TR Forums

Oh, and this reminds me of the Maximum PC Dream Machine 2000. Every year, their dream machine is usually around $5,000 or so. But in 2000, they decided to go crazy and build a machine that was slightly faster than a $5,000 computer, but cost more than twice that much:

Dual 1 GHz PIII - $1,100 apiece
Server motherboard - $330
Dual 256 MB PC800 RDRAM - $990 apiece
64 MB Geforce 2 GTS - $400
Dual 18 GB SCSI hard drives and one 75 GB PATA drive

And a bunch more stuff, for a total of $11,987. It was absurd, even by dream machine standards. https://books.google.com/books?id=5gEAA ... 00&f=false

Makes me want to fire up some Action Half-Life.

Wait a minute, Virtual On? It was the only arcade game I'd spend all my money on... do you play it with the dual sticks? Or is it just the gamepad/keyboard?

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Like Rise of the Triad?

DO NOT play the reboot.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

Like Rise of the Triad?

DO NOT play the reboot.

I’m content to let it reside in the nostalgia area of my memories.

mikewinddale wrote:

Oh man, this is cool. And it brings back memories of my first computer.

We had a Gateway-brand PII-266 MHz, with a 66 MHz FSB and 16 MB of RAM, on a 440LX motherboard - the first PII chipset to support SDRAM and AGP.

Oh yeah, and a 4 GB hard drive. I remember that one of the first things we did was install the original Starcraft, that took up like 100 MB. I remember thinking, "Wow, 4 GB is so much! This hard drive will never be filled!"

And then we had an aftermarket PCI Voodoo3 that my brother picked up from one his friends who had upgraded to a better graphics card. Over the years, we also kept upgrading the RAM. I think we ended up somewhere around 128 MB.

That's similar to the computer I purchased back in 1997. A Compaq Deskpro 4000 with a PII-233, 32MB of RAM, and a 4GB hard drive. It was a very early PII system with the 440FX chipset, EDO memory, 16.7MB/s ATA interface, no soft power control, no AGP, and no USB. It was very unusual for an OEM PII machine not to have USB or soft power control; in fact, many P-MMX machines had these features (including Compaq's own P-MMX Deskpro 4000). I believe Compaq just took their older 440FX Pentium Pro motherboard and replaced the socket 8 interface with Slot 1.

Despite its high price, it was very slow for a Pentium II system. The use of EDO memory severely hampered its performance. Unless a program was extremely FPU intensive, it only barely pulled ahead of a P-MMX 233. Later on, I discovered that installing the P2-233 in a BX system with SDRAM resulted in a massive ~40% performance boost.

Thanks for the Max PC link! I'm going to be up till three in the morning...

Crayon Shin Chan wrote:

Wait a minute, Virtual On? It was the only arcade game I'd spend all my money on... do you play it with the dual sticks? Or is it just the gamepad/keyboard?

I always bust out the old Sega Twinstick whenever I'm in the mood for Virtual On.

setaG_lliB wrote:

Later on, I discovered that installing the P2-233 in a BX system with SDRAM resulted in a massive ~40% performance boost.

Wow, I didn't know that EDO was so much slower than SDRAM! I've heard of EDO, but I never "experienced" it.

There were some boards that had both on them. For once there was a good reason to upgrade as soon as you can. The DDR1 & DDR2 combo boards didn’t have as much reason to jump ASAP if I remember correctly.

EDO memory was meant for 486 and Pentium systems. It truly was suboptimal for the PII. Kind of like how the use of plain old SDRAM really hurt the performance of those early "value" P4 systems, before DDR took off.

mikewinddale wrote:

setaG_lliB wrote:

Later on, I discovered that installing the P2-233 in a BX system with SDRAM resulted in a massive ~40% performance boost.

Wow, I didn't know that EDO was so much slower than SDRAM! I've heard of EDO, but I never "experienced" it.

When I got my Pentium 133 MHz machine, I got 32MB EDO RAM. It was faster than regular RAM at the time. This was around the time that speeds increased exponentially each year.

Somewhat related to this thread, the boss recently brought in a slew of old family computers to be recycled and have the hard drives destroyed. There were a couple P4's (lap & desk), a S370 Coppermine Celeron, and a Pentium Classic. I decided to hang onto the latter for S&G's.

Pentium 166mhz (non-MMX)
430HX Board with 256k Pipeline Cache
32MB EDO 72-pin SIMMS
Onboard ATI 3D Rage w/2MB EDO
Onboard Yamaha sound
2.1GB WD HDD (removed & destroyed)
28.8 Dialup Modem (discarded)

Transplanted the board into a spare Corsair 200R w/Antec Earthwatts 380w, and chucked everything else. Added the following:
Syba PATA/IDE to Compactflash adapter
16GB Sandisk Compactflash Card (had spare)
New 2032 Battery (had spare)
Win98SE (still had an original disc)
MS Win98SE Update Rollup Disc (circa 2004)

I'd been wanting to test a PATA-to-CompactFlash adapter with an old PC for a while, and was not disappointed. It worked so well and seamlessly, there's really no reason to mess with old decrepit mechanical drives on vintage rigs anymore (unless you have nostalgia for that aspect of things; I certainly don't). The only issues I had were related to getting my input devices to interface with PS/2 (cleared out nearly all my old inventory a few years ago), and the original optical drive being defective, despite spinning up and the logic board identifying properly.

A few other interesting things of note:

• Sony not only still has a page for a 22yr old PC, but the link for the latest BIOS still works (which I used to go from ver 03 ->> v10)
• Once I actually had a working optical drive, the BIOS was capable of booting directly from disc
• The motherboard has a couple onboard USB ports, which I didn't think were included until Pentium II chipsets
• I happen to have an MMX variant of the P166 in my souvenir box, though I seem to remember differences in voltage (and the fact that MMX never ended-up being particularly useful)

Also, after I got everything up and going, my interest-level rapidly deteriorated.
He was supposed to have a 386-era PC somewhere (which I was much more interested in), but sadly, was unable to find it

mikewinddale wrote:

setaG_lliB wrote:

Later on, I discovered that installing the P2-233 in a BX system with SDRAM resulted in a massive ~40% performance boost.

Wow, I didn't know that EDO was so much slower than SDRAM! I've heard of EDO, but I never "experienced" it.

It's true. Many, many moons ago I had a Tyan board with slots for both SDRAM and EDO. Jumping from 64 MB of EDO to the same amount of SDRAM (damn you, TX chipset!) netted an easy 15% boost with a Pentium 233 MMX without changing anything else. EDO would definitely have bottlenecked a Pentium II.

From what I remember my leftover EDO went to an ancient Compaq with no L2 cache running a Pentium 90, bringing its total RAM from 16 MB to 80. That took it from being a bearable system for my mom to being a solid dedicated server for late 90s games when she wasn't using it... but that's a story for another day.

I wanted to build an old PC for retro gaming, but to be honest I loathe the design of old cases. I'm thinking on building something that can fit in a Cryorig Taku (just because it's pretty... I know it's super expensive for what it's worth)... wonder if there are parts that can fit that case (perhaps P4 parts rather than a PIII)

I rarely power it up anymore, but I've still got an old Gateway P90 desktop that I kitted out with 32MB of EDO DRAM and a Voodoo3. No Compact Flash drive, though it did gain the ability to boot from CD-ROM after I updated its BIOS.

Concupiscence wrote:

mikewinddale wrote:

setaG_lliB wrote:

Later on, I discovered that installing the P2-233 in a BX system with SDRAM resulted in a massive ~40% performance boost.

Wow, I didn't know that EDO was so much slower than SDRAM! I've heard of EDO, but I never "experienced" it.

It's true. Many, many moons ago I had a Tyan board with slots for both SDRAM and EDO. Jumping from 64 MB of EDO to the same amount of SDRAM (damn you, TX chipset!) netted an easy 15% boost with a Pentium 233 MMX without changing anything else. EDO would definitely have bottlenecked a Pentium II.

Likewise, I remember having a Pentium 100 on (I believe) a 430VX chipset with regular 72-pin SIMMS. Further down the road, we put the same chip on a 430HX board with EDO memory, and the seat-of-the-pants improvement was similarly tremendous as going from EDO -> SDRAM on the P-II.

The Egg wrote:

Concupiscence wrote:

mikewinddale wrote:

Wow, I didn't know that EDO was so much slower than SDRAM! I've heard of EDO, but I never "experienced" it.

It's true. Many, many moons ago I had a Tyan board with slots for both SDRAM and EDO. Jumping from 64 MB of EDO to the same amount of SDRAM (damn you, TX chipset!) netted an easy 15% boost with a Pentium 233 MMX without changing anything else. EDO would definitely have bottlenecked a Pentium II.

Likewise, I remember having a Pentium 100 on (I believe) a 430VX chipset with regular 72-pin SIMMS. Further down the road, we put the same chip on a 430HX board with EDO memory, and the seat-of-the-pants improvement was similarly tremendous as going from EDO -> SDRAM on the P-II.

I seem to remember finding a back of the envelope calculation suggesting that even 60ns EDO memory ran at an effective speed of somewhere around 15 MHz. It's incredible that most of the Pentium classic's effective lifespan was hobbled by such underperforming memory.

Concupiscence wrote:

I seem to remember finding a back of the envelope calculation suggesting that even 60ns EDO memory ran at an effective speed of somewhere around 15 MHz.

I believe 60ns was the latency to open a page; 1 / 0.00000006 ~= 16666667, which would be just shy of 17 MHz if you're doing completely random single-word accesses to different pages. So that's likely a worst-case scenario. Within a page I believe you could do one access per cycle of the bus clock, so up to 66 MHz depending on platform.

Concupiscence wrote:

It's incredible that most of the Pentium classic's effective lifespan was hobbled by such underperforming memory.

Relative to CPU core clocks, DRAM speeds haven't improved much since then, and latency has actually gotten worse. That's why we need such big CPU caches these days.

All this memory talk made me curious. Here are some AIDA64 cache/memory benchmark numbers comparing that old PII-233/EDO system to a few other machines I have kickin' around. The results are rather interesting.

Pentium II 233MHz, i440FX, 192MB EDO DRAM
Memory Read, latency: 140 MB/s, 350.4 ns
L1 cache read, latency: 1908 MB/s, 10.0 ns
L2 cache read, latency: 730 MB/s, 56.1 ns

Bitchin'Fast! PC'99 (Celeron 1400MHz, i440BX, 512MB PC100 SDRAM (CL2)
Memory read, latency: 780 MB/s, 139.5 ns
L1 cache read, latency: 11204 MB/s, 2.2 ns
L2 cache read, latency: 5870 MB/s, 5.9 ns

Athlon 64 (socket 939, 2.64GHz), nForce3, 2GB dual-channel DDR-440 (CL2.5)
Memory read, latency: 6668 MB/s, 63.1 ns
L1 cache read, latency: 42213 MB/s, 1.1 ns
L2 cache read, latency: 17832 MB/s, 20.2 ns

Core 2 Duo E8600 (3.33GHz), P45, 8GB dual-channel DDR3-1333 (CL7)
Memory read, latency: 10922 MB/s, 74.6 ns
L1 cache read, latency: 103.84 GB/s, 0.9 ns
L2 cache read, latency: 46610 MB/s, 5.6 ns

Core i7 4930K @ 4.6GHz, x79, 32GB quad-channel DDR3-2400 (CL10)
Memory read, latency: 64356 MB/s, 49.5 ns
L1 cache read, latency: 862.55 GB/s, 0.9 ns
L2 cache read, latency: 471.18 GB/s, 2.7 ns
L3 cache read, latency: 284.25 GB/s, 9.9 ns