The Wildcat III Pro was my first non-consumer card... at that time I had moved to the Athlon MP using a Tyan S2462 board. Absolutely massive gear - housed it in an Enlight EN-8950 server case with redundant PSU's. That stuff was truly made to last; I'm sure it'd fire up readily to this day. After 386 and K6-2 I went to Socket A as well - have never been an Intel fan : ) thanks for this blast from the past !
My friend (who introduced me to PC gaming back in 1993) resurfaced after dropping PC's for years. By then, I was already going to LANS every weekend in our town, with a group of PC guys I'd met over the years. That old friend, who showed me Doom on his 486-DX2-66 back in 1993, he asked me to build him a super PC so he could come to the LANS and start gaming again. I asked him the budget, he didn't care. Just build me the best he said. SO, at that time, this meant an Athlon T-Bird 1Ghz and a Geforce 2 Ultra. He also bought a 21" Dell flatscreen that did 1600x1200 at 85Hz. He wasn't trying to show off (maybe a little). He reallly was into PC's and was blown away at how far they had come in the years he didn't have one. Money wasn't a problem for him at the time. So I built it and installed all the LAN games we played - Total Annihilation, Quake III, Unreal Tournament etc. And he came to the LAN. And everyone was just crowded around his PC watching 3DMark on loop for hours, instead of gaming. After about four months he got bored, and life was taking him elsewhere, so he called it a day and he sold me the entire PC (minus the monitor) for £300. That was less than he had paid for the Geforce 2 Ultra...
Thanks for sharing! I always love to hear these stories from the golden age of PC gaming :) .. Sounds like an awesome PC. The GeForce 2 Ultra was a real gem. I just recently acquired one after looking for quite a while.
@@vswitchzero They were super fast on release, but he paid £340 for that card. I thought he was insane. Double the price of a GTS and that was more than enough horsepower for what we played. I still have the GF 2 Ultra. Had to replace the fan, so I ended up replacing the entire heatsink with one from an FX5500 that fit exactly. The day we built the machine, we were playing Quake III with r_picmip 0 in 1600x1200 for hours. The next day the same. His girlfriend was getting upset, wondering why we were both constantly admiring the PC. She didn't understand how cool it was for us. Neither of us could believe how smooth QIII was playing in that res. The textures looked amazing.
The AGP Pro card you showed was a Dual Chip system, hence why it was AGP Pro. You can see thee is a bridge chip on the PCB directly above the slot. This allowed the 2 chips to work together as well as allow both chips to communicate across the AGP bus. Fun fact. AGP was Actually a faster implementation of the PCI bus, except it was mean for single device with a direct connection to the Northbridges. Its main benefit over PCI was the fact that the entire bandwidth was dedicated to the GPU rather than having to share bandwidth like PCI. It ran at 66Mhz rather than the 33MHz of PCI. AGP also allowed the GPU to have direct access to the system memory. this allowed the GPU to store textures in system memory if the onboard GPU memory was exceeded. Downside of AGP was it was less tolerant of FSB overclocking compared to PCI but thankfully chipset manufacturers implemented quite a few different AGP frequency dividers which was welcomed by overclockers, since back in the day unless you pencil modded your AMD CPU, your only recourse to overclock was FSB
I never had this cpu. When i went to USA, i have collected the "garbage" computer parts then i started to build my pc. I remember the free internet provider, netzero :D . Man, that was a real pain in the ass but free. I had all kind of cpus but thunderbird. You would be amazed what kinda of treasure you could find on the street. Thx for bringing back those memory's.
AMD Barton Mobile + Abit NF7S v2.0 + Samsung TCCD + GeForce 6800 Ultra + Audigy 2 ZS was my first enthusiast rig bought with my first job. Now I have again that rig except for memories and soundcard (OCZ Gold PC4000 and X-Fi Elite PCI) but I add to my collection a few mobos nForce3 (939 with an Opteron Denmark and AM2 with a Phenom Deneb), slot A with an Athlon Thunderbird and 775 with AGP and q6600. I love 2000's hardware 😄
I didn't knew you was so reluctant about building a Socket-A, but I think could hear some nostalgia in your voice when talking about these games... And as a bonus you got to play with that beast AGP pro card!
Haha yeah, you are right about that. I may have been reluctant at first, but the build brought back so many good memories. Both of my old socket A systems and of the games I played around that time too. I'm very glad I did it. Thanks for watching! 🙂
Heck yeah! That Wildcat is something else, wow! I'm glad you managed to put a functional build together after so much struggle with that motherboard. Way to go!
Thanks! Yeah it was a bit of a struggle for a while there. Thankfully most of the difficulty I had was due to the bad Athlon 1.33 chip that I kept trying to use. Once I removed that from the equation, the board was quite solid. I may keep an eye out for a high-end thunderbird chip for future use in the board.
You included lots of historical detail here, which is something I always appreciate. I feel similarly to you about the hardware but, as you say, it was a great era for some games. Nice to see some uncommon choices!
Thanks for watching! Haha yeah, I was debating whether or not to buy the wildcat card, because I wouldn't really have a use for it after this video, but it was totally worth it. It was fun trying it out and seeing AGP Pro in action 🙂
Haha yeah, Danger Den made awesome watercooling gear back in the day. Too bad they went under. I had a Danger Den TDX waterblock on the CPU as well if I recall correctly.
One thing on the SB Live!: It had 4 way positional audio. I think it was the first consumer card ever to support that. All serious games at the time, like Half-Life and Unreal engine games, supported it. It was my first 3D audio experience, and it was awesome. There were bundles with Cambridge Soundworks PCWorks speakers. I had this set back in the day. My son still uses the sub/amp of that speaker set on his rig today, so that tells a story about quality. I recently got a second set complete with the original satellites. That was the last piece of hardware I needed to recreate my 1999 setup (Gigabyte 6BXC, 300A@450, TNT, SB Live!). I think I threw out the SB Live! when I got a socket 775 board many years later.
Thanks for your comment! That’s right I forgot about the 4-way audio! I really need to explore the features of the SB live again one of these days. I remember the Cambridge sound works speakers too! Those were awesome and I remember really wanting to get a set back in the day but they were too expensive for me. Those and the old altec Lansing models were great 👍
Aureal had 3D audio, I don't remember i think they released it before Creative, but Creative bought them and stopped technology improvement decades. Best wishes.
@@ajax700 Indeed, I remember many games supporting both A3D and EAX at the time. I'd not say tech didn't improve in the upcoming years though. 4 way audio didn't have a long life expectancy anyway as DVDs with Dobly Digital 5.1 became common. 5.1 sound cards quickly emerged everywhere. But beyond that? Frankly, I can't even imagine how consumer PC audio could have possibly been improved any further.
@@Shmbler Creative acted delinquent through all their history. Creative cards are known for having CONS: bad drivers, compatibility issues not solved by creative with many chipsets, not being really compatible with features as advertised like good compatibility with older soundblaster cards, bloated drivers/software, cheap amplifiers on very expensive soundcards, etc., etc. Since forever, since soundblaster/1/pro/16/awe32/awe64/vibra, sb live, live 5.1, 128, audigy, etc. etc. Creative many times attacked / sued hobbysts for releasing improved drivers, or drivers for soundcards for new OSs they provide no drivers. Creative bankrupted Aureal by suing the hell out of them, they had a much superior and advanced 3D technology, hardware and software. Once bankrupted, it bought the company. They did nothing with their 3D audio technology. Sounblaster live!/Audigy never reached, much less surpassed what Aureal 3D can do. Creative bought Sensaura the company that developed the high quality and excellent features of Nforce 1 and 2 chipsets: Nvidia Soundstorm. What happened with Nforce 3/4/etc. audio? Realtek low cost audio. What did Creative do with that technology? Nothing. Creative could not release a PCI soundcard, as they never had true R+D. They bought Ensoniq for their PCI soundcards. There are many many more anecdotes but I'm tired already. Creative killed innovation on many audio fronts, but they have very good marketing and most people ignore this. Best wishes.
Both EAX (I'm sure) and A3D (at least I think so) positional audio parts were based on Microsoft's DirectSound3D API, which became available before Creative and Aureal launched their first cards for that. At least Terratec and Guillemot had cards out earlier which supported DirectSound3D with corresponding quadrophonic (4.0) output. Those were still ISA cards! I own one of those, a Guillemot Maxi Sound 3D. I got a SB Live! with my brand new Pentium 2 system in late 1998 and it was indeed awesome. A cool feature a friend at that point already used was the SB Live!'s capability to encode DS3D/EAX 4.0 audio into Dolby Surround Pro Logic which is also 4.0 but instead with a center channel and mono surrounds. Thanks to that people who already owned a Dolby Surround system could enjoy positional audio from PC games although with mono on the back speakers. Creative with the first SB Live! also launched a proprietary Digital DIN connector which could transfer 8 discrete channels digitally, way before HDMI was invented. Sadly thanks to the media industry it was only implemented on the highend Cambridge/Creative SoundWorks speaker systems, but not on AV receivers of the usual suspects (I still think to remember reading about Harman Kardon having an AV receiver model with Digital DIN ready, but I've yet to find the German PC magazin in which I think it was reported). Creative had to kill Digital DIN later under pressure from the media industry because they wanted their crap HDMI instead to force DRM on consumers. That's why only one third party model X-Fi, which had HDMI, can output lossless 5.1 gaming audio. All other X-Fi cards can only output analog or compressed digital bitstreams which was pathetic.
Thanks, Mike! Was a lot of back tracking trying to find parts that weren't dead, but in the end it turned out to be a great combination I think. Thanks for watching! Looking forward to seeing your video as well 🙂
10:30 One of the tricks I learned on these CPUs was to get a very fine piece of sandpaper, place it on a flat piece of glass, and "lap" the bottom of the heatsink to improve thermal transfer.
4:18 DDR is a type of SDRAM. People keep referring to PC66/100/133 pre-DDR memory as “SDRAM” which it is of course, but they say that, meaning that DDR is not SDRAM…but it is, as is DDR2, DDR3, DDR4 and DDR5. 9:01 Pentium 4’s we’re not around at that time. The Athlon Thunderbirds were competing with Pentium III’s, it was the Athlon XP line that was competing (and beating) Pentium 4’s…for a while anyway.
Both good points - You are right, the Williamette P4s weren't released until very late in 2000. The Pentium 3s were very popular all through 2000 and into 2001 so they'd defintely be the chips competing with the Thunderbirds. This is a period of computing history that I'm not too knowledgable about, unfortunately :)
A bit late to your channel by the look of things but I'm enjoying what Im seeing! Used to have an Athlon 800 thunderbird back in the day and followed that up with a 2200 xp thoroughbred. I recall we had (and still have) a GeForce 4 MX440-t (TV out on it apparently) that never worked out of the box. Might be something you could fix based on your GFX card repair videos I've watched. From memory (which was a LONG time ago) it used to give beep error codes, a long beep followed by 2 short beeps, when it was installed.
Miss my socket A system. It's final form of sorts was, Athlon XP 2500+ Barton OC to 3200+, 2x 1GB xms DDR400, ati 9600xt 128mb, 160gb WD 7200 IDE, Abit Nf7-s 2.0. That nforce chipset was pretty good for its time.
The Socket A / Thunderbird combo was the very first PC I ever built myself in 2001. I eventually moved onto the Abit NF7-S + Barton 3200 in 2004 just in time for the release of Unreal Tournament 2004
The T-Bird chip one hot chip when overclocked... I remember using pencil to connecting the exposed L1 pins and that's when I to the dark side water cooling a machine.... Back then it wasn't normal to water cool a machine, compared to today it's normal
It's interesting to look at. I have similar Socket A PC that I slowly upgraded to be probably the fastest Socket A you can build. I managed to find mobile Barton CPU that runs at 2.5GHz, it's paired with nforce2 400 chipset and Radeon 3850 AGP. It would be almost usable today for browsing and some basic stuff if it was not lacking SSE2 instructions. That killed it some 5 years ago. Every modern browser requires SSE2.
Thanks! The mobile Bartons were awesome. I never owned one but a friend of mine did. He got some impressive overclocks out of it too. That's interesting about the SSE2 requirement in modern browsers. I didn't realize that.
Great build , great commenting , could feel the love of the personal retro history in your choices of hardware and software , great cards choices , keep up the good work ,trying to build similar system now , asus board , agp pro wild cat , live card , original hdd . P3 933 😀👍🏻
I absolutely broke an egde off my Duron back in the day... But I'm happy to say it still did work just fine. The only minor issue was that the Bios did not detect it as an Amd Duron anymore, just as some kind of standard Amd cpu IIRC. But I used it for several years after that! Oh the memories ;)
And I had a very similar Board, used the additional IDE connectors not for RAID, but to enhance the available disk-space. When I had 8 HDDs in and the RAM maxed (I believe it held 1,5 GB), it was a beast of a server, hehe
I used to have a wildcat 3110 AGP-Pro on a p4 478 and older wdraptor 10kdrives SCSI fond memories of video editing although after software compatibility issues with the wildcat 3110 I ended up going with Nvidia Quadro fx3000 g I believe it was yeah with the SDI output and input I'm just surprised to see another one of those cards what other kind of cool and unique especially when I was a younger guy doing my comp TIAA certifications before 08
I remember over clocking one of those bad boys to 1000 mHZ years ago. Smoke the processor and power supply after a few months but it was pride messing with me hahahaha
The original fan on the GeForce 3 is not defect. I had exact this sound for one simple reason, a small holding clamp on the fan for the two wires came up from time to time. Very hard to sea but check it, after I pulled the clamp back to its position, the fan works perfect without noise ;)
These days I hotrod retro software. For example 60.8GBs is stable for id tech 3 for all level compiles. You need a 8k display to really make the balls to the wall until x86 crashing version planned make sense.
Oh for simcity 4. Load it on a ramdisk. Even larger cities will run smoothly so long as the cpu and gpu can keep up! There's a bug (or poor programming) with the way it handles graphics assets. For example... Instead of referring to the same model of a house in memory, it loads another copy from the hard drive! This can also lead to what looks like a memory leak, especially with larger cities. The game is constantly reading from disk to load asset copies to ram. Sadly you'll have to have a lot of ram (as far as older systems go) 3-4gb for the game files on a ramdisk, another 2 or so to run it!
@@vswitchzero back with my ddr2 775 system I noticed that even my 8800gt was struggling to get high teens in fps. I made a ramdisk using an app creatively called RAMdisk and even my oddly clocked 575mhz ddr2 smoothed out any fps issues. Though I did notice that SC4 could use up my remaining 2gb lol. Made a 2gb ramdisk leaving 2 for SC4 of my 4gb setup. Cpu was a pentium e5300 overclocked to 3.2ghz.
Once we got an AMD slot A CPU and a slot 1 motherboard for free as defective units. We tried how high the flames will go if we insert the slot A CPU into a slot 1 motherboard and power it up :) At that time, I also had a Pentium 4 motherboard with an 1.6 GHz CPU. The board supported both SDRAM and DDR1 RAM modules. I never thought I could ever see DDR1 RAM work with SDRAM in the same board, at the speed of an SDRAM.
i loved those promise controllers back in the day, most of my computers had 6 or more hdds, at one point i even converted an old model 50 case into a scsi container for 7 external drives. tiny drives by comparison these days, but i had over 100 gig in 99. i regret the loss of the ibm ps/2 model 50 though, fastest 486 i ever had even though it was only a dx2 66. micro channel and all scsi.
Ahhh the Thunderbird.... how many times did I have to explain to some poor schlep that I couldn't warranty their CPU because they physically damaged it on install.
Have you done a drag race between CF and HDD? I see people changing HDD to CF in oscilloscopes and not really seeing a speed difference, ie, maybe it's limited by the ATA interface speed of the motherboard. I think they were Win95-ish era, so maybe ATA/33/66-ish. But then I talk to guys doing CF in DOS industrial systems and saying it's faster, but these guys don't specify hardware, ie, they might have something like Pentium200 or better, ie, faster interfaces. Basically the people making the claims never look at the hardware, just the CF. PS. I just realised, the HDD speed also matters.
Thanks for your comment! Can't say I've ever done a direct comparison (especially with old hard drives from the early to mid 90s). The transfer rate of CF cards can vary quite a bit, but the industrial cards I use are rated for about 30-33MB/s, which is way beyond what early IDE controller can do. Only UDMA/33 or faster could take advantage of those transfer speeds. Even with a slower controller, the biggest difference between the two is the access time/latency. Even if a HDD and CF card could saturate the interface, the near-zero access rate of the CF would make game/app loading feel much faster. If you were doing file copies (large sequential transfers), there would probably be little to no difference. Of course the awful bearing whine being gone is a huge plus too :)
Ahh Thunderbird.. I bought whole cart full of parts including Thunderbird 1.2Ghz at a local Fry's back in the day. Went home but no boot so took it back to the Fry's and the kid at the return section looks around the motherboard and cpu and connects the power to it and turn it on without heatsink on. Within couple seconds the core heats up and the computer shuts down. "Must be a defect CPU" Grabs a brand new 1.2Ghz CPU and puts it on and turn it on again without a heatsink. Same thing happens and burns another CPU. They didn't have any more of them in stock because they were so new so I asked for a refund and bought Pentium 3 1Ghz instead. Never looked at AMD until they came out with Ryzen 1800X.
My SocketA -system is a maxed out one :) Abit KT7A-RAID, mobile-Barton @2GHz (no help clocking higher, SDRAM is the bottleneck) with 150FSB, 768MB RAM, 140GB WD Raptor SATA (with PCI-SATA controller), Radeon X800Pro (Nvidia-cards just don't work with this mobo fully stable). And the sound cards: SB Audigy2 (for EAX), Aureal Vortex2 (for A3D), ESS Solo-1 (SB PRO in DOS), Gravis Ultrasound Classic 1MB. Dual-boots Windows 98SE and WinXP. I can freely change cpu multiplier AND FSB speed from DOS or Windows, so I can make this very slow easily. Tried to add Voodoo2 -card but Radeon drivers freaks out when Voodoo is installed. With Geforce I can use Voodoo but not stable enough.
It's easy :) Audigy2 has drivers only in Windows XP. Vortex2 has drivers only in Windows 98SE. ESS SOLO-1 is only for SB PRO support in DOS and uses port 220, irq 7 and dma 1. GUS is used only in DOS and uses port 240, irq 5, and dma 5. But now I got Orpheus II and swapped GUS and SOLO-1 out for it but the resources are still the same. Tried to get Vortex2 and Audigy2 to work same time in Win98SE but problem was A3D and EAX, both use a3d.dll for it so it's only one or another.
Wow, some serious nostalgia for me in this one. I ran an AMD Thunderbird 800, with a SoundBlaster Live, and an ASUS V7700 Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS, on an ASUS A7V motherboard as well, with some Logitech Z-something speakers. XD I think I was running a couple Maxtor DiamondMax 80GB HDDs at the time, iirc. It was a rather nice system layout for its era. AMD had the edge for a bit back then, for sure.
Yeah, XP wasn’t my first choice for this build. I initially planned to use Windows 2000 but ran into some weird DirectX problems. Since I was short on time to get it completed I just went with XP. If I could do it again, I’d probably go with 98 SE 🙂
DDR(1) pricey? And INTELs Rambus was....? 1400'Bird, GeForce 3 Ti500 and 2x256MB DDR 266MHz in Dual channel, Baby! Was THE(Bang for Buck) SHIT in late 2001 Denmark! Only thing left in 2023 is thé hot 1400MHz 'bird. (Never did like the AGP socket...)
![ILLSLICK - WINTER IS COMING [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dwTMeM1zIhQ/mqdefault.jpg)
The Wildcat III Pro was my first non-consumer card... at that time I had moved to the Athlon MP using a Tyan S2462 board. Absolutely massive gear - housed it in an Enlight EN-8950 server case with redundant PSU's. That stuff was truly made to last; I'm sure it'd fire up readily to this day.
After 386 and K6-2 I went to Socket A as well - have never been an Intel fan : ) thanks for this blast from the past !
My friend (who introduced me to PC gaming back in 1993) resurfaced after dropping PC's for years. By then, I was already going to LANS every weekend in our town, with a group of PC guys I'd met over the years. That old friend, who showed me Doom on his 486-DX2-66 back in 1993, he asked me to build him a super PC so he could come to the LANS and start gaming again. I asked him the budget, he didn't care. Just build me the best he said. SO, at that time, this meant an Athlon T-Bird 1Ghz and a Geforce 2 Ultra. He also bought a 21" Dell flatscreen that did 1600x1200 at 85Hz.
He wasn't trying to show off (maybe a little). He reallly was into PC's and was blown away at how far they had come in the years he didn't have one. Money wasn't a problem for him at the time. So I built it and installed all the LAN games we played - Total Annihilation, Quake III, Unreal Tournament etc. And he came to the LAN. And everyone was just crowded around his PC watching 3DMark on loop for hours, instead of gaming.
After about four months he got bored, and life was taking him elsewhere, so he called it a day and he sold me the entire PC (minus the monitor) for £300. That was less than he had paid for the Geforce 2 Ultra...
Thanks for sharing! I always love to hear these stories from the golden age of PC gaming :) .. Sounds like an awesome PC. The GeForce 2 Ultra was a real gem. I just recently acquired one after looking for quite a while.
@@vswitchzero They were super fast on release, but he paid £340 for that card. I thought he was insane. Double the price of a GTS and that was more than enough horsepower for what we played. I still have the GF 2 Ultra. Had to replace the fan, so I ended up replacing the entire heatsink with one from an FX5500 that fit exactly.
The day we built the machine, we were playing Quake III with r_picmip 0 in 1600x1200 for hours. The next day the same. His girlfriend was getting upset, wondering why we were both constantly admiring the PC. She didn't understand how cool it was for us. Neither of us could believe how smooth QIII was playing in that res. The textures looked amazing.
The AGP Pro card you showed was a Dual Chip system, hence why it was AGP Pro. You can see thee is a bridge chip on the PCB directly above the slot. This allowed the 2 chips to work together as well as allow both chips to communicate across the AGP bus. Fun fact. AGP was Actually a faster implementation of the PCI bus, except it was mean for single device with a direct connection to the Northbridges. Its main benefit over PCI was the fact that the entire bandwidth was dedicated to the GPU rather than having to share bandwidth like PCI. It ran at 66Mhz rather than the 33MHz of PCI. AGP also allowed the GPU to have direct access to the system memory. this allowed the GPU to store textures in system memory if the onboard GPU memory was exceeded.
Downside of AGP was it was less tolerant of FSB overclocking compared to PCI but thankfully chipset manufacturers implemented quite a few different AGP frequency dividers which was welcomed by overclockers, since back in the day unless you pencil modded your AMD CPU, your only recourse to overclock was FSB
I never had this cpu. When i went to USA, i have collected the "garbage" computer parts then i started to build my pc. I remember the free internet provider, netzero :D . Man, that was a real pain in the ass but free. I had all kind of cpus but thunderbird. You would be amazed what kinda of treasure you could find on the street. Thx for bringing back those memory's.
NetZero, now that's a blast from the past... !
Socket A was my first computer build in high school, and the Asus A7V was my first board.
AMD Barton Mobile + Abit NF7S v2.0 + Samsung TCCD + GeForce 6800 Ultra + Audigy 2 ZS was my first enthusiast rig bought with my first job. Now I have again that rig except for memories and soundcard (OCZ Gold PC4000 and X-Fi Elite PCI) but I add to my collection a few mobos nForce3 (939 with an Opteron Denmark and AM2 with a Phenom Deneb), slot A with an Athlon Thunderbird and 775 with AGP and q6600. I love 2000's hardware 😄
I didn't knew you was so reluctant about building a Socket-A, but I think could hear some nostalgia in your voice when talking about these games... And as a bonus you got to play with that beast AGP pro card!
Haha yeah, you are right about that. I may have been reluctant at first, but the build brought back so many good memories. Both of my old socket A systems and of the games I played around that time too. I'm very glad I did it. Thanks for watching! 🙂
@@vswitchzero Maybe do a video on Socket A overclocking? You got me interested on the barton at almost 3Ghz
Heck yeah! That Wildcat is something else, wow!
I'm glad you managed to put a functional build together after so much struggle with that motherboard. Way to go!
Thanks! Yeah it was a bit of a struggle for a while there. Thankfully most of the difficulty I had was due to the bad Athlon 1.33 chip that I kept trying to use. Once I removed that from the equation, the board was quite solid. I may keep an eye out for a high-end thunderbird chip for future use in the board.
You included lots of historical detail here, which is something I always appreciate. I feel similarly to you about the hardware but, as you say, it was a great era for some games. Nice to see some uncommon choices!
Thanks for watching and for the comment! Looking forward to seeing your #socketabuildoff video👍
Awesome build! Socket A is a platform I haven't used in a long time. That 3D labs card is so cool!
Thanks for watching! Haha yeah, I was debating whether or not to buy the wildcat card, because I wouldn't really have a use for it after this video, but it was totally worth it. It was fun trying it out and seeing AGP Pro in action 🙂
Nice ! That danger den 9800pro water block though 🥰 I still need to mess around with socket a
Haha yeah, Danger Den made awesome watercooling gear back in the day. Too bad they went under. I had a Danger Den TDX waterblock on the CPU as well if I recall correctly.
Man I remember Sparkle PSU's being very highly regarded back then. Great choice!
One thing on the SB Live!: It had 4 way positional audio. I think it was the first consumer card ever to support that. All serious games at the time, like Half-Life and Unreal engine games, supported it. It was my first 3D audio experience, and it was awesome. There were bundles with Cambridge Soundworks PCWorks speakers. I had this set back in the day. My son still uses the sub/amp of that speaker set on his rig today, so that tells a story about quality. I recently got a second set complete with the original satellites. That was the last piece of hardware I needed to recreate my 1999 setup (Gigabyte 6BXC, 300A@450, TNT, SB Live!). I think I threw out the SB Live! when I got a socket 775 board many years later.
Thanks for your comment! That’s right I forgot about the 4-way audio! I really need to explore the features of the SB live again one of these days. I remember the Cambridge sound works speakers too! Those were awesome and I remember really wanting to get a set back in the day but they were too expensive for me. Those and the old altec Lansing models were great 👍
Aureal had 3D audio, I don't remember i think they released it before Creative, but Creative bought them and stopped technology improvement decades.
Best wishes.
@@ajax700 Indeed, I remember many games supporting both A3D and EAX at the time. I'd not say tech didn't improve in the upcoming years though. 4 way audio didn't have a long life expectancy anyway as DVDs with Dobly Digital 5.1 became common. 5.1 sound cards quickly emerged everywhere. But beyond that? Frankly, I can't even imagine how consumer PC audio could have possibly been improved any further.
@@Shmbler
Creative acted delinquent through all their history.
Creative cards are known for having CONS: bad drivers, compatibility issues not solved by creative with many chipsets, not being really compatible with features as advertised like good compatibility with older soundblaster cards, bloated drivers/software, cheap amplifiers on very expensive soundcards, etc., etc.
Since forever, since soundblaster/1/pro/16/awe32/awe64/vibra, sb live, live 5.1, 128, audigy, etc. etc.
Creative many times attacked / sued hobbysts for releasing improved drivers, or drivers for soundcards for new OSs they provide no drivers.
Creative bankrupted Aureal by suing the hell out of them, they had a much superior and advanced 3D technology, hardware and software.
Once bankrupted, it bought the company.
They did nothing with their 3D audio technology.
Sounblaster live!/Audigy never reached, much less surpassed what Aureal 3D can do.
Creative bought Sensaura the company that developed the high quality and excellent features of Nforce 1 and 2 chipsets: Nvidia Soundstorm.
What happened with Nforce 3/4/etc. audio? Realtek low cost audio.
What did Creative do with that technology? Nothing.
Creative could not release a PCI soundcard, as they never had true R+D. They bought Ensoniq for their PCI soundcards.
There are many many more anecdotes but I'm tired already.
Creative killed innovation on many audio fronts, but they have very good marketing and most people ignore this.
Best wishes.
Both EAX (I'm sure) and A3D (at least I think so) positional audio parts were based on Microsoft's DirectSound3D API, which became available before Creative and Aureal launched their first cards for that. At least Terratec and Guillemot had cards out earlier which supported DirectSound3D with corresponding quadrophonic (4.0) output. Those were still ISA cards! I own one of those, a Guillemot Maxi Sound 3D. I got a SB Live! with my brand new Pentium 2 system in late 1998 and it was indeed awesome. A cool feature a friend at that point already used was the SB Live!'s capability to encode DS3D/EAX 4.0 audio into Dolby Surround Pro Logic which is also 4.0 but instead with a center channel and mono surrounds. Thanks to that people who already owned a Dolby Surround system could enjoy positional audio from PC games although with mono on the back speakers.
Creative with the first SB Live! also launched a proprietary Digital DIN connector which could transfer 8 discrete channels digitally, way before HDMI was invented. Sadly thanks to the media industry it was only implemented on the highend Cambridge/Creative SoundWorks speaker systems, but not on AV receivers of the usual suspects (I still think to remember reading about Harman Kardon having an AV receiver model with Digital DIN ready, but I've yet to find the German PC magazin in which I think it was reported). Creative had to kill Digital DIN later under pressure from the media industry because they wanted their crap HDMI instead to force DRM on consumers. That's why only one third party model X-Fi, which had HDMI, can output lossless 5.1 gaming audio. All other X-Fi cards can only output analog or compressed digital bitstreams which was pathetic.
Nicely done! We all knew/hoped you would not give this a pass.
Love the hardware you got for this one. Much better than I managed to gather!
Thanks, Mike! Was a lot of back tracking trying to find parts that weren't dead, but in the end it turned out to be a great combination I think. Thanks for watching! Looking forward to seeing your video as well 🙂
10:30 One of the tricks I learned on these CPUs was to get a very fine piece of sandpaper, place it on a flat piece of glass, and "lap" the bottom of the heatsink to improve thermal transfer.
4:18 DDR is a type of SDRAM. People keep referring to PC66/100/133 pre-DDR memory as “SDRAM” which it is of course, but they say that, meaning that DDR is not SDRAM…but it is, as is DDR2, DDR3, DDR4 and DDR5.
9:01 Pentium 4’s we’re not around at that time. The Athlon Thunderbirds were competing with Pentium III’s, it was the Athlon XP line that was competing (and beating) Pentium 4’s…for a while anyway.
Both good points - You are right, the Williamette P4s weren't released until very late in 2000. The Pentium 3s were very popular all through 2000 and into 2001 so they'd defintely be the chips competing with the Thunderbirds. This is a period of computing history that I'm not too knowledgable about, unfortunately :)
A bit late to your channel by the look of things but I'm enjoying what Im seeing! Used to have an Athlon 800 thunderbird back in the day and followed that up with a 2200 xp thoroughbred. I recall we had (and still have) a GeForce 4 MX440-t (TV out on it apparently) that never worked out of the box. Might be something you could fix based on your GFX card repair videos I've watched. From memory (which was a LONG time ago) it used to give beep error codes, a long beep followed by 2 short beeps, when it was installed.
Miss my socket A system. It's final form of sorts was, Athlon XP 2500+ Barton OC to 3200+, 2x 1GB xms DDR400, ati 9600xt 128mb, 160gb WD 7200 IDE, Abit Nf7-s 2.0. That nforce chipset was pretty good for its time.
+
I still have mine & a few nForce boards plus loads of memory
A T-bird 1ghz was my... 4th cpu I think, following a 486 sx50, a k6-2 300 and k6-2 500. Awesome chip.
Socket A is one of my favourites. Thunderbird is also one I had. Though it burnt out.
I've done 3d modelling in the past on xenon and nvidia quadro with 3d studio max. But I prefer to watch your 3dfx repair videos
The Socket A / Thunderbird combo was the very first PC I ever built myself in 2001. I eventually moved onto the Abit NF7-S + Barton 3200 in 2004 just in time for the release of Unreal Tournament 2004
The T-Bird chip one hot chip when overclocked...
I remember using pencil to connecting the exposed L1 pins and that's when I to the dark side water cooling a machine....
Back then it wasn't normal to water cool a machine, compared to today it's normal
It's interesting to look at. I have similar Socket A PC that I slowly upgraded to be probably the fastest Socket A you can build. I managed to find mobile Barton CPU that runs at 2.5GHz, it's paired with nforce2 400 chipset and Radeon 3850 AGP.
It would be almost usable today for browsing and some basic stuff if it was not lacking SSE2 instructions. That killed it some 5 years ago. Every modern browser requires SSE2.
Thanks! The mobile Bartons were awesome. I never owned one but a friend of mine did. He got some impressive overclocks out of it too. That's interesting about the SSE2 requirement in modern browsers. I didn't realize that.
I own a socket A computer that still works. It has a beautiful purple motherboard. I use to play DOS and some early windows xp era games.
Great build , great commenting , could feel the love of the personal retro history in your choices of hardware and software , great cards choices , keep up the good work ,trying to build similar system now , asus board , agp pro wild cat , live card , original hdd . P3 933 😀👍🏻
Thanks so much! Best of luck with your retro build 🙂👍
I absolutely broke an egde off my Duron back in the day... But I'm happy to say it still did work just fine. The only minor issue was that the Bios did not detect it as an Amd Duron anymore, just as some kind of standard Amd cpu IIRC. But I used it for several years after that! Oh the memories ;)
And I had a very similar Board, used the additional IDE connectors not for RAID, but to enhance the available disk-space. When I had 8 HDDs in and the RAM maxed (I believe it held 1,5 GB), it was a beast of a server, hehe
I used to have a wildcat 3110 AGP-Pro on a p4 478 and older wdraptor 10kdrives SCSI fond memories of video editing although after software compatibility issues with the wildcat 3110 I ended up going with Nvidia Quadro fx3000 g I believe it was yeah with the SDI output and input I'm just surprised to see another one of those cards what other kind of cool and unique especially when I was a younger guy doing my comp TIAA certifications before 08
Oh man. Kinda exact my build in 2001 era.
That Motherboard looks very simular to my ABIT KT7A Raid board that I own and just love the hell out of.
I remember over clocking one of those bad boys to 1000 mHZ years ago. Smoke the processor and power supply after a few months but it was pride messing with me hahahaha
Ahh Thunderbird. These were nice chips. They were rare, but there were a few Slot A thunderbirds made.
Vary nice setup.
Thanks! Was a lot of fun putting it together 🙂
The original fan on the GeForce 3 is not defect. I had exact this sound for one simple reason, a small holding clamp on the fan for the two wires came up from time to time. Very hard to sea but check it, after I pulled the clamp back to its position, the fan works perfect without noise ;)
Thanks for the tip! I will give this a try 👍
Saw you watercooled a Radeon 9800 Pro amd instantly subbed.
These days I hotrod retro software.
For example 60.8GBs is stable for id tech 3 for all level compiles. You need a 8k display to really make the balls to the wall until x86 crashing version planned make sense.
Nice... i water cooled a slot A athlon 650 back in the day. Everything was a custom loop back then 😅
Oh for simcity 4. Load it on a ramdisk. Even larger cities will run smoothly so long as the cpu and gpu can keep up! There's a bug (or poor programming) with the way it handles graphics assets. For example... Instead of referring to the same model of a house in memory, it loads another copy from the hard drive! This can also lead to what looks like a memory leak, especially with larger cities. The game is constantly reading from disk to load asset copies to ram. Sadly you'll have to have a lot of ram (as far as older systems go) 3-4gb for the game files on a ramdisk, another 2 or so to run it!
Interesting! I'll have to give that a try!
@@vswitchzero back with my ddr2 775 system I noticed that even my 8800gt was struggling to get high teens in fps. I made a ramdisk using an app creatively called RAMdisk and even my oddly clocked 575mhz ddr2 smoothed out any fps issues. Though I did notice that SC4 could use up my remaining 2gb lol. Made a 2gb ramdisk leaving 2 for SC4 of my 4gb setup. Cpu was a pentium e5300 overclocked to 3.2ghz.
Once we got an AMD slot A CPU and a slot 1 motherboard for free as defective units. We tried how high the flames will go if we insert the slot A CPU into a slot 1 motherboard and power it up :)
At that time, I also had a Pentium 4 motherboard with an 1.6 GHz CPU. The board supported both SDRAM and DDR1 RAM modules. I never thought I could ever see DDR1 RAM work with SDRAM in
the same board, at the speed of an SDRAM.
i loved those promise controllers back in the day, most of my computers had 6 or more hdds, at one point i even converted an old model 50 case into a scsi container for 7 external drives. tiny drives by comparison these days, but i had over 100 gig in 99. i regret the loss of the ibm ps/2 model 50 though, fastest 486 i ever had even though it was only a dx2 66. micro channel and all scsi.
Ahhh the Thunderbird.... how many times did I have to explain to some poor schlep that I couldn't warranty their CPU because they physically damaged it on install.
Have you done a drag race between CF and HDD?
I see people changing HDD to CF in oscilloscopes and not really seeing a speed difference, ie, maybe it's limited by the ATA interface speed of the motherboard. I think they were Win95-ish era, so maybe ATA/33/66-ish.
But then I talk to guys doing CF in DOS industrial systems and saying it's faster, but these guys don't specify hardware, ie, they might have something like Pentium200 or better, ie, faster interfaces.
Basically the people making the claims never look at the hardware, just the CF.
PS. I just realised, the HDD speed also matters.
Thanks for your comment! Can't say I've ever done a direct comparison (especially with old hard drives from the early to mid 90s). The transfer rate of CF cards can vary quite a bit, but the industrial cards I use are rated for about 30-33MB/s, which is way beyond what early IDE controller can do. Only UDMA/33 or faster could take advantage of those transfer speeds. Even with a slower controller, the biggest difference between the two is the access time/latency. Even if a HDD and CF card could saturate the interface, the near-zero access rate of the CF would make game/app loading feel much faster. If you were doing file copies (large sequential transfers), there would probably be little to no difference. Of course the awful bearing whine being gone is a huge plus too :)
Ahh Thunderbird.. I bought whole cart full of parts including Thunderbird 1.2Ghz at a local Fry's back in the day. Went home but no boot so took it back to the Fry's and the kid at the return section looks around the motherboard and cpu and connects the power to it and turn it on without heatsink on. Within couple seconds the core heats up and the computer shuts down. "Must be a defect CPU" Grabs a brand new 1.2Ghz CPU and puts it on and turn it on again without a heatsink. Same thing happens and burns another CPU. They didn't have any more of them in stock because they were so new so I asked for a refund and bought Pentium 3 1Ghz instead. Never looked at AMD until they came out with Ryzen 1800X.
My SocketA -system is a maxed out one :) Abit KT7A-RAID, mobile-Barton @2GHz (no help clocking higher, SDRAM is the bottleneck) with 150FSB, 768MB RAM, 140GB WD Raptor SATA (with PCI-SATA controller), Radeon X800Pro (Nvidia-cards just don't work with this mobo fully stable). And the sound cards: SB Audigy2 (for EAX), Aureal Vortex2 (for A3D), ESS Solo-1 (SB PRO in DOS), Gravis Ultrasound Classic 1MB. Dual-boots Windows 98SE and WinXP. I can freely change cpu multiplier AND FSB speed from DOS or Windows, so I can make this very slow easily. Tried to add Voodoo2 -card but Radeon drivers freaks out when Voodoo is installed. With Geforce I can use Voodoo but not stable enough.
How do you manage all those soundcards in terms of resource conflicts, IRQ etc.?
It's easy :) Audigy2 has drivers only in Windows XP. Vortex2 has drivers only in Windows 98SE. ESS SOLO-1 is only for SB PRO support in DOS and uses port 220, irq 7 and dma 1. GUS is used only in DOS and uses port 240, irq 5, and dma 5. But now I got Orpheus II and swapped GUS and SOLO-1 out for it but the resources are still the same. Tried to get Vortex2 and Audigy2 to work same time in Win98SE but problem was A3D and EAX, both use a3d.dll for it so it's only one or another.
Wow, some serious nostalgia for me in this one. I ran an AMD Thunderbird 800, with a SoundBlaster Live, and an ASUS V7700 Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS, on an ASUS A7V motherboard as well, with some Logitech Z-something speakers. XD
I think I was running a couple Maxtor DiamondMax 80GB HDDs at the time, iirc. It was a rather nice system layout for its era. AMD had the edge for a bit back then, for sure.
nice!
Shame, I had an A7A266-Deluxe 😊
Why XP instead of 98 SE or 2000?
Yeah, XP wasn’t my first choice for this build. I initially planned to use Windows 2000 but ran into some weird DirectX problems. Since I was short on time to get it completed I just went with XP. If I could do it again, I’d probably go with 98 SE 🙂
don't crack the die. lol i did that once but luckily my boss didn't make me eat it.
DDR(1) pricey? And INTELs Rambus was....?
1400'Bird, GeForce 3 Ti500 and 2x256MB DDR 266MHz in Dual channel, Baby!
Was THE(Bang for Buck) SHIT in late 2001 Denmark!
Only thing left in 2023 is thé hot 1400MHz 'bird. (Never did like the AGP socket...)
I cringed when you said NAH vidia. Its eNN vidia man.
Haha yeah, sorry about that. I just found out I've been saying RIVA 128 wrong too all these years :)