The Slot A Paradox: Why It's Overlooked?
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- Опубліковано 18 січ 2024
- I am not seeing many Slot A projects in the Retro PC community, why is that?
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Funny thing was that Slot A was mechanically compatible with Slot 1, but of course these two are otherwise incompatible with each other. Connectors for Slot A are rotated 180 degrees to deter accidental insertion of a Slot 1 processor card, but the upshot for using the same slot connector was that motherboard makers are able to use the same part for both Slot 1 and Slot A boards, therefore saving on manufacturing costs.
I can't remember the name of it but wasn't there an attempt at a new expansion card standard that was either PCI or AGP mounted backwards?
@@MajorOutageI think it was demoed back in the 2000s but it never caught on.
@@MajorOutage Hello, maybe the Vesa Local Bus connector? It was located at the end of the 16 BIT ISA slot and used the same 116-pin connector used by IBM proprietary MCA cards but rotated by 180 degrees.
I noticed that on another video. I was also told the power was switched. But, I never looked that up.
@@MajorOutage Do you mean "ACR"? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Communications_Riser
My first build for going to LAN parties was a 1GHz slot A with 1 GB RAM and a GeForce 4 TI 4600, good times with that PC! I had that ASUS K7M I worked at Best Buy and got a super deal on an open box HP, all I did was order a custom BIOS chip off eBay, loved that it still had an ISA slot so I was able to keep rocking the AWE64 Gold until the OG Audigy Platinum came out.
Slot-A is not overlooked at all. It's just absurdly rare and usually obscenely overpriced for its performance level so it's just not an option for a practical build.
They're even more expensive than PIII systems. And we all know how much money THOSE can cost ...
My dad bought in 1999 a PC equiped with such a A slot Athlon 550Mhz, 320MB RAM and a 16MB VRAM NVIDIA Riva TNT 2. Such a good time.
UT never ran so well
that is almost identical to my 1999 pc
i went with a 650 mhz athlon though and only 256 ram at first and my video card starting out was a tnt 2 ultra.
after 3 months i upgraded the video card to a geforce 2 ultra
after 6 months i upgraded the processor to an athlon thunderbird 850mhz and the ram up to 320mb.
I love the Slot A platform - my first upgrade from the K6-2 350@380Mhz was to a Slot A Athlon 850Mhz - and it was an absolute beast... my PC was great, I bought a very cheap generic motherboard on the KX133 chipset, and replaced it later with Asus K7V motherboard (the best for Slot A Athlon back in the time) and it served me very well untill I was able to save up money for an Athlon XP 1600+. It was a great platform - very fast and easy to work with.
I think Slot A is a greatly underappreciated cpu and I've enjoyed several builds using them. My favorite of these, using a Shuttle Spacewalker AI61 and a 3DFX Voodoo 3, really is a lovely experience and every bit as good as any of my less attractive Slot 1 builds. Very happy to see you give this CPU some love. I will say that the most powerful Slot A cpus are very hard to come by, with usually only the 850 and lower cpus commonly seen. I've never seen any of the 1.0ghz models in person, and am limited to just a 900. Great video sir!
One thing about that era, ASUS was so terrified that Intel would prevent them from making a buck on AMD, the first K7M boards were shipped with boxes not labeled ASUS and there were no silk screen markings on the motherboard to identify them as coming from ASUS. I think it took them about 6 months to finally put their names on them.
I haven't watched the video in full yet but I already have the answer. These were so rare back when they were new that finding survival examples of the hardware is difficult.
The Slot A platform was very much short lived before moving to the very much more inexpensive Socket A platform that we all know and love. Sadly for those of us that missed out Slot A also missed out on overclocking via the golden finger connector boards. To those not in the know about this, the Slot A CPU's had a edge connector on the CPU that some clever people figured out could alter the CPU perimeters. The boards looked like a plug in thing with DIP switches. Very cool stuff.
Back in the day at my very first LAN party in early 1999 we had a member there who had a Athlon 600, overclocked that and installed my Riva TNT2 16MB, gave it a little overclock to produce some of the most insane 3DMark 99 results we'd ever seen. Great times!
I switched from a K6-2 400 to a Duron 700 in 2002 - what a boost. I wish I'd had a Athlon 600 in 1999. 😅
I have a Gateway Select Tower slot A 800 mhz Great Machine.Runs Windows 98se nice to see you using the platform
My first DIY PC was a Slot A Athlon 600Mhz CPU on an FIC mobo with a Matrox Millennium G400 32MB GPU. After putting this together I was hooked and have not purchased a prebuilt PC for myself ever since other than a couple laptops. Love to see your thoughts on these pieces of PC history.
Nice! My very fist DIY was a 486 machine with an AMD 486DX4-100. I wish I kept it and I don't know the exact parts also...
My first DIY was an Athlon 700 on an FIC board as well with a TNT2 Ultra. Great setup. Slot A components are just expensive now.
Slot A, when it came out, it was like unobtanium over here back in the day. Myself, and almost everyone I know went from Socket 7 to Socket A. I knew of one guy who had a Slot A board but his dad was from the UK I think?
I also didn't know anyone with Slot A... Socket A totally different story, it was very popular.
I was a complete Intel fanatic back in 1998, so getting anything AMD wasn’t even a thought in my mind 😂
@@mesterak I was still using an Amiga 1200 back in 1998 and anything with an intel CPU was considered evil to most Amiga users.
I actually bought a slot a board in the era here in Austria.. i think it was at computer company in linz back than@@philscomputerlab But i think i was the only person with a slot A machine though.. (Moved from a PII before that)
Thanks for covering this topic, Phil.
I have several Slot 1 Intel setups (P2&P3) and no Slot A. This video intrigued me! I'd love to try one. Thanks for sharing👍
I can't even find them! I barely remember seeing them in the wild back in the day too.
Intel strong armed everyone at that time...
Yeah! My understanding is it was short-lived (maybe 1-2 years) before Socket A took over. Fortunately, I was able to rescue one Athlon Slot A (550Mhz) with its mobo (Gigabyte) from my BFF out of a ewaste pile. I coupled it with a Voodoo 3 1000 found in the wild, to give it this exotic flavor :).
Of course you can't find them. There are crazy guys like me who have 10+ Slot A motherboards (and, no, it's STILL not enough) 😁
They were not popular in Poland either due to the fact that they were available in our country for quite a short time. I worked in a computer store where we assembled computers from January 2001 and even then Socket A was the king. I saw Slot A literally 2 times. One of which was my own :)
Its because those boards and Slot A Athlons are rare. Intel used Slot 1 for years but AMD switched to Socket A quickly.
That platform had maybe 8 months of life in it, because in 2000 people were still building Super Socket 7 AMD systems on the budget end, Slot A was sort of expensive. By the time Athlon got cheaper and got die-shrunk, the Slot was replaced with the Socket. All the 180nm CPUs are available in the Socket variant.
@@SianaGearz I got a good deal on a Celeron 1Ghz so I just ran that and later on got a KT266A / Athlon 2000+ (Later 2600+ that I got cheap).
Still got Slot A Athlon 800 and Irongate GB board fully functional. Bought them cheap after the platform "died"
@@jarok1891 That's good. Slot A systems have an advantage of usually having ISA slots, often 2 or 3, while these are harder to come by with a Socket A system, though it's often an easy fix of just adding the missing connector, but it's only one slot then. You can span a lot of generations of software with such a system.
As some who just got a Jabil Kadoka with a 650, this video is fantastic to provide some perspective. I'm so glad it's running, and I'll do absolutely everything in my power to keep it running. It's a real beast.
I was a teenager in '00 that always had my head buried in PC Magazine and PC World. I probably saw an ad for the very computer I now have.
IronGate (750) chipset had bugs in the early version, so was often locked down to 1x AGP - it could be overridden in some drivers - the later version which also had super bypass mode for faster RAM performance was ok, but would still get forced to 1x, you did get more ISA slots, typically, but I ended up regretting the lack of upgrade on my GA-7IXE4 (Socket A).
I regard slot A as merely a bridge before Socket A - Intel Slot 1 lived on through Pentium 2, and then bridge in Pentium 3, while the same class of Athlon replaced Slot A in Socket A - and there were never slotkets for it!
Really? I didn't know that, so thanks laddie.
I remember back in 2000 when a friend of mine had an Athlon based system (don´t remember the specs) but it was a Slot A because he opened the case to show me, and remember it was HOT!. Some years later, I´ve worked for many years building and doing support and never again I saw a Slot A platform (but I had plenty Socket A systems). Great times.
I actually had to search A LOT for my Slot A 800 Mhz Athlon and Motherboard. I have 6 retro PCs, I like the Slot A the most. The AMD chipset was a little messy back then. If you wanted the best performance you needed to get a motherboard with a chipset revision that had "super bypass" which greatly improved CPU to RAM communication. Also, the AMD chipset was AGP 2x (though nvidia drivers would fall back to AGP 1x when detecting the AMD chipset, as we can see in the video; not sure if a technical issue or nvidia just trolling amd) while intel had AGP 4x options for P3.
but like today with pci-e 16 vs 8x the agp buss speed barely affected card performance if at all. i had a slot a msi board with 2x agp an the geforce 2 ultra i had in it as well as the geforce 4600ti i put in it later still got benchmarks nearly identical to internet benchmarks of the day for those cards.
Thanks for reviewing Slot A. This CPU is rare on UA-cam, so it would be great to see a series of videos on this subject.
the slot A athlon thunderbirds have become even more rare , especially the 1ghz one. finding the socket thunderbirds is much easier. it's also easier to find the standard slot a athlons
I remember jumping on the slot A when it came out. Mine was an Athlon 500, which was the fastest they sold at the time. I don’t remember what mobo I bought for it, though…probably a Gigabyte or Abit since those were my preferred brands at that time.
I actually didn't realize AMD had a slot type CPU. Very interesting.
Oh it was expensive . I bought one on Launch. With an insider discount it was $700. that was the CPU,MB and 64 MB of ram
O how I wish I could get a decent gaming cpu, mb and ram for $700 all new today @@niyablake
@@niyablakeIt was for sure a departure from the bargain basement that was the K6 line compared to Pentiums and Pentiums II but the K7 was priced competitively with anything Intel could throw at it in June of 99, at 324$ the 500Mhz was an excellent value and the k7 700MHz wasn't cheap at 700$ but Intel was asking almost the same price for a 600Mhz P3, clock for clock it was always faster.
It started to loose the advantage at the end as AMD couldn't source fast enough L2 cache chips and had to clock down from 50% to 40% on the 800 and 850 and later to only 33% on anything faster (900-950-1000)
Shame. 1st 1GHz CPU was the Athlon.
@@RetroTinkerer I actually took a look at the cache speeds, and assuming the cache they used topped out at 350 MHz on all the CPUs (like on the Argon 700, Pluto 700 and Orion 1000), that means the Athlon 900 should have the highest ceiling. Clocking it to 1053 MHz would run the cache at 350 MHz.
Same with running a Pluto 750 on 878 MHz or an Argon 500 on 700 MHz
I had a Slot A 900 that I overclocked with chiller back in the XtremeSystems days. Many Slot 1 and Slot 2 as well.
Nice work Phil, good to see slot A getting some love, i had the Athlon 850 at the time, was rock solid.
I remember my first ever computer was a cyrix mII 233mhz rig in a packard bell. My second was a hand me down from my uncle and it was a slot A 750 mhz 512mb ram and geforce mx 440 64mb. Great little machine I had it until 2003 when it got replaced with the first computer I built myself which was an athlon xp rig.
Back in 2000 I had to tie that Slot-A bastard to the case frame using fishing line, as the mobo slot was loose, it was losing contact with the processor. Good times! :)
oh yes!!!
my slot a 850mhz athy was great . i eventually upgraded to a whole new pc (athlon xp 3200+) and the old slot a system went to my brother who didn';t need a high end system as he didn't play games really. it lasted a year after that before a capacitor in the PSU blew , and killed the system.
Slot A 800 Athlon + K7M + Voodoo3 user, checking in! It's a great platform though I can concur the Slot 1 probably has the better motherboard selection. I'm lucky enough to have my grandpa's original motherboard, though i've upgraded from his 500 mhz CPU. Looks like it was a good buy back in the day.
What revision do you have on that K7M? Does it support Super Bypass?
@@Erik.Lundberg It's the last revision as far as I know, i'll have to open it up to verify. Certainly the last BIOS revision. It does support super bypass.
one of my pc builds was a slot a build 750mhz athlon and i still have it today had to repair the motherboard but once the new caps were put on runs like a dream
My dad bought a new pc back in 2000. I still remember playing games on it. It was an 800MHz Athlon on an AOpen AK72 motherboard, 128MB ram and an Elsa NVidia Riva TNT2 32MB. It was a world of difference with the Pentium 1 120Mhz we had been using before. Still regret getting rid of it all those years ago.
Your father bought a solid pc. That was a powerhouse with the tnt2.
Our P3 550 broke from overheating. Got it 98 with a ati rage fury. I think the 35° room temps under the roof there in the summer were not ideal without case fans.
But our older 386 was fine. I wish this wasn't given away for free.
My first PC was a Athlon 800, made by Dell.
I loved my slot A 600mHz system. I ran it as my email server for years.
I also was somewhat checked out for the Slot A period, though for different reasons. The place I lived was extremely rural, and for a while from about 1998 to 2005 online games were beginning to require a broadband connection, so there wasn't much compelling reason to upgrade. Everything I still played was fine on my old Pentium 200 and VooDoo 2. So many years on, I think you have the heart of the matter right - there's just so much more in the Slot 1 platform, and so much more of it, that it's hard to pass up. I do see a fair number of Athlon and Duron systems, though, so maybe one day I'll have one to tinker with!
The first PC I ever built was a Slot A Athlon 650 with an Epox board. Great CPU!
I've got an old slot 1 system I need to get running, thanks for the motivation.
My first complete system build was a slot A Athlon system with a Guilletmot Geforce 256. I bought the Athlon from a long defunct specialty overclocking company. The put a nice three fan heatsink/fan combo on it. They setup and tested an overclocked a 500mhz Athlon at 750mhz. It lived out it's entire service life running happily at 750mhz. I replaced it a few years later with I think a Thunderbird chip.
NICE! Similar journey myself. Slot A 600Mhz Athlon to the amazing at the time TBird 1.3GHz. Fun times. 👍
Around 1998 my dad built me an AMD k6-2 at 333mhz, with Maxi Sound Muse sound card and an ELSA Gladiac 311. 1999 Im at college and probably playing Half-Life/Opposing Force, AvP, Jedi Knight, System Shock 2 during my free time that I bought with christmas money (if Im not modding or making map with worldcraft 😊). 1999 is a great year for pc gaming ! Never had a Slot A machine, it's quite interresting, especially the flawless install on win98 you got !
I've had good luck finding OEM Jabil Kadoka Slot A boards found in many Gateway Select, IBM Aptiva, and Acer S systems. It has all-solid caps. There always seems to be one or two available on eBay.
Yep. Solid boards.
I still have exactly the same board now. Sometimes I take it out and use it now. The Biostar M7MKA board has a layout very similar to the AMD Fester reference board. It was very nice to be a user of the same board..
Ah, those were the days. I remember transitioning from a troublesome Pentium 200 to a smoother Pentium 2 400MHz, and later to a Pentium 3 600MHz with a rather subpar motherboard. After making the wise decision to switch both the motherboard and processor to a more reliable combination of a Pentium 3 550MHz and an Intel motherboard, paired with a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra (TNT 2 Ultra), I found true bliss. This upgrade allowed me to run contemporary games at their maximum settings for the first time, all on the fantastic Slot 1 platform. It was a remarkable experience. Your video brought back a flood of memories, and I appreciate the trip down memory lane. Interestingly, up until this point, I wasn't familiar with the Slot A platform. Thanks for shedding light on that, and it's fascinating to learn more about the diverse paths our computing experiences took during that era!
Oh I had one Athlon like these, very steady CPU. I think I used with a Mx400 AGP, loved that machine! Thanks for the memories (DIMM, not DDR for sure)
The sad thing is, at least if you look on prices in Germany/Austria on Ebay (even over whole Europe) Boards are €€€ these days. Would be eager to try one again. I do still have some socket 462 boards with Athlon XP´s though.
Great platform. Around 2006-2008, I had 3 of these Athlon 700 in my classroom for teaching basic user tasks and office lessons. The other computers were different Pentium 4 configurations, some Socket 423, a few 478, but FSB400, and the only thing that seemed slow in the Athlons was the network, (also in the P4.): ADSL times, 256k/512K bandwidth, shared in a 100Mbs network. When I quit from teaching, I sold or gave away all the computers, except for the best working condition Soltek motherboard foir the Athlon 700 CPU, which I still have those today.
I had a slot a athlon 500. It ran windows 2000/98 dual boot. The gpu was voodoo 3 3500 with video input connected to ps1 for final fantasy. I mostly played counterstrike on it. I upgraded to athlon 800 and geforce ddr. Then went to socket a, maybe 6 months later. Upgrading was fast and furious back then. There was a goldfinger mod for the slot athlon where dip switches could overclock it but I didnt go for it.
Ah those were my heyday in terms of building PCs. I was a huge fan of AMD so I built several Slot-A systems. I recall it was incredibly difficult to make s stable/reliable system though. I worked in s PC manufacturer so I knew some AMD sales engineers; they provided me with some tips and sometimes patches, too, but I could never really overcome the flawed chipsets (AMD/VIA/SIS).
I LOVE my 900MHz Slot A Athlon + AMD 751 + Voodoo3 3000 + Win98 machine! It is so much fun. Glad to see some coverage of that platform.
Great video, also thanks for addressing the PSU 5V issue.
I still remember printing my music sheet for composition class with a dot matrix printer.
Nice throwback. I didnt join the amd bandwagon until socket462. You jogged my memory on this one.
Slot A was a good system Phil running Athlon 700 mhz on Octeck motherboards and of course Ati graphics.Had 20 machines running here in my İnternet Cafe in Ankara from 2000 to 2002.Never had any problems with them.Still have a 750 mhz Athlon and a Octeck mother board from Amd still brand new in the box.One day I might build a system again mate.Cheers from Turkey.
1999? Boy howdy what a year. Found some new friends in high school who got me into Half-Life and the broader world of pc hardware. Up until that point I had mostly been interested in the software side of things. What a time to be alive!
Nice video Phil, the AMD Slot A is by far my favourite CPU. 👍
My First Athlon was a Shuttle Board with 512MB DDR266 and a Athlon XP 2000+
Phil in 1999 I was in Melbourne Australia doing a religious experience. I went home at the end of 2000 to the USA. In 2003 I started my journey of building computers. I built 2 AMD Athlon XP systems. My first computer was a AMD K6-2 that I got at a salvage yard at a Thrift store. It smelt like cat pee. So, I cleaned it up. I had taken classes for pc hardware trade school in 2002. A lot of my knowledge of computers came from working at a Universities Surplus store. It was fun seeing all the different systems. Most of them are on your channel. Sadly, I bought a slot one computer but gave it to the thrift store. Just some of the computers I wished I had saved.
Was very rare we even seen a Slot A board / Systems back in the day, when Socket A/462 came around though, way different story. Fun systems IF you can find the parts for a decent price.
The Slot A Athlons were only around for a year. I remember the going advice for much of that time was to wait for soon-approaching Socket A and Thunderbird to get full speed cache as opposed to the slower cache of the Slot A Athlons. I followed that advice and I never knew anyone who actually owned a Slot A Athlon. Speed was increasing so quickly in that time period that if you could squeeze 6 more months out of your existing rig, you could get way more speed for your buck just waiting that short amount of time.
And they top out at 1000 MHz and there are no slockets. But you can put a 1400 Tualatin on a 440BX Slot 1 board that also accepts a Pentium Pro with a socket 8 slocket.
Back in the day the Irongate chipsets had many issues with Geforce cards. Driver lockups and freeze of the OS
I had one K7M back in the day, coupled with an Geforce 2 MX. It worked but it wasnt stable. Fun fact, these boards also had problems with Voodoo 2 boards. I couldn't get my Diamond Monster 3D II working. After a long search I found a working driver from Guillmote.
Right now I have a working Slot A set-up, with a Thunderbird Slot A. These CPU'S are awesome. 256 kb cache on full speed instead of the 512 kb of cache on 1/2 the CPU or even 1/3 or 1/4 of the CPU speed with Athlon 800 or higher.
I have mutiple Slot A CPU'S for nostalgia reasons.
The first PC i built totally from scratch by myself (dad had assisted previously) was Slot A, Asus K7M 700MHz K7 Gefore256. Still runs (mostly) and was super powered at the time. Great platform if you could get all the pieces working together.
Nice vid! I'm sure I read somewhere that slot A was pretty much the shortest lived platform ever and that besides intel causing trouble and maybe pushing AMD to switch package, once socket A came the new cpus were also much cheaper to produce so AMD were in a hurry to move people along to sockets, which may have made it so. Slot A boards seem quite pricey and rare from what I've seen. I had a pentium II back then and then missed slot A and went to socket A next. I've always loved the cartridge format though. Was very nice from a user perspective, easy to handle and very cool and cyber punk looking. I love my socket A, one of my favourite retro setups.
I had a Slot 1 motherboard in my prebuilt system and my friend had a Slot A prebuilt. Both machines were solid and had no issues running in terms of stability and he was able to get the 1GHz processor once that came out. A few years later I would build a Socket A system that would start off with the Duron 1.3GHz and moved onto an Athlon XP and stayed there for several years well into the Socket 939 era. In those days AMD's own chipsets were considered better than VIA but VIA came with more goodies.
thanks for this video Phil. Very interesting! I have the same motherboard and the K7 600 mhz on the 180 nm process. It is combined with a voodoo 3 2000.
What I really like was the thing about the power supply. I really like to update my power supply to a more modern one. As your system consumes 60 watt I think a power supply of 15A on the 5V rail will do just fine.
I think the system is a real sweet spot for playing retro games.
In my case, the voodoo3 might be a bit of a bottle neck, but all in all, a very beautifull system.
Personaly I use
Asus K7V mainboard
Slot A Athlon 700
Voodoo 3500 agp
Aureal vortex 2
Win98
Inwin A500 PC case
As main 90s gaming rig
Love the system. Glad you have covered slot A, looking forward to see more of it on your Channel. This is probably better than 440bx but pros and cons need to be compared on both
I haven't checked in for a long time. It's nice to finally put a face to the voice.
😀
I have a Pluto 650 on a Asus k7m with the P.O.S. Irongate chipset, superfast but goes flat on its face 95% of the time when you install the chipset driver and put agp on 2x. Best paired with a Voodoo 3.
Never had any issues with my k7M + Pluto 650 but I used a TNT2 and a VooDoo2, these issues were typical with any specific video cards?
@@RetroTinkerer Very typical, every agp 2x capable graphics card, including the TNT2 has guaranteed crashes when set to agp 2x, I managed to complete 3dmark99 once and the score was way better than a comparable P3 with a 440BX. You probably didn't have the agp driver installed or you used later detonator drivers that forced the agp to 1x. It is one of the jankiest bord I ever owned, very fast but that crappy AMD chipset combined with an also not issue free VIA southbridge is guaranteed keyboard smashing when forcing things. That's why I just put a voodoo 3 2000 agp in mine and it runs like a dream. Par for the course with AMD (and Intel with a via chipset) of this era really, socket 7, slot A and socket A all have agp issues until the nforce chipset released.
There was a reason on that most graphics drivers of that era downshifted to AGP 1X on the 750. I have tried Radeons and NVidia at 2X and its unstable. 1x no issue. Just a bandwidth loss to the graphics card. I have one and see a little bit w Spiderman. Most cases you don't notice. Having said that I am building a Slot A Tbird 900 w/ KX133 chipset board. I never had AGP issues w/ ALI, or VIA drivers. Socket 7 nor A. I also only used ATI Radeons, Matrox and 3DFX cards.
I remember slot A. I looked at it and thought it wouldn't last. Pin density and io connections were my primary concern. I never purchased one myself.
These processors were great overclockers. I had my Athlon 750MHz running at just under 1GHz with almost no effort!
I remember buying an AMD K2 350Mhz as my second computer build, and it crashed constantly. My next and First real computer was a Pentium 3 Slot 1 600Mhz. though windows crashed all the time, it was no longer random and for no reason. I have had a very hard time buying any AMD processors since. I did buy an AMD economy desktop board with 6 cores about 5 years back, but ended up staying with intel for my servers and have not regretted it.
Thanks for the video--we have come a long way !
Back in the day, crashes almost never came from the CPU itself, but the chipset and its drivers. But people with "intel money" mostly also bought good motherboards (440BX!) while the budget buyer often ended up with half-baked VIA stuff.
Come to think of it, it is the same today but CPUs are SOCs now, the "chipset" of yesteryear is in the CPU now, which is why even cheap boards work fine.
I still have my Asus K7M with my original 700Mhz Athlon I bought in May of 2000. Back then I used it with a GeForce 256 SE and 128MB Ram, now it has a GeForce 256 DDR and 512MB.
Does it support Super Bypass? It works with later AMD 750 chipsets and it provides a substantial performance improvement.
My roommate had a Slot A AMD Athlon which he had heavily overclocked. That thing was a beast. Later he got his hands on a Barton core AMD Athlon and a very nice MSI motherboard, proceeded to mod the motherboard and got a modded BIOS to push that chip to an insane overclock. He did not upgrade his PC again till well into the release of the Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64.
Interesting story Phil. I was more or less starting to check out from computers around 2000, and for similar reasons. What kicked my interest back into gear was when I randomly bought a PC magazine to read about the new 1GHz intel dominating Athlon 1000, Slot A.
As I got really deep into computers around 1999+, I still remember Slot A very much as it was the first time AMD trumped Intel to my knowledge at that time. At least in the hardware retails store where I worked part-time in that time frame, it was very popular.
My first home built PC was an Athlon 850, Slot A and clocked to 1050 with a golden finger device. I was disappointed when they switched to Socket A for the Thunderbird
There were also T-Bird Slot-A CPUs
There were a LOT of Really Fun Old Games in the 90's- early 2000's ... I wish I could find some again... I bet they would play Great on these newer PC's (sometimes)
I had some amd's back in the day. First new built desktop was k5-100, then i went to 566 celeron and later back to 800 duron. After that it was intell all the way. I have always had some retro stuff as a hobby but mainly i did some old unix workstations, sun, ibm, hp, sgi and then i got around to play with amigas again, still playing but now the hobby has evolved to old consoles too and other stuff. I also got inspired with different eras so had to get 286, 386 etc and noticed i got some old hardware in the storage so i wanted to also build some more powerfull stuff that i couldnt get back in the day. Core2duo+sli nvidia vs athlon 64x2+radeon crossfire, then it went to P3-550 vs Athlon socket a 550. Also went on buildin a all blue sempron build. Although couldnt find everything blue eg psu but its all blue/white like winter. Audio card was hard to find, a soundblaster from china but its blue :)
In 1999 is was 15 and I worked for a Computershop after school. After a few months I buyed and build my dream PC with an Asus K7M, an Athlon 800 with Pluto Core, and a Voodoo 3 3500. I loved it! And I still own it, but today I swapped out the CPU to a 1ghz Orion ❤️
My Slot-A system was burned by a defective power supply. Even though it wasn't that obsolete, the AthlonXP having come out not too long before, it was almost impossible to find a Slot-A board for sale at that point. I finally found one, but it was a super off-brand one, and the capacitors were garbage, the magic smoke ended up escaping from them. I ended up going to a Celeron on the Pentium 4 base after that, because I wanted a heat spreader and Athlon XP lacked that. I had both a Athlon 500 and Athlon 1000 chip at various points.
I run an Orion 900MHz on a FIC SD-11 motherboard and honestly it's performance just isn't what it's clock would suggest. I also have nothing but trouble with Geforce AGP cards and so use a Voodoo 3, which works for me, but the higher clocked slot As have a lot of drawbacks in addition to being somewhat rare. The right motherboard is definitely important.
The Slot systems came to market after I Bought my first Pentium.
In Germany I haven't seen the AMD A-Slot system in shops at this time. The Intel Slot system was available.
For all the pre build PC systems there was never a system with AMD ...
Thanks for shedding some lite on this story
Later revisions of the AMD 750 chipset had a feature called "super bypass" that improved performance quite a bit. Might want to check if that feature is available in the BIOS for your board.
Also the AMD 750 was limited to AGP 2x speeds. VIA chipsets like the KX133 (for Slot A) supported AGP 4x.
Earlier steppings had it too, it was disabled because of stability issues. There's software out there that can force enable it though.
I remember those days, and indeed Slot A was not all that common, all while Socket A that followed was huge (had two myself back then).
I found a "naked" Thunderbird 700 in some e-waste a while back, got me a GoldFinger and yeeeeeehaaaaw! That thing still posts with 1 Ghz but the last stable clocks are 900mhz in Win98. This is the only one i overclock because i dont wanna destroy the processor covers, and besides that its not even necessary to overclock since i own 900mhz Thunderbird and the classic 1Ghz, but for experiencing the things that i missed doing back then this 700mhz Thunderbird can take some beating.
I was very young (not even a teen yet) when the Athlon came out, but I still remember it vividly. Loved reading my dad's computer magazines and seeing all the anticipation swirling around the K7 architecture. AMD had a bad reputation at that point for over-promising and under-delivering, so it really sent shockwaves when Athlon arrived on schedule and somehow lived up to the hype. I've read that Slot A Athlon was a big commercial success for AMD, but most AMD fans like myself, being budget builders, could not afford the premium price. That might be another reason why it has less nostalgia and popularity among retro enthusiasts.
I missed out on Slot A because my Pentium II 400 based PC lasted so long, I used it right up until I built my Socket 754 Athlon XP system.
This brings back memories. At that time I bought a decent gaming machine: Athlon 500 with 128MB RAM on an ASUS K7M (in one of those oem packages), GeForce 256 DDR and a (I think) 6.5GB hard drive. The old days of lan parties with friends.
Happy to have a Slot A 500 and 750 systems
I love my slot A, had a 500mhz and upgraded to a 700mhz with a Ninja Freespeed pro OC card :) best CPU I still have in terms of overall fun.
Damn, all the memories. But by the time i could afford it, slot A was already out so... At some point, that space game threw me back to Final Reality and the early days of "modern 3D benchmarks".
I would say the board would be holding the system back due to the AGP as for slot ones it was rare to see back then, plus slot was short lived compared to sockets, back to the 440bx there was another chipset based on it that was newer and offered a wide clock range i just forget the name of it but i will have a look as i still have the board, but yes running at same clock as 440bx it still killed it due to the new AGP even with a basic APG card.
I finally found the chipset that replaced the 440BX as this chipset was really hard to replace due to stability and speed, The board that i jumped to after my shortly lived slot 1 funtime was the Asus CUSL2 with the 815E chipset.
I really WANTED to build a 1GHz Slot A system, but you're right - the parts are unobtainium. I've come across more 3dfx cards at the recycler in the past three years than Slot A motherboards - and 3dfx cards are a super-rare find!
Fun Fact : 3 years ago, i tried to see could an Athlon 600mhz play UA-cam on Windows XP SP3, because it was an offline computer until then. I thought that was impossible, considering that it is a processor from 1999. For sure, I couldn't believe that that old processor could play a video on UA-cam in 144p resolution. AMD Athlon Slot A and Diamond Viper v770, paried with Shuttle AI86 motherboard are an indestructible combination that has been running smoothly as a my personal retro computer for over 14 years.
The fact that it run GTA Vice City at respectable average of 20-ish FPS, even though it was an underpowered machine says it all.
I built a few Slot A systems for people but unfortunately that was also during the era of bad capacitor manufacturing. Within 3 years, all of the Slot A systems I had built had leaking caps and power regulation issues. :( I think I was big into Elitegroup motherboards back then…
I got Slot1 mobo with 550 Mhz p3, because caps on it were bad. Went to the electronics store and bought about ten 16v1000uF electrolytics-to which clerk asked if I was replacing caps on some motherboard or what🙂 After the fix it worked fine.
@@Tegelane5 Of course, years later I became quite adept at repairing old consoles and computer systems by recapping the boards... but at the time, I didn't have the knowledge or skills for that kind of work.
My MSI K7Pro with AMD ATHLON 700 Slot A always runs perfectly and my ASUS K7V-T to
Slot A was a beast. I had a slot A 800 MHz. You have to remember to install the Via chipset drivers otherwise you'll be disappointed. Or you'll be surprised if you used your computer without the Via chipset drivers for a while thinking it was working normal and then you install the drivers and boom, unprecedented performance uplift. The heatsink is a very bad design. You need to apply thermal paste to the cache chips also IIRC. So take off the housing, apple thermal paste and then apply thermal paste a lot in between housing the and the heatsink. Then it becomes really cool. Temps go way down. My friend one day brought me a 2 pin external temp sensor. Motherboard had a connector for it. I was able to watch the temps go down using the temp sensor after modifying the CPU with new thermal paste.
I have very fond memories of Slot A. We had a 350 MHz Pentium II machine in 1998, but it stopped working a year later, so we got rid of it and went shopping. The K7 CPUs had just been released to great reviews, and I was happy to get one - an OG 500 MHz "Argon" model, with an AMD750 "Irongate" chipset on a board by FIC (if I remember correctly). I gotta say, that thing was *fast*! Going from 350 to 500 MHz, I expected a ~50% increase, but it was way more than that, especially in tasks that made use of the FPU. (That was also a first for AMD: the FPUs were the K6 family's weak spot, but with K7, that changed completely.) It was rock-solid too; I never had any compatibility or stability issues with it. I used that system as a daily driver until 2005.
I owned one of these CPUs when they very first came out. It was a 650mhz model but I bought it pre-overclocked, which on these chips was performed by physically resoldering resistors on the slot a pcb. I don't recall the actual clock speed but I do know it was over 700mhz, at the time this was pretty much the best CPU performance available and I used the machine happily for many years - it was always a great gaming pc!
Loving the increased frequency in videos and great to hear you're an England fan 😁
Would love to see more videos on hybrid solutions for retro gaming. How to connect a retro PC to modern system for MIDI emulation. Raspberry Pi solutions, how to connect a modern PC to retro hardware etc.
With prices going up and reliability going down, it seems this is the future of retro gaming.
Keep up the great work 💪
My AMD 700 was a slot a and the biggest gripe I had with it was that my fans kept falling off of it. A common issue back then.
For several months there was someone in my local area listing a 'never used in box' Athalon system with a CRT monitor on FB marketplace. Asking price $120. I just looked and the listing is gone so they may have finally sold it. Anyway...seemed like a reasonable asking price and I was surprised it took so long to sell (I thought about it myself, but my collection is big enough already).
I came too late into the game to enjoy Slot A - My first system was the later Socket A/462 with the Athlon XP.
I only once got a Slot A board dumped in my lap ever - it was an impossible repair for me at the time. Badly leaked caps in a time before I got he grasp on soldering and electronics.
Slot A was very rare in my area back when I started out with PCs - Intel still was king 🙂
My first self-built PC was a Slot A AMD Athlon 600 system, back in 2000. I regret doing away with that thing, it probably would've made for a good retro PC nowadays. It was a great upgrade over the Pentium II we had before, and it worked very well for pretty much any Windows 98 or DOS game.
Nice video. Thanx. 🙂
The Slot A was created for the same reason as Slot 1 & 2, namely the issue of not being able to place (sufficient) cache on the CPU die, making them stop gaps introduced in desperation due to the need of introducing a CPU platform / socket that is proprietary enough (again) to not just be copied or contested by cheaper CPU / Chipset solutions.
And yes, this started with Socket 3, somewhat escalate with Socket 5 and had its peak with the Socket 7, when Intel alternatives both outpriced and outperformed their own offerings - sometimes at the same time.
Before the introduction of the CPU slots, CPUs of different manufactures shared the same socket and (mostly) chipsets, which meant that Intel quickly ran out of arguments as to why and in what way an Intel CPU was better. It didn't help either, or not Intel at least, that updating / switching to a different CPU was very easy because of this.
This essentially is what the "Intel Inside" jingle was all about - associating PC with Intel with Power.
To say Intel was ... displeased ... when the socket 7 turned "Super Socket 7" seemingly over night, still offering competitive performance despite essentially using "old tech", would be an understatement. And when AMD introduced Slot A on top of things, daring and succeeding to directly compete, Intel was beyond furious - and quite scared. So they doubled down creating even more advanced versions, hopefully a CPU with cache on die, while delaying AMD as much as possible by suppressing the HSPs. And it worked to some extend, which is one of the reasons why Intel got to two slot variants and AMD only one which didn't have many sales or a long shelve live.
Because of this, AMDs "Slot A" with its legendary "Irongate" (AMD-750) chipset, is rather rare and quite expensive to buy used today.
When the cache issue finally got solved, Intel started offering the "Socket 370" while AMD introduced the "Socket A" - both essentially a relaunch of their Slot 2 respectively Slot A offerings, only as socket CPUs. Both had good performance and a very long shelve live, as well as support from increasingly decent alternative chipsets from VIA and SIS.
For vintage computing the socket 370 is the better choice though, because you need less additional drivers, don't need the occasional AMD (timing) patch like for windows 98, and because native ISA support means finding a board with at least one ISA slot is a lot easier - never pick a PCI sound card for DOS sound if using an ISA card is an option.
Oh and a small warning since "proper power supply" was mentioned: ISA (sound) cards sometimes need not just +5V, but also -5V to work properly, which is something excluded from modern ATX power supplies. If you run into this issue, find yourself an older power supply, a board which helps you out with an additional voltage controller, or buying one such controller (off ebay).
My first build was a AMD K6-2 333. Was a great little system. I later that year upgraded to a Athlon 750-mHz slot A Thunderbird CPU and a FIC SD11 mobo. That board had almost nothing on it and was about the most basic board you could get, but it was stable. Paired with a trident TVGA AGP card and a voodoo2 card.