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Couldn't help myself...
- Thread starter Brett B.
- Start date
Those ServerWorks boards really would be sort of wasted on gaming, especially a dual-CPU one. (Given that most games chronologically suitable for them don't benefit from multiple CPUs, and I don't even know if those boards had drivers for the non-NT variants of Windows.) The motherboard I ended up with I got in 2003 or so, when a dual Tualatin box was actually still potentially a viable solution for a "workstation" (IE, dual 512k cache PIIIs could still give even the fastest single P4s a solid run for their money), but the lack of AGP meant I'd have had to spend money for a really capable lots-of-VRAM video card instead of using a readily available AGP hand-me-down, and while the SCSI RAID controller was cool I *didn't* have SCSI drives to go with it. (And at the time the price differential between the two was massive; I don't remember precisely but I think it was on the order of 250GB PATA hard drives costing well under the price of a 73GB SCSI.) The price-benefit ratio just didn't add up to being worth my time.
Brett B.
Well-known member
They were common as mud back in the day but I haven't run across one in years. The one I had is actually the first PC I ever built from scratch - it started out as a dead motherboard that had a 900MHz Duron CPU on it that I got for next to nothing. It just sorta came back to life after several hours of messing with it and has worked great ever since except for one other instance where it appeared lifeless after being unplugged for a couple years. I ended up putting an Athlon XP chip in it, some sort of cool video card, RAM, don't even really remember now but it's a cool dedicated XP box now. I blame it for singlehandedly starting my love affair with Gigabyte branded PC parts.
As a sidenote, I am just now remembering that old PC hardware and discussions I had with my buddies about it. A lot of them were Intel guys, but quite a few of us were into AMD pretty heavily, myself included. It was kinda weird how similar hardware "felt" different running the same software - Intel chips seemed to kinda chug along with brute force but didn't do anything real fast, and the AMD ones would zip through the task and then choke on something odd for a bit. Just my observation. Hardware from today doesn't have that same feel.
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In the real world I never noticed much difference between Athlon Thunderbird boxes with DDR vs. SDR. Maybe it was a side effect of the kind of lousy chipsets all too many Athlons were cursed with at the time (looking straight at you, VIA) or maybe in the real world the theoretical increase in memory bandwidth just didn't translate to much of a gain. (IE, there weren't that many things that were memory-bandwidth constrained.)
I still have fond memories of my 1.33ghz Thunderbird. (It was a 1.33ghz instead of the 1.4ghz because, as was typical at the time, buying one speed grade under the fastest saved you a *ton* of money.) In sheer FPU grunt it stayed competitive with Pentium 4's for a good three or four years after I bought it, and it was *crazy fast* compared to the PIIIs that were its major competition when I bought it. I never quite felt the same love for the Athlon XP; I didn't bother upgrading when it was new because the T-Bird was fast enough, and when I encountered them my impression of them suffered because a lot of them ended up in really cheap, lousy machines. (Compaqs, eMachines, etc.) By that point I'd pretty much drifted into the Evil Empire's camp not because I cared for the P4 (I didn't), but because Intel won me over with the relative quality/reliability of their later motherboard chipsets. (The 865 is about when they started getting it right.)
I still have fond memories of my 1.33ghz Thunderbird. (It was a 1.33ghz instead of the 1.4ghz because, as was typical at the time, buying one speed grade under the fastest saved you a *ton* of money.) In sheer FPU grunt it stayed competitive with Pentium 4's for a good three or four years after I bought it, and it was *crazy fast* compared to the PIIIs that were its major competition when I bought it. I never quite felt the same love for the Athlon XP; I didn't bother upgrading when it was new because the T-Bird was fast enough, and when I encountered them my impression of them suffered because a lot of them ended up in really cheap, lousy machines. (Compaqs, eMachines, etc.) By that point I'd pretty much drifted into the Evil Empire's camp not because I cared for the P4 (I didn't), but because Intel won me over with the relative quality/reliability of their later motherboard chipsets. (The 865 is about when they started getting it right.)
Unknown_K
Well-known member
The Socket A Thunderbirds were 100 FSB so SDRAM vs slow DDR probably didn't matter that much and early chipsets sucked. Later Athlon XP's went to 133FSB/266 DDR, 166 FSB/333 DDR, 200 FSB/400 DDR and internal cache went from 256K to 512K. Once you get into the faster FSB then DDR speeds mattered especially the last generation chipsets with dual channel DDR.
There were both 100mhz and 133mhz FSB "T-birds". (The 133mhz variant is sometimes called the "Athlon C".) Originally the only major difference between Thunderbird and "Palomino", IE, Athlon XP, is the latter incorporated SSE instructions (the Athlon C is the last AMD CPU to only have 3Dnow!) and consumes slightly less power. (Thus allowing them to ultimately goose it up to 1700+ mhz.) It's also when AMD went to their Mickey Mouse "PR" rating, which always was something of a turn-off and maybe contributes to my lower level of respect for it.
And while there *were* good chipsets for the XP there were also a lot of really bad ones, like the depressingly common SiS products with the horrendous built-in video. My wife had a Compaq equipped with that when we started dating and, yeah, while maybe the CPU was okay the machine it was built into was *trash*. I upgraded (side-graded?) it with a Radeon 7500 I had lying around after seeing how badly it chugged and stuttered and that helped... some.
Unknown_K
Well-known member
Well I collect Athlon XP era motherboards and machines and have quite a few Via KT400a and Nvidia Nforce 2 chipset boards among others. I also have an original Athlon Slot A AMD chipset board running with SDRAM.
Back in the day my original Athlon XP board was a SIS chipset SDRAM or DDR1 board that was very popular ECS K7S5A SIS 735 chipset. I ran it with DDR and it worked fine till I upgraded and sold it (ran a Hercules Kyro II video card then a Radeon 9000 in it).
Back in the day my original Athlon XP board was a SIS chipset SDRAM or DDR1 board that was very popular ECS K7S5A SIS 735 chipset. I ran it with DDR and it worked fine till I upgraded and sold it (ran a Hercules Kyro II video card then a Radeon 9000 in it).
Yeah, my Athlon is a KT133 chipset that only supports a 200MHz FSB, meaning that I have to buy chips that end with a B (the ones that end with a C are 266MHz). Maxed out with a 1400MHz chip and 1.5GB of RAM it could run XP but I'd rather just use it as a 98 machine.
My T-Bird had the KT133A that supported the 266mhz bus. I guess to be fair to Via at the time that chipset was decent enough, it mostly got a black eye because the infamous Soundblaster Live! PCI bus issues affected it badly. (It didn't happen to me but some people suffered hard drive corruption.) I probably would have splurged on getting a DDR board and RAM if I'd bought everything separately but the CPU was a Fry's promo bundle that effectively made the motherboard cost about $20.
Maybe SiS made some quality products, but in the early 'aughts they'd built themselves a reputation selling their chipset products to the worst most corner-cutting OEMs. I didn't know anyone that would even give their "high end" offerings a second look after experiencing something like that terrible Compaq.
Maybe SiS made some quality products, but in the early 'aughts they'd built themselves a reputation selling their chipset products to the worst most corner-cutting OEMs. I didn't know anyone that would even give their "high end" offerings a second look after experiencing something like that terrible Compaq.
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Unknown_K
Well-known member
There are always some corners cut with budget motherboards that you can't really blame the chipset maker for. The ECS K7S5A was one of the better and faster FSB 266 boards out at the time it was sold and was one of the first to offer DDR support plus it was very cheap and stable. I do have a P4 SIS chipset 8x AGP motherboard in my collection and that board is a pain in the rear mostly because it has issues with not liking dual channel RAM ever after a recap (MSI 655 Max SIS 655 chipset).
CC_333
Well-known member
Back then, I to noticed something about AMD systems versus Intel ones.
For whatever reason, given otherwise similar configs (1 GB RAM, Windows XP, same graphics card), the graphics on the AMD system would feel strangely laggy compared to the Intel system, which felt fine.
This was on an AthlonX2-based MSI board, so that might've been it (I've noticed that that era of MSI boards felt kinda cheap, probably in part because of that lag).
I had used several Athlon64-based systems, both then and more recently, none of them have exhibited that lag.
c
For whatever reason, given otherwise similar configs (1 GB RAM, Windows XP, same graphics card), the graphics on the AMD system would feel strangely laggy compared to the Intel system, which felt fine.
This was on an AthlonX2-based MSI board, so that might've been it (I've noticed that that era of MSI boards felt kinda cheap, probably in part because of that lag).
I had used several Athlon64-based systems, both then and more recently, none of them have exhibited that lag.
c
Brett B.
Well-known member
MSI boards, especially of the era around '05, 06, ish were absolute shit. Total garbage. I took a two year computer networking degree program at a community college from '05 to '07 and we were required to build a PC from scratch using parts the school bought - at least half the MSI motherboards were dead by the end of the second semester. Almost all of them were dead by the time we graduated... think like around 30 of them total. It was so bad that we were scavenging parts from classmate's computers when they dropped out of school.
MSI is the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to PC hardware.
MSI is the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to PC hardware.
Brett B.
Well-known member
I also scored a Late '06 Mini out of the trash today (my boss threw it away...)
Works great, has a 1.83 Core Duo. I ordered a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo for it. I wanted one of these to use as a Windows server but ended up with a laptop instead - I may do some reconfiguring anyway. Low power use was my goal, the laptop PSU may still use less but takes up a lot more space on my rack.
Works great, has a 1.83 Core Duo. I ordered a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo for it. I wanted one of these to use as a Windows server but ended up with a laptop instead - I may do some reconfiguring anyway. Low power use was my goal, the laptop PSU may still use less but takes up a lot more space on my rack.
Brett B.
Well-known member
The Core2Duo upgrade on the Mini was successful - after about 30 failed attempts. The 2,1 firmware flash did not work exactly like the instructions I found said it would, then I had issues with the 1GB and 2GB memory sticks, and it would just not boot at all for a while with the Core2Duo installed. So after disassembling and reassembling way more times than was necessary, I discovered the intricacies of the Intel Mini, as well as a reminder to myself that the CPU socket has to be locked in place for the machine to function. Now I have a fully functional machine. :lol:
I do not have a 10.6 install disc - except for a 10.6 install disc that came with a late 2010 Mini that I have at work... is my best option to just pony up and buy the $20 upgrade from Apple or is there some way to make the disc I have work? It will boot to it but says I get a compatibility error when I go to install. Hate to spend $20 on old software if I don't have to.
I do not have a 10.6 install disc - except for a 10.6 install disc that came with a late 2010 Mini that I have at work... is my best option to just pony up and buy the $20 upgrade from Apple or is there some way to make the disc I have work? It will boot to it but says I get a compatibility error when I go to install. Hate to spend $20 on old software if I don't have to.
