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The super socket 7 motherboards were amazing. They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though). Some of t

The super socket 7 motherboards were amazing. They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though). Some of these boards had both sdram and edo ram slots along with an agp slot, pci slots and an isa slot. So you had an era where motherboads could take a P-75 or an amd k6 550 cpu. They could take ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) or you could put in faster ram. You could run a pci grapchics card if it’s all you had or you could run an agp card. I used my old 486s isa soundblaster awe in that board for a long long time since pci was of no benefit for a soundcard. The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway and it was fun to be able to frankenstein computers so much back in the day.

mikestorrent 9mo ago
I did love that era, in terms of it providing a young frugal person with the opportunity to buy upgrades piecemeal. It felt like there was more generational overlap, as you describe, so it was possible to just go out and buy a new CPU, or a new graphics card, for a few hundred carefully saved dollars of birthday and christmas money, and get a sizeable upgrade in performance. That era is over, especially with the current pricing crunch. What I am hoping for is that this leads to a resurgence for all those used computers out there... plenty of great machines from the last decade that should have no problem being competent workstations for 90% of people's needs for the next decade onward if treated well. This is where open standards and open source truly shine.
- jandrese 9mo ago
  It was an era where there was actual competition in the motherboard space as different vendors tried to outdo each other with their northbridge and southbridge and especially the connection between them. Computer magazines at the time actually benchmarked motherboards. Then Intel and AMD slammed the door shut on that market by moving the important functionality into the chip and now nobody cares about the motherboard very much.
mikepurvis 9mo ago
Pretty sure I had a Pentium 4 mobo that was kind of like that in 2002-2003 timeframe. Was still rocking my old ISA Sound Blaster 16 (the big ass one with the connector for a CD-ROM drive) alongside a Radeon 7500 in the AGP slot. It wasn't much but I could run Alice, Max Payne, GTA 3, Dungeon Siege on there, all at like mid settings, so I was a pretty happy camper for a high school kid putting paper route money into my own PC.
- TheAmazingRace 9mo ago
  ISA slots were definitely rather rare on motherboards by the time you got to the Pentium 4 era, so that's cool that you managed to find one that also offered DMA, since I believe Sound Blaster cards needed that to properly function. I think I would have done the same with my AWE64 Gold if that was still an option for me in the early 2000s.
  - mikepurvis 9mo ago
    Having googled it a bit now, it's fully possible I have my wires crossed, since I know that P4 machine had the SiS 645 chipset which of course had built in audio. I definitely used the Sound Blaster with my 486DX100, and I recalled migrating it to at least one other machine after that; it was nice for the joystick port and also the better wavetable synth on classic games.
rasz 9mo ago
I posit the opposite. Super Socket 7 motherboards were a terrible choice aimed at suckers trapped by sunk cost fallacy. >along with an agp slot Non working AGP slot, or rather working until you tried to play 3d games with 3D accelerator actually using AGP features, then you got crashes no matter the chipset (VIA, ALI). Solution was switching to x1 mode, disabling sideband signaling or just swapping to a 3dfx card. 1998 with the release of Intel Celeron killed any possible K6 advantage https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/p_cpu.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/p_cpu.ht... ~120 yen to $1 Celeron 300A MHz 10,440 ~$90 K6-2/300 10,850 ~100 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/newitem.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/newitem.... ZIDA BXi98-ATX (440BX,ATX,AGP1,PCI4,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 15,800 ~$140 FIC PA2013 (MVP3,ATX,2MB,AGP1,PCI3,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 2MB cache 13,800 ~$130 >amd k6 550 cpu thats year 2000 >The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway You are comparing bottom of the barrel AMD CPUs with top spec Pentium 3s. Correct comparison should be against Celerons. January 2000 prices https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu.... K6-III/450 14,550 $140 K6-III/400 8,980 $85 Celeron 300A $57 300A@450MHz beats K6-III/450@550MHz in every possible benchmark. by June 17 2000 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu.... Celeron 533A 10,570 $100 Celeron 366MHz 7,700 $73 Duron 600MHz 9,990 $95 K6-III/450 24,800 $236 !??!!? K6-III/400 14,800 $140 K6-2/550 7,949 $76 K6-2/533 5,970 $57 K6-2/500 5,350 $50 $76 K6-2/550 is slower than $73 Celeron 366, not to mention pulverized in benchmarks if you happened to find Celeron capable of 100MHz fsb. Old slow ram makes K6 setup even slower. You would think the benefit were much cheaper motherboards, but even that wasnt the case. SS7 boards started at ~$75 while Abit BE6-2 was $90 and cheapest 440BX ones (P2XBL) $65. K6-2/550 3DNow! (100MHz Bus) $90 vs Celeron 500 $93 https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-2000-07/page/n305/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-2000-07/page/n3... Slot1 made much more sense, only release of K7 made AMD competitive again with Duron on the low end and Athlon way ahead of P3.
- whaleofatw2022 9mo ago
  ALi definitely had a shit AGP setup, but I never had problems with Vias VP3
lproven 9mo ago
> ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) EDO was from the 2nd generation of Pentium. It was not a 486 thing and I never even heard of any 486 that could use EDO. The 1st gen Pentium chips were 5V parts running at 60 MHz or 66 MHz. The 2nd gen were 3.3V and ran at 75, 90 or 100 MHz. The critical development for EDO was Intel's Triton chipset (the 82430FX) which added EDO support for about 15% more memory bandwidth. I ran the testing labs for PC Pro magazine at that time and Tulip Computers of the Netherlands sent in a Pentium with an SIS chipset that could detect EDO but not use EDO's timings, so it was no quicker. I wrote about it. (This was circa 1995. 486 introduced 1989. P5 (5V) 1993. P54C (3.3V) 1994.) Tulip threatened to sue. The board and some lawyers flew to London. I demonstrated that their PC could detect EDO and showed a message that EDO was fitted which did not appear if FP-mode DRAM was. I then showed that a machine with a 430FX chipset was circa 15% quicker with EDO than FP RAM, and the Tulip was the same speed. The threat of litigation was withdrawn and Tulip used our phone to make an international call to Taiwan there and then to shout at SIS. I worked extensively with this stuff. No 486s with EDO to the best of my expert knowledge.
- rasz 9mo ago
  A lot of SIS chipsets claimed EDO support, but with such bad timings there was no gain or even loss https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1378307#p1378307 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1378307#p1378307 "I see no performance difference between EDO and FPM" Legit 486 EDO chipset is UMC 8881E/F https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=93147 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=93147 "486 board with UMC 8881E/8886B: The winner is: EDO without L2 (if your only other option is L2 at 3-2-2-2)" TLDR: standard on any 486 motherboard L2 cache masks any EDO mode gains, even when EDO runs with fastest supported 3-1-1-1 timings.
  - lproven 9mo ago
    > with such bad timings there was no gain or even loss Yes, that is what I discovered, experimentally verified, and published -- in 1995 or so, some 24 years before that post. > Legit 486 EDO chipset is UMC 8881E/F I am not sure what you're saying here. This seems like a very messy mix of conclusions... * At least one 486 chipset can use EDO -- sure, no problem, I can believe that. But was it designed to use EDO timings? I doubt that: 486 family chips were fading legacy tech when EDO was first invented. * Quake benchmarks: Quake was hand-coded to interleave FPU and integer ops in a way that used an inherent property of the Pentium hardware design. I went into this in some depth in 2016 here: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49259.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49259.html The int/FP interleaving didn't work on any other CPU. Not on 486, 5x86, 6x86, anything. So small performance differences on a 486-class chip do not really tell us anything meaningful here, IMHO.
edem 9mo ago
I loved the olden era. When everything was new and amazing.

mikestorrent 9mo ago

I did love that era, in terms of it providing a young frugal person with the opportunity to buy upgrades piecemeal. It felt like there was more generational overlap, as you describe, so it was possible to just go out and buy a new CPU, or a new graphics card, for a few hundred carefully saved dollars of birthday and christmas money, and get a sizeable upgrade in performance. That era is over, especially with the current pricing crunch. What I am hoping for is that this leads to a resurgence for all those used computers out there... plenty of great machines from the last decade that should have no problem being competent workstations for 90% of people's needs for the next decade onward if treated well. This is where open standards and open source truly shine.

jandrese 9mo ago
It was an era where there was actual competition in the motherboard space as different vendors tried to outdo each other with their northbridge and southbridge and especially the connection between them. Computer magazines at the time actually benchmarked motherboards. Then Intel and AMD slammed the door shut on that market by moving the important functionality into the chip and now nobody cares about the motherboard very much.

mikepurvis 9mo ago

Pretty sure I had a Pentium 4 mobo that was kind of like that in 2002-2003 timeframe. Was still rocking my old ISA Sound Blaster 16 (the big ass one with the connector for a CD-ROM drive) alongside a Radeon 7500 in the AGP slot. It wasn't much but I could run Alice, Max Payne, GTA 3, Dungeon Siege on there, all at like mid settings, so I was a pretty happy camper for a high school kid putting paper route money into my own PC.

TheAmazingRace 9mo ago
ISA slots were definitely rather rare on motherboards by the time you got to the Pentium 4 era, so that's cool that you managed to find one that also offered DMA, since I believe Sound Blaster cards needed that to properly function. I think I would have done the same with my AWE64 Gold if that was still an option for me in the early 2000s.
- mikepurvis 9mo ago
  Having googled it a bit now, it's fully possible I have my wires crossed, since I know that P4 machine had the SiS 645 chipset which of course had built in audio. I definitely used the Sound Blaster with my 486DX100, and I recalled migrating it to at least one other machine after that; it was nice for the joystick port and also the better wavetable synth on classic games.

rasz 9mo ago

I posit the opposite. Super Socket 7 motherboards were a terrible choice aimed at suckers trapped by sunk cost fallacy. >along with an agp slot Non working AGP slot, or rather working until you tried to play 3d games with 3D accelerator actually using AGP features, then you got crashes no matter the chipset (VIA, ALI). Solution was switching to x1 mode, disabling sideband signaling or just swapping to a 3dfx card. 1998 with the release of Intel Celeron killed any possible K6 advantage https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/p_cpu.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/p_cpu.ht... ~120 yen to $1 Celeron 300A MHz 10,440 ~$90 K6-2/300 10,850 ~100 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/newitem.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/newitem.... ZIDA BXi98-ATX (440BX,ATX,AGP1,PCI4,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 15,800 ~$140 FIC PA2013 (MVP3,ATX,2MB,AGP1,PCI3,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 2MB cache 13,800 ~$130 >amd k6 550 cpu thats year 2000 >The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway You are comparing bottom of the barrel AMD CPUs with top spec Pentium 3s. Correct comparison should be against Celerons. January 2000 prices https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu.... K6-III/450 14,550 $140 K6-III/400 8,980 $85 Celeron 300A $57 300A@450MHz beats K6-III/450@550MHz in every possible benchmark. by June 17 2000 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu.html https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu.... Celeron 533A 10,570 $100 Celeron 366MHz 7,700 $73 Duron 600MHz 9,990 $95 K6-III/450 24,800 $236 !??!!? K6-III/400 14,800 $140 K6-2/550 7,949 $76 K6-2/533 5,970 $57 K6-2/500 5,350 $50 $76 K6-2/550 is slower than $73 Celeron 366, not to mention pulverized in benchmarks if you happened to find Celeron capable of 100MHz fsb. Old slow ram makes K6 setup even slower. You would think the benefit were much cheaper motherboards, but even that wasnt the case. SS7 boards started at ~$75 while Abit BE6-2 was $90 and cheapest 440BX ones (P2XBL) $65. K6-2/550 3DNow! (100MHz Bus) $90 vs Celeron 500 $93 https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-2000-07/page/n305/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-2000-07/page/n3... Slot1 made much more sense, only release of K7 made AMD competitive again with Duron on the low end and Athlon way ahead of P3.

whaleofatw2022 9mo ago
ALi definitely had a shit AGP setup, but I never had problems with Vias VP3

lproven 9mo ago

> ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) EDO was from the 2nd generation of Pentium. It was not a 486 thing and I never even heard of any 486 that could use EDO. The 1st gen Pentium chips were 5V parts running at 60 MHz or 66 MHz. The 2nd gen were 3.3V and ran at 75, 90 or 100 MHz. The critical development for EDO was Intel's Triton chipset (the 82430FX) which added EDO support for about 15% more memory bandwidth. I ran the testing labs for PC Pro magazine at that time and Tulip Computers of the Netherlands sent in a Pentium with an SIS chipset that could detect EDO but not use EDO's timings, so it was no quicker. I wrote about it. (This was circa 1995. 486 introduced 1989. P5 (5V) 1993. P54C (3.3V) 1994.) Tulip threatened to sue. The board and some lawyers flew to London. I demonstrated that their PC could detect EDO and showed a message that EDO was fitted which did not appear if FP-mode DRAM was. I then showed that a machine with a 430FX chipset was circa 15% quicker with EDO than FP RAM, and the Tulip was the same speed. The threat of litigation was withdrawn and Tulip used our phone to make an international call to Taiwan there and then to shout at SIS. I worked extensively with this stuff. No 486s with EDO to the best of my expert knowledge.

rasz 9mo ago
A lot of SIS chipsets claimed EDO support, but with such bad timings there was no gain or even loss https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1378307#p1378307 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1378307#p1378307 "I see no performance difference between EDO and FPM" Legit 486 EDO chipset is UMC 8881E/F https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=93147 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=93147 "486 board with UMC 8881E/8886B: The winner is: EDO without L2 (if your only other option is L2 at 3-2-2-2)" TLDR: standard on any 486 motherboard L2 cache masks any EDO mode gains, even when EDO runs with fastest supported 3-1-1-1 timings.
- lproven 9mo ago
  > with such bad timings there was no gain or even loss Yes, that is what I discovered, experimentally verified, and published -- in 1995 or so, some 24 years before that post. > Legit 486 EDO chipset is UMC 8881E/F I am not sure what you're saying here. This seems like a very messy mix of conclusions... * At least one 486 chipset can use EDO -- sure, no problem, I can believe that. But was it designed to use EDO timings? I doubt that: 486 family chips were fading legacy tech when EDO was first invented. * Quake benchmarks: Quake was hand-coded to interleave FPU and integer ops in a way that used an inherent property of the Pentium hardware design. I went into this in some depth in 2016 here: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49259.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49259.html The int/FP interleaving didn't work on any other CPU. Not on 486, 5x86, 6x86, anything. So small performance differences on a 486-class chip do not really tell us anything meaningful here, IMHO.

edem 9mo ago

I loved the olden era. When everything was new and amazing.