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PART 1: PARTS PICKING So what would your dream computer have been in 2000? I got my first "real" computer around then (not an old amd 5x86 out of a dumpster) and it was a Pentium III 500 MHz deal. Already outclassed by newer CPUs but still solid. ATi Rage 128. 128MB of SDRAM. Windows 98. Later on upgraded to Windows XP and it was my main college PC for a good while. But there were better parts! In 2000 there was this new i820 chipset which supported Rambus RDRAM. drat if it wasn't expensive but it clearly had better bandwidth than SDRAM. Pentium IIIs were clocking in at 933MHz or more, and with more advanced instructions. nVidia was stepping up their game and becoming a serious competitor to ATi. So now old computer parts are cheap (even RDRAM!) and I'm not a poor college student. Why not make a sick rig? Clearly I'd want an i820 motherboard and... oh. They're not actually that cheap. There's lots of i815 boards available but that was made as a "budget" chipset using the cheaper PC100/133 SDRAM. But what have we here... http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/rdram-avenger,151.html  Looks like there's a company selling surplus i840 worstation motherboards for $40. $40! Dual CPU boards! And it's a workstation chipset that supports up to 4GB of dual channel RDRAM. You could get it in 2000 for $$$ and put a decent video card in it. Might be tough to get a symmetrical pair of CPUs to go with it but with luck I might have a couple 933s by the end of the week. Then you got video cards. In mid 2000 you had the GeForce2 GTS and the ATi Radeon 7200 as top-of-the-line competing cards. The Radeon was better on release but nVidia improved the drivers for the GeForce2 down the road and it ended up being the better card. Only trouble is:  The higher end cards tended not to have DVI support. I guess because LCD panels back in 2000 were pretty garbage (bad scalers, ghosting, small size, dead pixels) so enthusiasts were sticking to high end CRTs. I won't be buying a CRT. My modern monitor has VGA support at least. So, any suggestions before I commit to any of this? Should I go AMD? 
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Aug 1, 2016 05:53
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EipIq8nnwas
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Aug 1, 2016 06:05
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Silver Alicorn posted:
with luck you can find good crts for free. understandable to not want one, in any case that InterView 28hd96 monitor carmack used was in my old dream build, alternatively the fw900 or whatever "widescreen hd crts"
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Aug 1, 2016 06:13
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Only one CPU?
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Aug 1, 2016 06:21
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i had a low end geforce2 and i remember playing max payne with it in 2001 pretty well that's my 15 year old pc gaming story i hope you liked it
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Aug 1, 2016 07:06
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weren't dual CPU systems a huge PITA back in the 98/2000 days? like lots of games not working at all so you'd have to spend time loving around setting CPU affinity and such? only the nerdiest of neckbeards had multiprocessor systems back then. is your retro system supposed to be realistic, or is it based on ~*~dreams~*~? also lol @ rambus, double lol @ slot processors
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Aug 1, 2016 13:04
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Slot processors own (they look cool) rambus was clearly superior to sdram for the short time before ddr sdram was available. you can get 2gb of rambus for $35 now so why not? going dual cpu is largely because of board availability. I may only bother loading one slot w/ cpu. games did not generally support multiprocessing until much later, I was thinking it'd be fun to see how well it worked for desktop applications in win2k or linux.
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Aug 1, 2016 13:41
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mishaq posted:i had a low end geforce2 and i remember playing max payne with it in 2001 pretty well I did thanks
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Aug 1, 2016 13:42
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I remember building my first PC when the Pentium III came out. they had 450 and 500mhz ones iirc, but I kno 500mhz for sure. like a month or two later they came out with a 550mhz processor and I remember feeling extremely betrayed. I was 13, and stupid enough to think 500mhz supremacy would last for more than a month. SO DEMANDING posted:weren't dual CPU systems a huge PITA back in the 98/2000 days? like lots of games not working at all so you'd have to spend time loving around setting CPU affinity and such? my rich friend build a dual slot-A P3 system soon after and yeah games weren't capable of running on it. he had to go into the BIOS and disable one when we wanted to play AoE or Warcraft or whatever (our neighborhood had pilot AOL DSL service so RTS games weren't interminable to play)
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Aug 1, 2016 13:46
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Silver Alicorn posted:Slot processors own (they look cool) they definitely did look cool, and they had some actual size and heft (because of the nonremovable heatsink I guess?) so it felt more substantial than a socket processor.
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Aug 1, 2016 13:52
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mom please don't pick up the phone I'm trying to play starcraft
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Aug 1, 2016 13:56
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for what it's worth I ~could~ pick up a more consumer focused i820 board for $100, and I might just because it has an ISA slot so I can load in a classic sound blaster or similar (which is a thing I would have done even in 2000)
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Aug 1, 2016 14:00
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maybe see if atomicthumbs has something kicking around
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Aug 1, 2016 19:15
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i have an old gateway somewhere but my computer stuff mostly skips right over the surrounding decade or so, minus a pentium 4 single board pc/riser board i've got around somewhere
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Aug 1, 2016 19:38
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wish I never dumped the micron pc with the 200mhz p2 and scsi hard drive / cdrom. Think it mighta got water damage but I dont remember. 1994 was a good year apparently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbjYkPKRm-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g15J44xB2zU moron izzard fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 19:43
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lilbro built a nice rig back in about 99 or so celly 300a clocked to 450 bx board canopus pure3d II i remember he preordered that card and waited like two months. i remember him downloading the matrix 2vcd set over 26.4 dialup. it took like four weeks.
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Aug 1, 2016 19:48
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i have a 450MHz pentium 2 and a 450MHz pentium 3 at home and both of them work fine the pentium 3 has a 3dfx voodoo3 3500 tv card, and i still occasionally use it to record VHS tapes into MPEG2 files
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Aug 1, 2016 19:49
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i forgot slot cpus existed and was really confused trying to figure out where the cpus went on that board. anyway, my first computer (that is, the first that was solely *mine*) was a dell with a p3-600. i had a voodoo2 in that beast and i think when i finally upgraded in 2005, i had it loaded with something like 192 MB of rams!!!! it got me through college until i got a real job. i hope you enjoyed my story
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Aug 1, 2016 20:12
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This is a p. excellent plan OP. I shelled out for my first PC in summer 2001, an early P4 with rambus (850 chipset). Owned bones. Mobo is still hanging on my wall with 512mb of rambus intact. I have a pentium 3 slot CPU sitting on my desk at work as part of my x86 museum. I even still have my original GeForce 2 GTS sitting in a box at home somewhere. I'd offer to send it but i'm almost certain it died a tragic death some time around 2003
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Aug 1, 2016 21:16
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Silver Alicorn posted:mom please don't pick up the phone I'm trying to play starcraft
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Aug 1, 2016 23:51
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Endless Mike posted:i hope you enjoyed my story I did  COACHS SPORT BAR posted:This is a p. excellent plan OP. I shelled out for my first PC in summer 2001, an early P4 with rambus (850 chipset). Owned bones. Mobo is still hanging on my wall with 512mb of rambus intact. fully sikh
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Aug 2, 2016 00:46
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yeah I will be buying a TESTED! WORKS!! geforce off ebay. also I'm this close *pinches fingers* to buying that workstation motherboard even though it doesn't come w/ an I/O shield.
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Aug 2, 2016 00:49
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Endless Mike posted:i forgot slot cpus existed and was really confused trying to figure out where the cpus went on that board. I did and I also approve of this project ca. 99 i built a k6-2 500 machine the whole family used. took me three days, and multiple trips to the computing store. i had only the barest notion of what i was doing and ofc there was no internet since i was reusing parts from the existing machine (2d video card etc). i am genuinely amazed it ever worked
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Aug 2, 2016 12:48
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please use a voodoo 2 just for the video pass-through cable.
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Aug 2, 2016 13:39
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Cool I found the manual for the workstation that motherboard is meant for : http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01137285 I went ahead and ordered it because it's just standard ATX footprint. will need to come up with my own I/O shield at some point tho Endless Mike posted:please use a voodoo 2 just for the video pass-through cable. 3dfx stopped doing that in 1998. I would like to see what are the newest games the geforce2 gts can handle
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Aug 2, 2016 13:50
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Er, ahem. This is a workstation build so I'll be running CAD software ONLY
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Aug 2, 2016 14:09
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Built my first computer around 2000/2001 with dual athlons in it running at 1.2 ghz. had to use windows 2000 since it was the only OS that supported more than 1 cpu. the only game at the time that supported more than 1 cpu was quake 3, but it was great for everything else as well back in the day when winamp would stutter when switching between tasks or whatever. never had any issues running anything else that I can remember my dad still uses it as CAD workstation
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Aug 2, 2016 14:37
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Silver Alicorn posted:Cool I found the manual for the workstation that motherboard is meant for : dx7 only  you can run half life 2 on it (or at least you could way back when, no idea if dx7 support has since been removed). "non-essential" items like nonexplosive barrels are only drawn at a short distance, so sometimes you would shoot and shoot and shoot at something, wonder why they werent dying, get closer and suddenly the barrel they're behind gets drawn 
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Aug 2, 2016 14:39
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I'm looking forward to Freespace 2 I mean autodesk
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Aug 2, 2016 14:52
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the option is there but its grayed out....maybe because its dx9+ hardware?
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Aug 2, 2016 15:25
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playing hl2 makes me sad. valve were so good at games. also i realized this 11 year old game has consistent physics, even with unlocked frames. how has that been lost 
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Aug 2, 2016 15:26
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Stealth Like posted:
it's a recursive acronym
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Aug 2, 2016 15:33
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Panty Saluter posted:playing hl2 makes me sad. valve were so good at games. tbf that 11 year old game has seen constant updates in those 11 years and is technically only a 2 year old game at this point (last time source 1 was updated). i'd actually be legit surprised if you can get hl2 running on c.2000 hardware at all at this point
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Aug 2, 2016 16:11
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Endless Mike posted:tbf that 11 year old game has seen constant updates in those 11 years and is technically only a 2 year old game at this point (last time source 1 was updated). still, so many modern engines tie frame rate to physics and it just kinda sucks
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Aug 2, 2016 16:12
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Freespace 2 hells yes :ltash: So it turns out what I thought was a P3 slot cpu was actually a P2  My 933mhz p3 is definitely a socket. Did they continue to offer the option of slotted or socketed throughout the entire life of the P3?
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Aug 2, 2016 16:22
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according to wiki, katmai (up to 600 mhz) and coppermine (up to 1100 mhz) came in slot 1, while coppermine t (1133 mhz) and tualatin (1400 mhz) were socket 370, introduced in 2001.
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Aug 2, 2016 16:28
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huh, odd This is definitely a slot 370 coppermine @ 933 with a '00 copyright on it
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Aug 2, 2016 16:38
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Endless Mike posted:according to wiki, katmai (up to 600 mhz) and coppermine (up to 1100 mhz) came in slot 1, while coppermine t (1133 mhz) and tualatin (1400 mhz) were socket 370, introduced in 2001. edit - anandtech did some reviews of desktop dual socket 370 boards back in 2001 this guys has wrote an article and talked about some possible motherboards for the tualatin Mr. Apollo fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 17:12
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COACHS SPORT BAR posted:huh, odd i'll update the wiki edit: lmao the header table says the socket 370 coppermine t was released in august 2000, but further down it says june 2001. i blame fishmech Endless Mike fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 18:49
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Silver Alicorn posted:PART 1: PARTS PICKING  Silver Alicorn posted:So, any suggestions before I commit to any of this? Should I go AMD? professional grade: SPARC
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Aug 2, 2016 21:41
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