Ancient Relic of A CPU

Heh, Slot 1 Pentium IIIs. I remember the 500MHz version was $700 in 1999 dollars and got completely left in the benchmark dust in just 2 years, and now we have people whining about how Intel charging $300 for a CPU that can easily last for 4+ years is a ripoff.
 
I still have quite a bit of old hardware around my house, including a 550Mhz P3 katami, and a 600Mhz P3 copperming in my retro rigs. That coppermine is a beast, it runs a 840Mhz at stock voltage.
 
Wish I'd looked after my pentium pro. had it sitting in open and the top is starting to get iffy. it's only the 256k version, not the 512 so probably not worth as much. Those dies must be absolutely huge. I'd be interested to cut it open in the name of SKY-ENCE.

I do have a gold top Cyrix 233 somewhere, about 20 K6-2 386s, Celeron 700 mobiles and all sorts of other shit. AMD386-SX too. They were plastic and had no heatsink! hahaha
 
Those Cyrix have enough gold in them for good gold scrap value. Or keep it and wait as time goes by and it will be worth hundreds to a collector.
 
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Palladium@SG said:
Heh, Slot 1 Pentium IIIs. I remember the 500MHz version was $700 in 1999 dollars and got completely left in the benchmark dust in just 2 years, and now we have people whining about how Intel charging $300 for a CPU that can easily last for 4+ years is a ripoff.
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That is why we ran Celly 300's at 450, 333s at 500, or 366s at 550. I remember my roommate spent 2 grand on a P3 550 system and he was mad that my $700 BP6 system matched his in Quake 3.

I ran that system for 3 years until the Athlon Tbird /KT7A Raid system.
 
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N4CR said:
Wish I'd looked after my pentium pro. had it sitting in open and the top is starting to get iffy. it's only the 256k version, not the 512 so probably not worth as much. Those dies must be absolutely huge. I'd be interested to cut it open in the name of SKY-ENCE.
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No need to ruin a perfectly good CPU by cutting it up, there are already pictures of those chips without lids. The Pentium Pro actually has two dies in it, not a single massive one. One die is the CPU itself and the other is the cache module:

PPro_Q0706_back.jpg


(Left is CPU, Right is cache)

LightningCrash said:
I want a P133 for my 1995 retro rig. Also looking for a Pro 200, Am486 DX4-120, or Am5x86-P75
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P133s are still pretty cheap on Ebay, so are Am486-120s and AM5x86-133s. Pentium Pros are a bit more pricey but are still available.

I'd offer you one of my P133s, but they're in sad shape. The tops are all scratched to hell and IIRC one of the chips was unstable and frequently locked up. I do have one Am486-120 and 3 AM5x86-133s but you'd spend less for them on Ebay.
 
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I threw two $1000+ Athlon 64 FX 57 chips in the trash a couple of years ago.

No regrets. Amazing how worthless, top of the range tech can get.
 
I always wanted a K6-III with a mobo that could take 4 meg of l3 cache!,

I had a 386 on a mobo that had cache on it, wish I still had that, seems to be such an oddity, the cache controller was as big as the 386 dx chip itself.

I donate an Amstrad ppc640 to a museum a few years ago, that was kind a weird system.

The socket 370 Celeron 366*cough*550*cough* chips have to be my favorite, I had some slotket adapters that jumpered the pins to allow smp on them, So I was actually running 2 processors at that point in time. I also miss the sandwich heatsinks that I had for them at the time.
 
luminousone said:
I always wanted a K6-III with a mobo that could take 4 meg of l3 cache!.
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I have a FIC board that has 2M of motherboard cache on it that acts as L3 if a K6-III is installed. It's more of a gimmick than a useful feature since the CPU has to go through the FSB (unlike a PII which had a dedicated backside bus for cache) and it's almost as expensive to access it as main system memory. The performance difference with it on vs. off was so small that it might as well be called margin of error.

The only time I ever measured a considerable difference with motherboard cache was the ones that had COAST modules for the Socket 7 Pentium. I benched my Pentium MMX 200 with a 512k COAST module and got 11-15% better performance.
 
AMP2000?

I'm Guessing "Athlon MP 2000+"

Before AMD launched their Opteron line, consumer CPU's were Athlon XP's and multi processor server/workstation type CPU's were Athlon MP's.

Only one core per socket in those, so if you wanted two cores, you needed two CPU's.

trick_m0nkey said:
Lol are Socket A processors officially considered "Ancient Relics"? I feel old...
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Yeah, feels like yesterday I was following the news as these came out.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
I have a FIC board that has 2M of motherboard cache on it that acts as L3 if a K6-III is installed. It's more of a gimmick than a useful feature since the CPU has to go through the FSB (unlike a PII which had a dedicated backside bus for cache) and it's almost as expensive to access it as main system memory. The performance difference with it on vs. off was so small that it might as well be called margin of error.

The only time I ever measured a considerable difference with motherboard cache was the ones that had COAST modules for the Socket 7 Pentium. I benched my Pentium MMX 200 with a 512k COAST module and got 11-15% better performance.
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I am surprised that any motherboard cache would make a difference to be honest. cache on the motherboard would be running at the memory bus speed and only buy a slight reduction in latency on a hit and not any actual throughput increase. Maybe a l2-less chip hits enough pipeline stalls while waiting for main memory that it makes a difference.

That said, I had a k6-2 at the time and really wanted a k6-3, I am a complete sucker for that sort of stuff =p. Wish I could buy an all sram main memory for something like that!

"Never enough!" -- Stalin on his death bed.
 
luminousone said:
I am surprised that any motherboard cache would make a difference to be honest. cache on the motherboard would be running at the memory bus speed and only buy a slight reduction in latency on a hit and not any actual throughput increase. Maybe a l2-less chip hits enough pipeline stalls while waiting for main memory that it makes a difference.
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COAST modules were actually considerably faster than main memory in the Pentium era which is why they made a noticeable difference. This was especially true on motherboards that still used SIMM memory, which runs asynchronously to the FSB. Really expensive fast memory in SIMM modules in those days only ran at 50ns (20 MHz) with more common memory being 60, 70 and 80ns (16.7, 14.28 and 12.5 MHz.)
 
GiGaBiTe said:
COAST modules were actually considerably faster than main memory in the Pentium era which is why they made a noticeable difference. This was especially true on motherboards that still used SIMM memory, which runs asynchronously to the FSB. Really expensive fast memory in SIMM modules in those days only ran at 50ns (20 MHz) with more common memory being 60, 70 and 80ns (16.7, 14.28 and 12.5 MHz.)
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Hey back then, ANYTHING made an improvement.;) Even the wind blowing in the right direction could help Quake go from 23fps to 25fps. When you have very little to begin with, every little helps.

We are now just used to when a tweak or considerable upgrade gives us a 0.5% improvement over a situation that didn't need it anyway.
 
I still have my FIC PA2013 socket 7 with a K63+ 450 that'll do 600 all day long. that was the first system I built, started with the original riva tnt, then added a voodoo II for glide. that voodoo was so much better for QII! Good times!
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
AMP2000?

I'm Guessing "Athlon MP 2000+"

Before AMD launched their Opteron line, consumer CPU's were Athlon XP's and multi processor server/workstation type CPU's were Athlon MP's.

Only one core per socket in those, so if you wanted two cores, you needed two CPU's.



Yeah, feels like yesterday I was following the news as these came out.
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Hehe or a pencil to bridge the traces. I remember getting dual xps running in a board for a buddy.
 
I'd have to dig around but I have a pile of old procs around as well including a few Pentium Pro's, 386's, even down to a couple of 8086 (8088) cpus. I remember one of my first PC's that had 4 SIPP memory slots. Thought I was big time when I upgraded the 4 64k ones to 4 256k and was running a massive 1MB of ram. Eventually got into the overclocking which is when I found HardOCP. I think the best overclock I had ever hit was on a Celeron 300A slot processor. Interestingly I drive right past Kryotech every day. They are still there in the same place but I dont think that they dont anything really related to PC's anymore.
 
zpackrat said:
I still have my FIC PA2013 socket 7 with a K63+ 450 that'll do 600 all day long. that was the first system I built, started with the original riva tnt, then added a voodoo II for glide. that voodoo was so much better for QII! Good times!
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I used to have three of those motherboards but two of them have since died. One of them died mysteriously and the other had a power transistor that went sad and burned a hole in the motherboard. I left for work one day and came back to a room that smelled like burning electronics. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from until I realized that while the case it was in had everything still powered on, it wasn't responsive and the screen was off.

The sad power transistor also took out my AMD K6/2 500, I was mad that day.

The last remaining board I have is showing signs of being on its last legs too, it won't POST reliably no matter what I do with it.
 
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