove to take home.There was some beautiful all in ones but I was very selective as I only wanted gaming capable tech, so I usually passed over a lot of good stuff. I didn't need it.
However one week for my mates I decided to collect ANY good nick PCs so by early Monday morning I had about ten huge PCs all stashed in their garage.ready to collect the next night.
Well that week my luck ran out big time.
I was woken that afternoon ( I slept in the day at home, obviously)by a call from a frantic head of the staff, a very nice Phillipino guy ( for whom I collected cameras which I also found on my trawls)telling me the Royals had turned up unannounced ( which they did maybe twice a year) and were very upset that they couldn't get their big S-class Mercs in the garage because it was full of computers. So I got sacked (quite right, I deserved it) but also lost all those PCs as well!
I then went to work for Tesco Dotcom delivering food and just like you I was picking up any PC junk lying around and confirm what you said about there being a LOT of it. This is before we started recycling our rubbish but your post took me right back to those days. P 3 and P 2 stuff was everywhere but if it didn't have a AGP slot it stayed where it lay. When Greenwich council were updating their PCs there were huge skips FULL of perfectly good hardware, mainly Cyrix stuff which I didnt realise had a high gold content.
Suffice to say I didn't pick any of it, but of course I kick myself now for all that gold I passed up.
I apologise if I went on a bit but then it was so much easier to get your hands on unwanted tech. Now you cant even get it at your local tip because of Political Correctness gone mad.
This is to show the younger guys here what it was like back in the day.
I remember I hardly ever came across RAMBUS and usually it only came in pre built systems. I do remember they had these blank sticks they needed pairing up with, which shows how crazy expensive it was.
Man what a great story! I can't believe they just chucked their computers. What I take away from this story is that whenever you have a good thing going, don't get greedy, as that's when it falls apart. Thanks for sharing!
A few years ago, I had a Fujitsu Siemens Scenic PC, it had s370 P3 1000 EB, intel i815 chipset AND one ISA slot.
A Sound Blaster AWE 32 was installed on that slot :)
It was their proprietary board, it would have been interesting to find if it had some kind of a bridge chip for ISA or not.
loving that motherboard standoff :)
I had a celery 400, I think it was lightly overclocked to around 600. The mobo was a via chipset, and it wasn't long after 2000 that I upgraded the graphics card to a Hercules 3D Prophet 2 GTS 64MB. Not sure about the exact timeline, but I was running a Panasonic SCSI slot loading CD burner, which was awesome. It never suffered from buffer underruns since it was entirely separate from the IDE controller, and burning from one drive to another was also perfect since SCSI drives transfer data directly from one to the other, without having to go through the host system, as it would with IDE. I later upgraded it to a DVD burner (also Panasonic, and slot loading). But I digress. When I bought the GF2 card, my friends told me I was crazy for spending so much on a graphics card, but not upgrading the celery CPU. They shut up after seeing the performance I was getting at a LAN party!
Thanks for sharing!
To share a sort of story , I actually bought a system with Pentium 4 and with 512 MB of RDRAM when I was 15, and that is when I learned the hard way that I needed a dummy ram stick in the other slots where I don't use ram sticks. but later I did upgrade it to 1GB ram and that worked fine. and I actually still have those RDRAM stick in a anti static bag :P
They are actually still worth something. People didnt bought them back then and now they are quite rare. Would be interesting to build a nice Northwood/RDRAM system as a retro machine.
Yeah, the P4 with kinda flew with RDRAM but then the Dual channel DDR systems weren't that far behind either. RDRAM on the PIII was unnecessary though until maybe around Tualatin but it was better to go with SDRAM or DDR
i just realize something this day 4 days later i made this first commant, i wasn't 15 when i bough the RDRAM P4 system, at that year of 15 i bough my AMD k6-2 550 mhz system. this was around year 2000 :-P
I still have my Abit BX6 2.0 board. It was a simple matter of raising the FSB to 133 to get a Celeron 300A to run at 450Mhz. Good times. This was actually my last Intel build for almost a decade.
At the time, I had a Via-C3 667 sold as: "1GHz PR" - "Samuel 2" core and later, as the computer was shared with my brother, he would get the VIA and I've had a P3-500 Slot-1. We never had a Rambus system, but in Eastern Europe the P3 Cooperine or P4 were overly pricey. Around 2 years later, my aunt bought an Athlon 1800+, so what can I say:
- P4 was a linked with Rambus making everything overly expensive. I knew only two people in entire IT university that had them initially, from some dozens of colleagues. AMD was the king, some people would argue that Coppermine's Celeron is a good deal, but none was pro-P4 or P3.
- Via-C3 667 was running neck on neck with a P3-500 which was second hand
- I remember that at the time, the single way to counter a slower CPU was only to buy a lot of memory, and we were using XP flawlessly
- Via-C3 was kind of "SOC" with everything soldered, you could not change the video card, but it would have 2 slots of memory, so we upgraded it till 256MB of memory and we would run Linux and XP.
- Linux was amazingly compatible to Via platform at the time, and P3 was not
Pentium Eco-Boost?
Terroriser Spot that was accurate
The Pentium III 500E was a 'special' release from Intel around 1999. It was rumoured to run on a 133mhz bus and was very cheap ( about $250). I rushed out and bought it and had this cpu in a slocket running at 667mhz on my AX6BC Pro. Coupled with 512mb of insanely fast Transcend ram. It ran for many years until I gave it to a relative. It never faltered ever. Thanks for the great memories.
In this era I just got a Celeron 500 I got to run at 565 overclocked. This lasted till I defected to AMD with the 1 GHZ Thunderbird.
In august 2000 I had bought and assembled my first PC. It had Chaintech 6BTM (i440bx) motherboard (widely recommended in our russian FIDO segment as one of the most stable MBs at the time), Pentium III-500 (Katmai, Slot 1), 2x32 MB PC-100 RAM, 8 GB Seagate HDD, simple AGP Trident video card, ASUS S400 CD-ROM drive and a noname case. I brought all the hardware home, assembled the parts together, connected the case to the monitor, turned everything on... and nothing happened. Only fans in the case started, but no sound from PC speaker, monitor didn't awake. I was very frustrated. I checked the connections many times - everything seemed to be connected properly. After few hours it turned out the IDE cable was connected to the motherboard the wrong side (there was no key on the cable connector). The MB wasn't able to start or to indicate the error.
The computer worked fine till 2006 (but I needed to replace capacitors on the MB to get it back to life) and then I played with it for some time as an OpenBSD server. It was pretty stable.
In the day I used to run an Asus P2B-D dual slot 1 motherboard that got started with 2 Pentium II 400MHz, and was upgraded later to 2 Pentuim III Coppermine 850MHz
It was running Windows XP Pro, upgraded later to Windows XP Pro x64 dual booting to Linux.
It was a beast..
These were the "good ole days" upgrading either my videocard or cpu every fucking 6- 9 months, around here i had a 500 mhz coppermine p3 with voodoo 2s in sli and like 128 mb ram and a 30 gig hdd. Next comp was a 1ghz Athlon with 256 mb ram and a voodoo 3, a tiny bit later a athlon 1.4 thunderbird with 4 40 gig hdd in raid 0 and a geforce 256. And a tiny bit later.......
I had (still have) a PIII500e. It run fine at 667mhz, and even worked for the odd benchmark at 750mhz with a TEC module. The issue i had with my BX board (SOYO SY-6BA) though was the PCI bus speed didn't have dividers for anything above 100mhz FSB, so your PCI speed would run way over spec
I remember my mom having a p3 600eb slot 1 on a intel 820 with the defective intel mth (memory translator hub) as this motherboard uses sdram but the i820 works with rdram. we didn't ended up having issues with this computer, random crashes or anything. I was using it over my aging own p233mmx/v2-sli. it did work great, and remember playing black & white on it quite a lot.
Nice video !!!. Back in 2000 to 2001 we have pretty an offimatic machine. It was a budget clone, but got the job done and got tired of people telling how miserable this PC was (PC Chips 850) but hey ... It worked fine for us and still powers up nice. It used AMD K6II 500 Mhz, It was a really good value. At this time, 500 to 600 Mhz, PIII or Celerons were the most common systems you could find in drugstores that have many of them networked just for gamming. But the K6 was not enough for certain things .... like the ones required by the university. Poorly made scripts with errors (well, I was learning) take tons of time on Matlab and tired of waitting 2 hours each time to get more errors I grab my CD and went to one of this drugstores. One in particular imported SPECTACULAR HW for its era, 850 and 900Mhz machines with 256MB RAM and powerfull graphics cards. The machines were by far the most powerfull around starting with the case itself. So rare and fast that people keep asking the owners where did they got this HW. I paid for a gamming PC (you could pick a "only internet" and a "gamming" PC) get the permission to install Matlab on it and it was insane fast. I finished my work in two hours. How weird this was, I was in the middle of people shoutting and shutting themselves in the game, one of them even broke the keyboard. Sure it was weird for the other buddys there, using a proper gamming system for nothing but a white command promt LOL. My "gamming" setup was a P1 100Mhz enough for VICE and CCS and minimal for MAME depending on the ROMS.
Good call on the 440BX being a good idea for P3s. I run a 1000EB on an ABIT BE6-II v1.2 (HPT366 instead of 370) and it runs absolutely sweet.
I miss this kind of video. Hight quality !
Late 90s pc hardware is the best
I'd love to see you do something with the Intel L440GX motherboard, the one that can do dual pentium 3 slot 1s. Warning for you if you do though, it's limited to 100MHz FSB and will actually refuse to boot with any 133MHz FSB cpus. It's got a great SCSI chip onboard and a great chipset in general though, and the board is comically huge. I feel like dual Celeron 1100MHz with a really good AGP video card would be an impressive machine for that board, in fact I'd love to try it, the only issue is slotkets seem rare on American eBay atm.
I am still amazed how good the pentium 3 is that it was good enough for day to day computing as well even youtube till around 2009 or so. Still a little pissed after all these years about Intel gimping the 815 chipset (ram limit). Should have done 1gb out of the box or even 2GB like the i840 chipset.
I agree, the i815 could have been perfect had it more memory support and ISA slots by default.
Bit it makes a decent platform for a fast Win 98 machine.
More than 512 MB isn't supported by the OS anyway and with something like a SB Live or Audigy the lack of ISA isn't really an issue. And still faster than VIA on S370.
I was using a P2-266 back in '99. I didn't get into PIII until 2003, when I replaced my terribad 1.8GHz P4 with a PIII-S, clocked it up to 1575 on a Apollo Pro266T DDR motherboard, and slotted in a shiny new Radeon 9800 Pro. That thing was just so awesome. I spent hours and hours playing Painkiller, Splinter Cell 1 & 2, Vice City, Far Cry, Doom 3, Thief 3, and many other games on that machine.
In fact, I enjoyed that rig so much that I recently spent way too much money recreating it. Got myself the same QDI Advance 12T motherboard that my original machine had. I'm even replaying all of those old games!
Nice! I'm yet to try out the VIA 266T, the best I have is the 133T. Unreal that you found the OC Tualatin better than the P4.
Nice thing about the 266T is that it lets you take cheap CL3 DDR400 memory and run it at 300MHz (to match the 150MHz FSB) with very good 2-2-2-5 memory timings. There's also a dedicated 266MB/s bus between the Northbridge and Southbridge. It doesn't use the PCI bus to link the two like the older Apollo 133 did.
You really know your stuff! I only recently read up how they the North- and Southbridge were connected with the PCI bus and how the i810 chipset changed all that. It's so interesting to experience all this stuff :D
Another great video Phil! I had one of those Aureal Vortex 2 sound cards, ah the memories. I think it was a VideoLogic branded board? Good sound but MIDI over the joystick/MIDI port was erratic and I had to use an AWE64 at the time to get vaguely stable / lower latency MIDI in Cubase.
I like that Vortex 2 card because of the A3D over headphones. It's a real treat.
I think that socket 370 is the most intresting retro platform since it is quite modern and still has support for ISA cards. Same thing with late (2007-2008) socket 775 systems with their support for floppy drives and IDE hard drives.
I had a socket 370 system myself, but unfortunately I had a 700 MHz Celeron and a dirt cheap motherboard. I'm not sure how much i missed because of this. If I decide to build a retro PC, it will definitely be from this time period.
What S370 parts would be your favourite if you could pick anything?
I havn't tried it myself, but I'm quite fond of Taulatin CPU:s and Intel 815 chipsets. However, I'm not sure if the chipset supports ISA.
I have an aptitude for the high end stuff in each generation. I have a computer with ASUS P5E3, Q9550 and Icy Dock trayless bays that I use for small scale kernel development and other testing, and I really like the onboard support for floppy, IDE hard drives and classic PCI slots.
I missed the Pentium 3 era but built a 1 Ghz AMD Athlon system instead in January 2001.Many years later I think in 2005 I acquired two Pentium 3 systems one system Slot 1 @650 Mhz and the other a Socket 370 system at 733Mhz.Just two months ago I acquired a 500 Mhz Slot 1 Pentium 3 system.These were monsters compared to my 1999 AMD K6-2 system @ 450 Mhz.
When I bought my AMD K6-2 system I saw on television Intel advertisements about the new Pentium iii I felt that my new computer was obsolete right away though I didn't feel too bad as I was on a low end budget.
It was a 3Dfx card the Voodoo 3 that was the savior as I could actually do some decent gaming.
I believe I was still using a 486DX 50 motherboard with an Evergreen processor running at 166Mhz, and 16Meg of RAM around that period. I got a true 166Mhz system which I used for about a year, then jumped straight to an AMD K7 Athelon, and then to a quad core Pentium 4. (or possibly 2 core, 4 thread, just prior to the Core architecture)
I remember that period well, because I was heavily experimenting with OS at the time, having concluded that Linux was distinctly aiming at server use, and Windows wasn't fit to be let loose on the internet. So I used a lot of QNX, BeOS, SkyOS, Zeta etc. systems.
Ahhh, RDRAM. I was wondering when we'd get there. My college computer in 2001 was a P4 1.8ghz with 256MB RDRAM 800 non ECC. The mobo was a Monterey one and I had a powered by ATI Radoen 7000 with 64MB. It was an ok computer for a bit. Did some small upgrades like upping to 512MB of RAM later and putting in a Geforce 2 GTS Pro then an FX5200 so I could play Thief 3, then got a an FX 5900 Ultra later. Went to an Athlon 3200 up the road with a gig of RAM and finally got away from RDRAM. Was a fine day indeed heh
That system will still be a nice rig for retro purposes.
All I remember from this period is my duron, and how it beat the everloving crap out of anything intel offered when I overclocked it. That duron, 256mb RAM, and a TNT2 64 were all I could afford, but it still played that 3dmark 2001 matrix scene at a reasonable framerate. Good enough for me back then!
Love your videos mate
I was using the best board available. Asus p3v4x. You should really get one. Noone used rambus. That was the major part of intels p4 fuckup. The whole history of the p4 just just one huge fuckup. Anyway, get the asus board, it's got all the good slots.
The asus board was a great overclocker.
Oh yea, just a shame I can't recall what overclock I got on it. :( I remember I did have all the slots filled up, (agp+6pci as the isa was shared), it was one packed computer. The only overclocks I can really remember that were great back in the days I got was a 200mmx @300 on an ax59pro, and a duron 600@1ghz on a modded a7v133.
MV60 ahhh the duron! I had a 650 which used to run rings around my other friends stuff! reminds me of the pencil mod on the cut bridges!
I had an Intel OR840 board with dual Slot 1, 1ghz cpu's. It used RD ram. It was also classified as a workstation board though.
That pencil mod was so good! tho I ended up using a more conductive connector. I think I held on to that CPU till I got an athlon xp 2500 that got clocked to the 3200 speeds out of the box!
I had a Compaq Presario with K6-2 533 MHz with 64 MB (later expanded to 128 MB), an OEM VIA Apollo MVP4-based motherboard and a Trident Blade 3D iGPU that fortunately had it's own chip on the motherboard. Performance was pretty decent with Windows 98 SE, but not so good with any Windows NT-based OS.
Years later, I could replace it with a Pentium III 933 MHz, a GeForce 2 MX GPU, 192 MB of RAM and a ASUS CUV4X-E motherboard. The difference was huge in all aspects, even running Windows XP.
I miss these times. Specially when I remember the launch of the Athlon 1 GHz and a little later, the Pentium III Coppermine with the same frequency.
The Via Apollo was very good. Even SGI used it for their SGI 230 Visual Workstation.
I'll try using a board with VIA Apollo 133T is a video project soon.
Strange, I remember those VIA chipsets having been a big pain in the ass... I once had a K6-300 (don‘t remember the exact chipset, but it was VIA) and my sister an Athlon 1400 on a KT266, and I was only satisfied when switching back to intel chipsets.
By this time, I still had my P2 350MHz on a FIC VB-601 and I could not complain... Had a Hercules 3D Prophet MX with 32MB and i could run lots of crap on it :) I jumped from this system to a AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with a ASUS A7A266 (ALi Magik 1... Hey, I could re-use my old SDRAM and money was thight for DDR) ... Love your videos... Oh man, they bring me back.... Still have that A7A266 and CPU, but it wont boot...
Best regards from Portugal
I built my first from-the-ground-up PC in 2000. I had a FIC AZ11 motherboard, AMD Athlon 1GHz CPU, 128MB RAM, and the notorious ATI Rage Fury Maxx graphics card (which I loved btw.) The system ran Win98SE at first, but later upgraded to XP and I had to ditch the Rage card for a vanilla GeForce4 MX440. The GeForce served my purposes and played all my games but in hindsight it's a lot less exciting than the earlier dual-chip graphics solution. Prior to this build I'd been running a drop-in AIO upgrade motherboard purchased from TigerDirect with a 233MHz Cyrix MediaGX CPU and integrated graphics and sound so this whole Athlon thing was a massive upgrade - and the Rage Fury Maxx was my first experience with a hardware-accelerated 3D card too!
I personally used the Athlon platform around this time starting with the slot A 600 in late 1999. At work we mostly built Intel systems for corporate customers, the 440BX and 815 chipsets were very stable. As for power hungry Athlon's the Thunderbird 1.4GHz was one of the most power hungry / Heat generating CPU's AMD released. Power consumption definitely improved with the release of Athlon XP series.
In my time working in the industry I only ever built one Rambus system it was on a "confidential" sample Intel 820 motherboard.
DDR exploits the double clock rate (dual edge clock triggering) with out the latency issues.
I'm pretty sure that the EB variants were more expensive than the E ones back then. I remember being able to get a pretty good deal on a P3 700E and then I slapped it in my BX board (Abit most likely, don't remember that well) with a slot adapter and set the jumper on the adapter for 133fsb mode and it ran at 933mhz without any problems. I think I could post at 1ghz, but it wasn't stable so I had to lower it down just bit from that. Still ran great though!
lots of systems: K62/400 oc to 450 MHz with a Diamond 2d card and a canopus voodoo2... after a while upgraded to a GeForce mx2, but kept the voodoo for glide games... This machine still runs, but i need to find time for a mayor rebuilt...
Do it!
I love your channel, makes me almost a bit said that those times are long gone. Dont know why but even if tech was slower and not as advanced back then it was at least exiting and special.
Anyway.
Had the first slot 1 p3 550mhz "katamai "or something like that paired with an abit 440bx mobo, I think it was what you used and it was to me the most stable platform ever. Not even when I got my k7 750mhz a couple months later did the via mobos did change that. To be honest the biggest surprise was when later on I got a Asrock 939Dual-SATA2, to be honest it was a cheap plaything and all but damn was it good. Since then asrcok took over nr1 spot from Abit in my heart :P
No but, nothing could compare to a old bx440 board especially a abit one with "softmenu" hehe. those where the times :)
I agree with Asrock being awesome :) I got a board that has PCIe and AGP, but haven't found time to use it yet.
PhilsComputerLab Probably the board I mentioned, it has also a proprietary connector over the pci-e for a cpu daughter board? www.asrock.com/mb/ULi/939Dual-SATA2/ If I remember correctly you need to make a hw-mod to be able to give the cpu more juice. fun and cheap board but it withstand everything I did to it.
Yes that's the one!
straight out of vocational school, i build my first machine. A duron 800Mhz before that it was hand me downs and things pre P3. Been an AMD guy since 2001 :)
I had that old mitac intel celeron from 1997 266mh pc until 2004 when i got the amd athlon xp 2600+ pc.
Hey Phil, really enjoy your channel and the content you produce. I stumbled here after searching for more information on a PC project I was doing, attempting to recreate a system from 1999. I've since subscribed just because I love learning about these old parts as well.
I have a question for you that is completely irrelevant to all this though: What is the name of the song that you use for the benchmarks starting at 5:30? It's a really chill beat and I really liked it!
Not sure, I got it from epidemic music. You pay to use music for UA-cam. I rename the songs to something more meaningful for me.
On a side note, there were also boards with bot socket 370 and slot 1(although couldn't be used in a dual cpu config), which are very cool, I'm not sure what chipset they use, although I do have one, need to have a look at it.
OEMs like HP even used both Slot1 and RAMBUS memory back in the day. I had an HP Vectra VL600 which had a Coppermine 600EB on Slot 1 with i820 chipset and RDRAM. It took the system forever to count all of its 512MB of RAM during POST, but it was rock solid otherwise.
I don't mind OEM boards, but anything RAMBUS is obscenely priced and rare.
In 99-00 I had a P3 500, huge upgrade from my P133 (no MMX!) :)
AMD went DDR I do not remember an alternative SDR for the Athlon. i had Athlon 800 which i used for quite long. Thanks for taking me to my youth.
The E denotes the Copermine fabrication process, it does not denote the Socket 370 form factor. It is possible to get a E as a slot 1 processor Phil
Thanks for the info!
i had a Pentium III EB 667@775 running infion RAM with 155mhz FSB...was a great time
Oh yes, those Infineon are great clockers. Can get my 256 MiB 133 CL3 stick up to 148 MHz CL3 or 128 MHz CL2.
i think the AMD Athlon Thunderbird was a bit faster in gaming during this time.. i miss those days...
I've got a 600eb slot1 version recently. Now I'm using it along with 440bx at 450 and 300 mhz. Very happy with it. Going to build voodoo-1 based retro pc. Have an idea to build a arduino-based fsb-selector (and agp-divider selector). Wonder if there are option to switch them without restart (somehom put a wait-states through pc/pci connector to motherboard and switch fsb during this period)
Like you, I took a break around that timeframe, hanging onto my Pentium III 450 for a good 4-5 years, upgrading to a used 550 at some point. Then I bought a "cookie cutter" Dell. I didn't build another until I went all out on the socket 775 Pentium EE release! I still have that monstrosity w/ quad-SLI and a case that had a built-in air conditioner!
Quad SLI? Very nice!
Oh gosh, hard to remember around 2000 but I believe I was using XP, DDR RAM and an Athlon 800MHz overclocked to 900MHz with the pencil trick. Shortly after that, I had an Athlon 1400. I stuck to the ASUS A7V series like the A7V333.
I never had Intel until my current i7 6700k but my dad gave me RAMBUS memory which I then sold on ebay for 3x times what he paid for it. RAMBUS was no longer being made then.
In the year 2000-2001? I was still using an AMD K6-2, dual booting Linux and Windows 98 due to the latter's instability. I didn't upgrade to an Athlon XP until 2003 or so when I finally upgraded to Windows XP, I believe.
ive had P3 600mhz one dont know what model, but i cud clock it to alil over 700, 133fsb, 128mb of ram (later upgraded to 256 or 512)and 20gb hdd, it was a prebuild from Fujitsu, and i installed a Voodoo 4(5?) 4500. man that thing was a beast, to me anyways.
I actually got the same AB-BX6 i440BX slot1 motherboard in a computer I still use and this computer is one of the most stable ones I had so far, I even got one PIII 600EB in my storage but for this rig I have stick to my PIII 550Mhz CPU because of the simply rock solid experience I had with it I don't feel like I want to change the story behind this custom built PC I had for so long now. In a way I still think the Slot1 CPUs was the best CPU ever made not just because they are big and look cool but also because they were so stable as well. I simply loved them from the first day I saw them
Great story, thanks for sharing!
no problem :) I should do some own reviews about hardware I got, I actually got a lot of it too
Is there a story behind the Radeon graphics card having a nVidia sticker on its fan? (5:10)
I think previous owner changed the cooler to one from nVidia gpu
Maik Merten just for lulz
Yea it came that way. I've since replaced the fan, but will get a proper cooler replacement when it arrives.
the only reason anyone does anything...
#fortehlulz
Agent Smith my life story
I hope you will make some tests comparing late Tualatin CPUs against early P4/Celeron ones. I upgraded from Pentium 3 800 to Celeron 1.7 Ghz and the difference was quite small. And overclocking of this Celeron was a joke - 300 Mhz more, still no real difference in speed. I would like to suggest more tests with overclocking - I heard that Pentium MMX could be overclocked well over 266 Mhz - insane! I had P166 MMX and it ran on 200 very well. Keep up the good job :)
Willamette Pentium 4 CPUs were a joke ... an expensive joke. The fastest Willamette was slower than the P-III Tualatin @ 1Ghz (the latter not being overclocked)
I was just a little child around the time of these systems, so I didn't have the comprehension for them and don't feel nostalgic to them, but I still love these systems regardless. I've got a Compaq Deskpro EP/SB series tower with a 450MHz Slot 1 Pentium III that I installed some ATi Radeon 9200 job into to play games on. I've got better systems for this purpose, but I like this one. Too bad I've never been able to get sound working in it. Either its original sound card is roasted well-done or the drivers I keep finding are bogus.
For Windows 98 SE, I can recommend the Sound Blaster Live! Look for models SB0100 and SB060.
Hey Phil. Love your video's as always! Would be interesting for others to see perhaps if you can cover the speed difference between the 500 and 500e for example. There's quite a nice performance boost in some benchmarks due to the full speed cache even though it's halved in size. Also, I see you have a 500e and a 700e - Could you overclock them using 133 fsb and give people some idea of the possible free performance boost?
I had a 500e back in the day, which was an upgrade from a k6-2 400. I managed 112fsb on this, which was the limitation of the QDI motherboard I had! Also, not sure if you have any of the Matrox G400 series cards, but these were interesting at that time, running great until you looked at some blood for example in Half-Life etc!
Maybe even a complete 600 MHz roundup.
Duron 600, Athlon 600 Orion, Athlon 600 T-bird, P3 600, P3 600B, P3 600E, P3 600 EB, Celeron 600.
Thanks for sharing!
PhilsComputerLab I've got a bnib kt7a, and an nf7s! struggling to find a decent cooler over here (UK)! I can get the athlon 1.1 to nearly 1600 but it's very toasty!
Old used all copper coolers is the way to go I think. Especially for overclocking. For stock look out for the Arctic Copper Silent or something like that. I used it with the 3200+ without any issues.
I'm sure I tested the 500 vs 500e in my Voodoo2 SLI scaling project. There was no difference basically, maybe 1% or 2 with no clear winner.
I remember around that time I had a bunch of system failures, and also a complete hard drive failure for good measure.
I can't quite remember what order I used things in though.
I know I had a pentium 3 733 mhz system on an adapter card for a slot 1 board, but also a Duron 1 ghz system.
For a really long time I had no 3d accelerator at all, before finally getting a Geforce 2 MX, which is my first 3d accelerator card, and actually my only nvidia card ever. (To be Specific it was a Gainward Geforce 2 MX golden sample.)
It was a pretty good system... Until it died.
In hindsight it was caused by a rampant bad capacitor issue that was going around in the early 2000's...
I never used RAMbus with it - I could never justify any system high end enough to use it.
Of course, as the owner of an n64 I did in fact have a system with RAMbus memory around...
It's ironic considering just how eye-wateringly expensive that stuff was that by 2000 or so N64's were in the ~$100-200 range.
Granted that's only 4 or 8 megabytes of RDRam, but still...
Nice video and nice testbed! How did you get it?
Celeron 300-A was my beast back in the day, could get 575mhz out of it, does not sound huge but thats over 75% overclock, would be like getting my 6700k now to 7.8ghz lol
I did not have my first useable PC until 2000 and that was a Dell Dimension 2200 except for being a solid machine it was a POS 1ghz Celeron 256mb ram 20gb PATA HDD and Win XP it didn't even have enough headroom to power a DVD-ROM my first real taste of PC gaming as I was stuck on warcraft and starcraft and red alert 2 as my Dell even fought to run games that old it was not until 2007 when I got my hands on an AMD Athlon XP based system with 512mb ram and a Geforce MX 220 I think which I did upgrade to a 440 and 768mb ram so I was really late to the game but still like watching videos and learning about what was out there that I could have had if i had a better job
Thanks for sharing!
I was given a dell dimension 8100 1.4ghz pentium 4 with 256mb rdram and a geforce 2 gts when some one upgraded around 2006 . It was a huge upgrade compared to the amd k6-2 350 overclocked to 400mhz in a asus p5a-b super socket 7 motherboard with 128mb ram with a ati rage pro that I had been using until then . Never had any issues with the ram, eventually upgraded it to I think 384, it was still pretty pricey . Wish i had kept it . I gave it to a neighbor several years ago .
I got a Slot-A Athlon with a special cooling and overclocked by step thermodynamics (I still have it).
Hello, can you please make a video, explaining a bit and giving the measurements of the base and the drills for the spacers?
Back in those days I could not affort an intel system so I bought a AMD Athlon Classic 600MHz, which was really good.
i wished i had knowledge with buildin' custom PCs back then, but i was about 9 or 10 years old back then
Never used a socket 370 cpu in my main system. I did have a Slot1 450 MHz pentium3, but after the increased prices for the intel platform (ony RDRAM for p4), I decided to upgrade to an Socket A Athlon system with SDRAM which was quite powerful yet cheaper than any p4 platform.
Looking back, Socket A was a smart move.
back in the day, when via and sis still made chipsets for motherboards
my p3 system back in the day was on a intel board sporting RDram 256meg. was a great system. should have put 512 RD in it though...
I still own a Rdram motherboard and the RDram it'self. (gateway). It's a pentium 4 board. I run a 3.0 ghz cpu, very solid but hot. Very, very hot. Using only a 400 mhz FSB cpu it runs a bit cooler of course. It would be probably worth a review since it's considered pretty rate today. Good video as always my friend.
as allways ^^ a really good entertaining and informative video
since 2003 i have a Pentium III -S running @ 1640MHz with RAM @ 156MHz sync CL-2-2-2
other specs are 2x32GB IDE SSD 1x400GB IDE HDD and later upgraded to an 6800Ultra
on an Gigaby GA60XT RLY stable and overclockable > thanks to a changable PCI divider
OS > Windows ME + Windows XP Pro SP3
i still love this machine and i´ll maintain it as long as possible ^^
Nice!
Back then Phil I was fortunate enough to have a great Job and Wife who was also working, but enjoyed the Computer hobby as s much as I did.
We had both lol, the Intel slot one variants AND AMD's K7-750Mhz (slot A), my wifes favorite. Seems to me we had a Supermicro Motherboard for the Intel, and a VIA for the AMD sorry I don't remember the Motherboard.
i like your test bench looks good and simple!!
Why were you using XP service pack 1 instead of service pack 3? is it more compatible with older games or why?
Much faster to install on these old machines.
It's sad that after all these years I still remember those designations for Pentium III processors, probably because I was so obsessed with getting a new computer and researched the crap out of computers using Pentium processors. Once I got my new computer I started drooling over PCs with the AMD Athlon processors... =/
I just remembered the Pentium III systems running DDR RAM and a friend of mine got one from a boutique builder and the case looked like it was aluminium but it was kinda meant for servers.
I believe VIA and SIS had P III DDR chipsets.
yeah, his had a VIA chipset but I could not remember the manufacturer of the PC. All I remember was that it looked pretty utilitarian and was advertised for light server work but was outfitted for gaming. I had to make do with an HP PIII 800 and upgraded the GPU to a Radeon DDR and SoundBlaster Live! Platinum card. I originally wanted to get a Dell Dimension XPS B with an 866MHz PIII but the RAM upgrades made an already pricey PC even pricier so we pretty much settled on the XPS T with regular SDRAM... that was until my aunt somehow talked my parents into getting the HP.
Time to rebuild that machine you didn't get?
Only if I could get those old Dell Dimension beige tower cases as that was the only thing that really separated my HP from the XPS T (after I swapped out the Vanta TNT2 , added in the sound card and increased the RAM to 512MB). I still have the complete system sitting next to my Athlon builds from 2002 - 2006.
In 2001-2002 I had a Pentium 3 600 with a bad motherboard (via chipset), it was really slow and the capacitors were inflated. I replaced them and it worked but, I bought a intel motherboard with a Pentium 3 550 and it worked far better
cool video as always. you cold also make a comparsion of p3 tualatin1.233 ghz vs athlon thunderbird 1333 mhz vs low clocked athlon xp palomino like 1500+. because this is what im about. as usualy thanks for super video.
Maybe a 1 GHz roundup. Add a CuMine, Duron & Tuleron @ 1200 MHz for a broader scale.
From time to time, someone falls for the RDRAM thing.
RAMBUS was bad... My brother had one of those launch systems with the bug in the memory controller would crash all the time, I think before that, I remember getting a Pentium 233 MMX from Compaq... Socket 7 or something and with in a year PC's where like 3 times faster and uugghh!!! Not too much farther down the road I built a Pentium 3 733Mhz on an mobo from ASUS. Was really nice, and I enjoyed that for a long time, about that time was when I had purchased a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI edition :( the frown is because like 2 weeks after the company went out of business the card fried itself or something (it stopped working) so no warranty.... I wish I still had that card, it was a lot of fun for those GLide games. I can use a wrapper now with my GTX 980 but it still doesn't feel the same.
at thoose days i had Pentium2 PC :D after that i had athlon xp 1800+ 2x256mb ddr 333,and a radeon 9200
i have a question about the thing you put the motherboard on, is that what you use to test computers and did you 3D print it yourself?
The Via Apollo MPV3 while good had some serious issues with certain PCI devices in particular the SB Live. If you used the right combination it worked stable.
There is a patch that resolves latency issues with creative and diamond cards.
Is it just me, or did Phil just upload _much_ more often?
I had an RDRAM system and I remember it being my most favorite system at the time, although I can't remember the specifics. Although I don't see why the complaints were valid, look at what we got now, we got ram that regularly comes with heatsinks and crap on it all the time now...
to me, this was the heyday of my system building glory, when AMD was just as viable as Intel. happily built and upgraded so many systems during the socket 7, socket 370 and socket A phases.
Nice video, how do you get the benchmark to work in incoming and expendable.
You may want to install the unofficial texture fix for GTA3. Because the colours of the cars look too dark, and that fixes it.
Also, why is there no battery in the Dell motherboard on the lost shot in the video?
I see, thanks for the tip. I thought Steam would all be patched, but it seems not. Any other fixes for GTA3 I should check out?
Is there slot 1 motherboard, that supports Tualatins, 133 Mhz FSB / RAM, have Universal AGP slot, WHILE still have a ISA slot for soundblaster compatilibity under DOS?
I have retro PC BX440, with PII 400, but it's quite slow in later Win98 games, I want to have also real DOS with sounds, in one computer. Not sure, if I can use Tualatin with slocket in that board, but it runs only 66/100mhz FSB. Is there some 133 mhz one?
16 Year old me was plenty pissed about the entire RDRAM thing, An RdDRAM stick used to cost about 3-4 times as much as a SDRAM pc133 in my region. Built my first AMD machine back them with the Athlon 800 MHZ (Thunderbird core) and the VIA KT133 chipset.