Building a Socket A System Retro Gaming PC

[@QuantumBraced]

This brings a tear to my eye. My first system that I fully paid for and built myself was a Socket A system in 2003 when I was in high school. I saved for over a year to get it. It was an AthlonXP 2400+, 512MB DDR 400 RAM, Gigabyte GA-7VAX1394 motherboard, with a no-name brand nVidia GeForce FX 5200 with 64MB VRAM and a whopping 120GB Maxtor HDD. It replaced my 10-year old 486 DX 33MHz with 8MB RAM and a 200MB HDD, and completely changed my life. The 120GB HDD was the most expensive part of the system, but I'd been so sick of only having 200MB well into the 2000s, I wanted never to be short on space again and have the biggest HDD on the block :D

[@MaTtRoSiTy]

I have very nostalgic feelings towards this age too. I also bought my first computer that I completely paid for myself and was very similar in specs: Socket A GA-7N400 Pro2 with an Athlon 2600+, 512MB DDR 400 RAM, a 5600XT (cant recall the brand) with a 120gb SATA HDD that was the envy of my 'geek' friends as none of them had one of these crazy new SATA devices! That PC lasted me right up to 2006 (with a couple of graphic card, HD and Ram upgrades) and I couldn't count the hours of joy it brought me :)

[@kanopus06]

I had the GA-7VAX (VIA KT400 chipset with an Athlon XP 2000+), which I later upgraded to the 7n400 pro2 (nforce2 ultra 400), with 1GB DDR 400, a 160GB IDE HDD, an Athlon XP 2800+ and a Radeon 9800XT 256MB.

[@MaTtRoSiTy]

kanopus06 I would have been shamelessly coveting your upgraded system. I could only dream of the power of a 9800XT back then too!

[@kanopus06]

Yes, it was an expensive GPU back then, and performed very well with Half Life 2 and DOOM3 (50+ fps all the time).

[@QuantumBraced]

Oh nice. I didn't have SATA, my board only had IDE. SATA came out a few months after I built my system, and I was very jealous indeed of the new thin cables. It's amazing SATA is still around 15 years later...

[@ruthlessadmin]

Back in the day, I went with the ASUS A7V w/ a Thunderbird 1.0Ghz OCed to 1.4Ghz w/ the pencil trick. One of the most reliable systems I ever built.

[@ErikZarth]

I have 4 socket A boards that I still use today. Asus A7N8X-E deluxe, Asus A7V333, Asus A7V8X-X and an Abit NF7-S. I love AMD from early 2000s.

[@coreyisapushover]

I remember playing Need for Speed Underground on my AMD Thunderbird system with 256 MB of RAM. It's weird when I realize how long ago that actually was.

[@w00tDr]

The shape of the die indicates Spitfire core, so it's Duron 600-950. Duron 800 was most common, and you can still find them. Back in 2000, these were surprisingly good performers for cheap.

[@MVCZ1]

w00tDr Yes the 3D mark score really looks like my original pc setup back in the days when I had duron600 and this exact GF3Ti500 card. I was running the Duron happily overclocked to 933 MHz without any issues but it was still bottlenecking the geforce. The Ti500 card lived with me for quite long time (and survived few socketA boards upgrades as well as cpu upgrades) and was able to break 10 000 3DMark2001SE score, but this was with gpu overclock and also with AthlonXP fairly overclocked.

[@Code1D10T]

Still have my ASUS A7V333 with my original athlon xp 2700+ and radeon 9800xt. Still love it.

[@musiteufel]

Oh socket A was awesome.. I had a AMD AthlonXP 3200+ (2,2Ghz, Barton) on an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe mainboard with nForce2 Chipset, 4x512MB DDR400 and an ATI X800XT graphicscard running Windows XP. That system was awesome!

[@Vermilicious]

I was reminded that you could buy these shims to reduce the risk of damaging the CPU core, and also help a bit with the heat dissipation. Much has changed since those days. The CPU coolers are like night and day. Copper was new and expensive, and heat-pipes were even more so. The fans were nothing fancy, and usually their oil bearings dried up. There was no dual or triple channel memory yet and gigabytes was for the wealthy. PCI Express hadn't taken off as the new standard yet.

[@jonchapman6821]

Dual channel memory was introduced during the socket A era, then briefly taken away with socket 754.

[@ambigousBarrel]

Nice! I built a PC on this type socket recently after finding a old PC in a thrift store for £5.00. Ended up getting a new old stock motherboard and popped in a Athlon 3000+ with a Antec Power Supply from 2005 and a Nvidia 6800 ultra agp I had lying around and 2 gigs of Ram. It does a good job of playing games on XP :) I got the idea after watching your videos and can't thank you enough it has been a labour of love but I have enjoyed every minute of it! Thanks for the inspiration! :)

[@Laziter73]

Oh Socket A. I've had so much fun with that socket. I had a Abit AN7 motherboard, an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (T-bred) which I overclocked to about 2500 MHz using water cooling. It would post at little over 2600 MHz, but wasn't stable in Windows. I also had a GeForce 3 ti200 overclocked to little above ti500 speeds, I still have that card, Sadly my waterblock cracked after a few years and soaked the entire system with water. CPU and motherboard didn't survive that bath. Everything else was fine.

[@Trylen]

From the old socket 462 (a) days I was more partial to the nForce2 boards like the Abit NF7-S. More so because if you had a Barton 2500+ you could set it to a 3200+ and it didn't really know the difference.

[@Grzesiekk106]

my first PC (apart from Amiga 500) was based on Socket A. Sempron 2600+, 768MB of RAM, Radeon 9550 SE nad 80 GB hard drive... I remember running Stalker SOC and Minecraft on this thing. I have spent a lot of time playing older games like Call of Duty, Commandos and GTA (2 to San Andreas). good times :')

[@GendoPrime]

Ah Socket A, my old love. back in the day I ran an XP 2200+ on a Soyo Kt880 Dragon 2 V2 with a Ti 4200 and 2gb of Corsair XMS Platinum. That machine served me well until about 2007. I still have most of it, only missing a heatsink for it.

[@stuffinfinland]

Now just get a heatsink, a 19" CRT and bring them alive!

[@sandukanec]

nForce2 was the best choice for chipset back then :) I was using Elitegroup K7S5A, with Duron 950Mhz, 128Mb SDR, GeForce 2 MX400 and 20Gb Seagate 5400rpm HDD. Later i've managed to bought Athlon (Thoroughbred A) 2000+ and 2x512Mb DDR and the effect was WOW. And after cleaning my PC i forgot to put the cooler and i saw how AMD CPU burns for a second. Then i bought AsRock motherboard with Duron 1600Mhz. It was almost the same as the Athlon 2000+.

[@patchouli3422]

Nice to see Socket A getting a front row seat. Had myself a few scrapyard builds on the platform that I regret getting rid of.

[@NightSprinter]

Looking forward to this. Socket-A was the second platform I built a system out of my own pocket for. The system I had used a DFI LanParty KT400A board, AthlonXP 1800+, 2GB of DDR-400 memory, an 80GB harddrive, DVD and CD-RW drives, Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, steel version of what became Antec's LanBoy case, an 11g wifi card from D-link, and an SB Audigy 1. Lots of good times with that one. Games I played were: UT99 DooM 3 UT2k3 Age of Mythology Baldur's Gate and TRON 2.0 to name a few.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice, thanks for sharing!

[@izools]

that's an Athlon MP, Palomino core. Same core as the Athlon XP but on a ceramic PGA not an organic PGA, and predates the "+" rating. I'm guessing a 1.2GHz 😃 Some motherboards incorrectly detect these as Athlon XPs. The L1 bridges were also closed on these processors making overclocking by multiplier an absolute breeze... ahh, I miss my dual MP rig.

[@TobiasCarlsson1]

I got myself an AT form factor with Socket A motherboard (Jetway 849BS). Running an AMD Duron 850MHz with 128MB RAM. Really cool and works like a charm.

[@KasparOnTube]

there is one native SATA1 SSD what works with really early VIA SATA controllers fine - stec mach 8 (all other SSDs are SATA2 or 3 and will be not recognized by old VIA SATA controller) ;)

[@snp1200]

I have a nice Socket A build with a sempron oc to 1.9 GHz, 1,2GB RAM and Radeon 9100. In WinXP It's quite usable though firefox esr support for non sse2 cpus ended this month. Can even play 720p YT videos via smplayer nicely (with skiploopfilter enabled). I also have a Linux there, but it's just too slow in normal desktop usage, probably because open source driver, it ran much better with a gf4 mx400 with a closed driver. With a current linux I would need a newer nvidia agp card though.

[@johnreid8895]

I really like the mount that you're using. Much better than constantly changing stuff like this in a case.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea, I work on many different projects, cases are a pain.

[@RetroAdventure]

That is a beautiful test bench!

[@ViperBenchmarks]

I want to see on this system Quake 3 NFS Porsche 2000 Grand Theft Auto III Mafia Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Far Cry

[@philscomputerlab]

Annoyed that Mafia isn't available digitally anymore. Same with NFS games.

[@ViperBenchmarks]

Demo ?

[@NaoPb]

I bought Mafia before they removed it from Steam, so it's still in my library. It runs like crap on modern pc's. Crashes quite a lot. I think that may be the reason why they removed it.

[@marco_evertus]

man I wanna see every single game on that list played on this system you came up with a great list.

[@marco_evertus]

I think you can only get mafia from torrents at this point, however I am not sure if anyone is seeding such old stuff.

[@m9078jk3]

My very first custom PC build was a 1 Ghz Athlon Thunderbird system back in January 2001.I went that route rather than using the first Pentium 4 because such a system would be costly. However my system seemed too unstable somehow with Windows 98SE so I used Windows 2000 Professional on it and was satisfied.It couldn't run many of the older Windows 98,95 PC Games but it had no issue with the vast majority of the Windows XP era PC Games.

[@RetroPCUser]

And my guess for the processor is a Duron 0630 (600MHz) or higher. I had an Athlon XP 1700+ years ago before the BIOS chip got corrupted. Best motherboard to support DDR memory. I do have an Athlon 64 PC with 768MB DDR memory, Windows XP Pro SP3, 320GB SATA HDD, AHCI SATA PCI controller, the whole 9 yards.

[@xenoaltrax485]

Nice vid! Brings back lots of memories, my first ever PC build was a socket A platform: Athlon XP 2200 on an ECS K7VTA3v8 board. Thanks for the trip down memory lane XD

[@steliosp8041]

Geforce ti500 bought from ebay couple of weeks ago around 60?? I guess this is a 1ghz cpu. This card should do about 9k with 3ghz P4 or similar AMD. You need a 2000+ or more to make this card shine. KT600 or KT400 that you use has the limititation of AGP 4X, you could use a KT266A/KT333A mobo which can take up to 2600+ or even Barton and also bench Voodoo cards!! Performance loss is minor compared to the extra option. Keep up the good work:)

[@philscomputerlab]

KT600 is full AGP 8x of course and takes any Socket A CPUs like 3200+

[@steliosp8041]

Yes and the limitation of not taking AGP2X as i said..no Voodoo cards except 4500. But you can go as high as 3850AGP if you like

[@leondowdy5738]

I finally got my p4 board and CPU and GeForce 4ti 4200 128mb card in and working, at first need for speed underground crashed but I turned down to medium settings and we are good now running a p4 2.5GHz with 1gb ram and a 40gb regular hard drive bc the SD adapter was not doing right. Thanks for all your help Phil, you do great work btw, keep it up

[@njspencer79]

Ah Socket A my first Athlon. Brings back memories.

[@amnottabs]

just mounting the heatsink in that socket is a nightmare and deserves a whole tutorial for it

[@Imperious685]

I used to get about 6000 in either 3dmark 2000 or 2001 with a Duron 650 @ 800mhz and ti4200. I reckon this could actually be a Duron or athlon 600 at original speed. How about in this series using Doom 3 as a substitute for "can it run crysis?", but I guess ideally You would need a dx9 card for that.

[@guardianfrosty9724]

I´m simple man. I see Phil new video I press LIKE !!

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you!

[@ProjectGeek1]

This is definitely my next build. I want a nice Battlefield 1942 PC. Socket A should fit that task nicely. I'm glad you mentioned the die being exposed. I lost an old T-Bird 1.2 due to my Tt Volcano 9 crushing it :(

[@TableWolfMusic]

A friend had an ATI Radeon 9000pro and it was fast (especially the memory) so it was great for sparkly effects on games like Freelancer or for bump mapping on the Thief3 game or Loki when matched with athlon xp 2400/2600xp 333mhz-fsb or 2800xp/sempron 400mhz fsb. A 2100xp 266fsb was ok too. The slower 9000 (sans Pro) was like a Geforce4Ti so that should give some notion of what a faster 9000pro was like. The 9000pro was great to match with slotA or similar motherboard setups.

[@zevindd]

Would love to see an old Athlon vs Duron shootout, maybe overclocking the Duron? That is if you can find a working Duron still, lol. Nice system man.

[@JoshuaNicoll]

I have a working Duron 700 somewhere, however it's in the attic, man I miss that system sometimes,it was my childhood.

[@philscomputerlab]

Well that's a given! I just got to finalise some details of this build...

[@thomassmith4999]

My brother built a AMD machine in 2003 that was in the top 100 benchmarks in the world in 2003. I still have most of the parts. It has some kinda of Raedon card with a voltage mod and huge heatsink on it. A DFI lanparty motherboard and my brother tells me "a mobile Barton CPU" whatever that is. He tells me this is the CPU of choice for this era of gaming.

[@prozzac85]

Thi is going to be interresting. My first and second computer both ran on Socket A so much nostalgia for me :) I just wished that you used a faster video card, the Barton processors can easily handle a top end Geforce 7000 card. I'm just afraid that the geforce 3 will hold it back when it comes to testing the faster ones :(

[@philscomputerlab]

Swapping GPU is piece of cake :)

[@prozzac85]

Thats true :)

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

I miss good old builds like this

[@Storm_.]

Phil you should get a Matrox Parhelia! A really unique GPU with speed in-between a GF3 and GF4, but with better visual quality than both!

[@Dewotto]

I have an Athlon XP 3000+ XP build with an MSI MS-7021 which is a really nice board however I can't get front panel USB to work at all

[@Ironclad17]

I looked at contemporary reviews of socket a, and ddr memory options were very limited in the first year of launch. Reviewers pointed out how far off the maximum supported 2 GB of memory was when they were limited to 256 mb sticks and only 2 dimm slots on the few motherboards available and many said to stick to sdr memory till prices dropped, how familiar. Also 133 Mhz was the highest jedec rating initially.

[@Leeki85]

I had Athlon 1.3 GHz and Geforce 2 GTS Pro. It got about 4200 points in 3DMark 2001, so you probably have much slower CPU since, Geforce 3 should have higher score than that. I don't remember the exact score from 3DMark 2000, but it was a lot higher than from 2001. Maybe even 8000? So if you have similar score in 2000 and 2001 it means that CPU is the bottleneck. I would guess it's a 500-600 MHz Athlon or a Duron CPU. Athlons were very good CPUs, but they lacked Intel SSE instruction set, that made them obsolete really quick. At one point I had Geforce 7600 paired with that Athlon, but unfortunately every game from 2005 and later didn't run on this CPU because of SSE requirement. Later Athlon XP CPUs for that socket solved that issue, so they were an easy upgrade option.

[@brandonupchurch7628]

Either a T-bird Athlon or Spitfire Duron. Clocked at around 800-900mhz.

[@HeyImGaminOverHere]

This system reminds me of my first foray into Socket A which was the Duron 750(www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/AMD-Duron%20750%20-%20D750AUT1B.html) on an ECS K7S5A. Man that was a great budget setup. The nice thing is it could take SD or DDR memory and not only that but the Duron could be overclocked to 997MHz from 750 just by turning up the FSB to 133 from 100. I learned a lot about hardware with that setup. Great video Phil!

[@JamieBainbridge]

How cool is that open test rig!

[@Uraim]

YEAH I have this socket462 its pretty good for retro games. I have A7V8X-X motherboard and AMD Athlon XP 2500+ With Geforce Fx 5700 and 768mb ram Thats Awesome for RETRO :DDD

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice :)

[@Uraim]

@@philscomputerlab yeah :D

[@Uraim]

Gta San Andreas Tested with fx5700 yeah 25-35fps 720P And medium graphic

[@AlexM-uh7sq]

Socket A was a legendary platform. Great video as usual!

[@ND22M]

Another great video Phil! My guess would be a 700-800mhz processor! I would have one piece of advice for you: refrain from connecting one slow drive like a DVD-ROM with a HDD on the same IDE channel! Your videos about Athlon XP vs. Pentium 4 inspired me to build my socket A dream machine last year so I hope I am not intruding by listing its specs below:Athlon XP 3200 CPUAbit AN7 nforce2 ultra motherboard2*1gb Corsair RAMLeadtek GeForce 7800gsWD raptor HDD.

[@stonent]

Yep, IDE is limited by the slowest device and shares bandwidth.

[@philscomputerlab]

I know they share bandwidth, but not that it's limited by the slowest device. The drive only does 58 MBps tops, but that would still be a reason to use a single cable for it. I'll do some Google searching I guess :D

[@willynebula6193]

Still have my athlon 1.4 running on the Asus a7v133👌

[@3DfxAslinger]

I have 3 Socket A retro systems. Athlon XP 2600+ Thoroughbred B with V5 5500 AGP, Athlon XP-M 2600@ 2600Mhz 1,75V with Gainward Bliss 7800 GS 512MB (7800 GT) and Athlon XP 3200+ FSB166 on my fastest 3Dfx machine. I have upload here on youtube a simple small video of my fastest 3Dfx system. :) The DFI Lanparty NF2 Ultra B is one of the best Socket A Mainboards, the best for overclock. On Via, the Epox 8K3A+ and 8K5A3+ were the best.

[@ValorZeroAdvent]

What's the soundclip in the 6:23? I like the groove to it.

[@FROZTEN]

Same question.

[@nitrax8629]

The CPU core certainly looks like a 600-950 MHz Duron, going to guess it's the 600MHz version, as the 3DMark results seem about right for that setup. Is that PSU a VS450? If so, it will struggle to power the higher-end Athlon (XP) models, as the unit can only deliver 80 watts (16A) on the 5V rail. The Athlon 1400 and XP 3200+ will be just a couple of watts short of that limit on their own! Edit: Just realised the CPUID wasn't fully hidden, it too points to an early Spitfire core Duron.

[@philscomputerlab]

Regarding PSU, I think you will like tomorrow's video :)

[@RetroTinkerer]

Yep I broked my Arhlon 1300 core while seating the heatsink when it was still worht a lot (was about 16 months old)

[@Cybie1111]

CPUID dates back to the year 2000 so it can be the earliest Socket A Athlon or Duron chip. Based on the look of the chip on the video, I am pretty sure it is a Thunderbird Athlon. Clock rate... not sure. But most likely a 1.4 GHz chip.

[@MattyStoked]

The tune at the end of these videos is so good. Got a link so I can listen to the full thing?

[@MaTtRoSiTy]

Ah socket A, the fond memories I have of these days! :)

[@bucukomputer]

Very good video. Thanks for sharing dude. It's my admired platform in the past.

[@FaSMaN]

AMD Duron 700-850mhz ish if I had to guess

[@Leyvin]

AMD Duron 600MHz (0630 is Duron 600MHz, 0631 is Duron 650 to 950MHz ... I still have a Duron 900MHz somewhere). The AMD Duron has a very distinct look though, so yeah was obvious it was a Duron ^_^

[@hikikomorihachiko]

Would of guessed Duron too, mostly due to the ceramic look of the chip.

[@marco56702]

RobW0lf cpuid confirmed, it's a Duron

[@NicolasT94]

I had a Duron Pro 1300(950mhz) with a PCChips mobo. What a piece of shit it was. A real piece of shit.

[@AtariBorn]

RobW0lf I had the Slot A Athlon back in the day, but didn't the first Socket A Athlons (1.1 Ghz, 1.2 Ghz, etc) have the same ceramic chip?

[@retropcscotland4645]

Can't wait to see some Durons benched on this.

[@mbe102]

Phil, at 3:24 why did you censor the BIOS POST Screen?

[@MrKillswitch88]

A wise word of advice to people building a Socket A system for the first time is to check for hot spots on cheaper boards mainly mosfets and a overheated chipset can cause some grief in the form of reduced performance and stability issues. For those who like overclocking consider the mobile versions of the Barton core as they are lower voltage and are easier to work with.

[@philscomputerlab]

Do you have information on these mobile chips? I remember reading about mobile Athlon 64 and you needed software to change the multiplier and stuff like that.

[@rasz]

googling "Multiplier on the fly Fab51" should land you straight on the info you want, that site has everything, modding/overclocking tutorials etc.

[@MrKillswitch88]

I got a two systems but haven't done anything with them in a long time but you can use 754 mobile Athlon 64s in normal desktop boards but you either have to scrounge a ihs off a sempron or use an after market cooler due to the gap. Some of them really do only sip power vs the desktop versions and are fun to tinker with without heating up the place.

[@winj3r]

Some games I would like to see tested on this new system: No one lives forever 2 Max Payne 2 Quake 3 Arena Far Cry Warcraft 3 Medal of Honor Alied Assault Unreal II Star trek elite Force 2

[@Elios0000]

cpu is either a thunderbird or thoroughbred based on the ceramic package

[@RoyHess666]

Axper? Never heard of this brand before ... That CPU though looks almost like a Thunderbird or Duron to me

[@feieralarm]

Would have loved to see a GeForce Ti4400 or Ti4600 on this system. :D

[@rasz]

This motherboard is good for CPUs that could easily push fastest AGP cards. GF3 is going to be a big bottleneck down the line :( something like 6600/6800 would be ok.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thoughts about using a Radeon 9600?

[@rasz]

better, but still a bottleneck when you go above 2GHz, something like 9800 would be fine (2x the performance). For reference Athlon XP-M at 2.6GHz(socket A KT133A with sdram!) with overclocked GF6800 runs 16000 in 3dmark 2001, probably same ballpark with radeon x800. That setup runs 1 minute superpi 1M, same as ~2.8GHz P4/2GHz Athlon XP with DDR memory, so not that optimal, but still impressive for KT133A, chipset from year 2000, to go all the way to 2.6GHz ;) I ran Asus A7V133 up to 2008! You can even check my configuration if you google "XP2400+ 2GHz Mod Asus A7V133 RAID ATA133 ram 512MB" - first link should be to an auction site (allearchiwum) with my old listing selling motherboard + duron 1800 with L5 bridges closed (unlocking software multiplier change) running at 15x133 = 2GHz. I even list a bunch of games that ran well on this setup with Ti4200 hehe. fab51 com has great tutorial about unlocking socket A cpus with L1/L5 bridging (pencil of conductive paint).

[@Mini-z1994]

Think you can hop up too a fx 5600 on the 1 ghz+ cpu's these cpu's were quick enough to tackle with pentium 4 on socket 478

[@nihilyst8056]

Hello Phil, new comment for an old video: Are you going to cover the Athlon Classic on Slot A as well some time in the future? As far as youtube can tell me, it seems to be an almost forgotten platform these days. Would be nice to hear your thougts about that platform. Your videos are unquestionable among the best on youtube.

[@philscomputerlab]

Not any time soon, I don't see much reason to use it over Slot 1.

[@Laykun9000]

Absolute dream build, I always wanted a GeForce 3 but got stuck with a GeForce 4 mx 440, funnily enough on an axper motherboard with a duron 1200. Would love to see how this pc runs Halo pc as that's probably what I would have primarily played in it (the proper pixel shaders on this card made the big difference)

[@philscomputerlab]

Halo is going to be a challenge I think. Maybe it runs faster on DX 8 though.

[@Laykun9000]

PhilsComputerLab yeah it probably won't run amazingly, it should be ok at 640x480 but anything higher is asking too much. I remember it running very well in the ti 4200 at the time.

[@thelasthallow]

my build for this was as follows AMD Athlon XP 2600+ 512MB system ram (initially) then upgraded to 768MB 60GB WD IDE HDD Nvidia XFX 5200 120MB PCI all running on a Gigabyte GA-7S748 I never used a sound card because 2.1 speakers were pretty standard at the time and the on board was just fine, this thing played all the good shit like battlefield 2, rise of nations, Wolfenstien ET (the free multiplayer game) and a bunch of other games i cant remember, it was also the first system i had tried to overclock as well. i find it weird that some mobos for the K6 era had sata while many mobos even in the socket A era did not have them including mine.

[@TheBigupz]

im using my Hp pavillion Socket A that my parents bought all the way back in 2001, i used to run it with a nvidia 6100LP, but it died, i revived it with a ATI 8500 PRO AIW, and runs great, it has the Athlon XP 1800+ 512mb, ATI 8500 128mb, and boy does it run great, i finally completed most of my favorite games that wont run on windows 10

[@joeygreathouse3029]

The GF3 will definitely hold back CPUs faster than 1GHz. You probably should have gone GF4 Ti or a later model ATi card

[@flipkibblez]

I used to have a ide from 2011 that was 320gb. when i first saw it thought it was sata but it wasn't when i got a look at it.

[@NightMotorcyclist]

I still have my nVidia nForce 2 Ultra paired with an AMD Athlon Barton 2500+ that can be easily overclocked to 3200+ speeds. For kicks, I can also drop in my older Athlon XP 1800+ or Duron Morgan core 1.3 GHz (which surprisingly was a pretty good CPU back in the day). I've never had an issue using SATA devices on the system (my main HDD at the time was a Seagate 80GB SATA Drive) provided I installed the driver using a floppy before installing the drive. I may have to start using the system again since some of my older games don't seem to work on Windows 7 or 10 such as Splinter Cell or even Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (which worked prior to the past two Widows updates).

[@philscomputerlab]

Issue with SATA is that only SATA I drives work and you can't boot from SATA optical drive.

[@NightMotorcyclist]

Is it because of VIA or overall? I may have to get a SATA optical drive to try out on my nForce system or rip out my current optical drive that's been hooked up to a PATA - SATA converter. I wouldn't be surprised if it won't work since I don't think there was native SATA support in those days.

[@philscomputerlab]

It's because of the VIA chipset. nForce works fine the last time I tried. Intel Pentium 4 boards also have great SATA support.

[@Ale.K7]

A Duron, yay! Around 1GHz?

[@detmer87]

Can be unlocked to a Athlon :D

[@rasz]

probably 650 and no Detmer, you cant "unlock to a Athlon"

[@psucalculator7179]

OMG, this bring Athlon XP memory back!

[@Spolupyo]

CPU might be an Athlon 1.4ghz, if I'm correct I had that same setup BITD paired with a Geforce 4 ti 4600, remember playing the first Call of Duty games on that computer, ahh also Hidden and Dangerous 1 & 2.

[@gengpan]

i wonder if there is any adaptor to adapt nowadays's water-block to socket 462

[@Maxa1]

Nice expansion slot support thingy, is it 3d printed? Also I'm guessing Duron 900, 2gb seems kinda overkill though.

[@spidermcgavenport8767]

Say Phil if you took pictures of just some of your pcbs laying around in 4k would produce desktop background quality images that I'd be proud of have...

[@indenkellerag]

3:15 3Dnow! Was invented in 2005 People before 2005: BIOSNOW!! LMAO

[@floriankleinert6538]

You deserve far more subscribers !!!!

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks you :D

[@henryjohnson1071]

Phil, you unintentionally made my day. I was watching this video (great one, BTW) and I saw the part especially where you downloaded the audio drivers for your Audigy 2 ZS and shut off CMSS. Did it the audio beforehand sound a little bit off than what it should? If so, I had the same issue. I have a first generation Audigy card that I've had since it came out currently installed in an 2007-08 PC I received a few weeks ago. At first, the Microsoft drivers sounded a little off (it auto installed them). After playing back some audio files and listening to them with weird sounding results (almost tinny, whiney, hissy), I tried installing the online drivers from Creative. Well, it still sounded the same. After tinkering around with the settings, I still couldn't get it to sound normal. At all. CMSS WAS THE ONE THING I FORGOT TO TRY TURNING OFF! Thank you, Phil! You saved me from buying a new sound card for this old PC. I probably will at some point anyways; I want to install it in a more proper Windows XP machine XD

[@philscomputerlab]

Awesome :D I'm not sure why it's turned on by default. AFAIK you want to use it with headphones for 3D surround audio, and it can also do "speaker fill" if you got surround speakers. But it should be off for just plain 2.0/2.1 Stereo.

[@henryjohnson1071]

Yeah, it's definitely odd. I guess that they assume you have a surround system since it's designed for it. I have a 5.1 system but it's being used by another computer. In the mean time, 2.1 works for me along with a nice pair of headphones!

[@Tom2404]

I have 4 socket a boards, one of them is broken, 2 of them are just cheap and not good in any way and one that is pretty good I think. It has SATA ports and AGP pro.

[@thegamingbuck374]

I think what you do is cool because you use old stuff and that is cool AF :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Totally :D

[@sillyszili2593]

i'm always calling this socket 462. i had one in 2005 with Athlon XP 1800+ OCed to 1.8GHz 333MHz FSB

[@xavierrodriguez2463]

1:56 Could that card fit anymore capacitors?!?

[@philscomputerlab]

LOL good point.

[@inkysteve]

It wouldn't be my favourite of the time would it. Athlon 1000 with 100Mhz clock that could be overclocked by just turning the clock to 133Mhz by any chance?

[@enilenis]

Do you have any Slot A motherboard reviews planned? Somehow in all of the years working in IT and in computer retail I never came across one. Never met a buyer who wanted a Slot A system built. They were always a catalogue item that nobody bought. I'm curious to know how good they were.

[@philscomputerlab]

I had some goes at motherboard reviews, but never could settle on a format.

[@IvanBoskovic808]

That CPU could very well be the first 1GHz processor Athlon a1000AMT3c or a1000AMS3b

[@GiSWiG]

I'm pretty sure that's a Duron, below 1GHz. I'm going to say 600ish, maybe 700. I'm sensing an overclocking video coming :-).

[@genericgreensquid6669]

Have you ever tried XP gaming on a prebuilt Dell?

[@rasz]

Hope you are planning to use pencil for CPU comparisons ;-)

[@RetroPCUser]

Too bad they didn't make a Socket A board for baby AT cases, but there would've been too many cables to hook up, for example, PS/2 mouse ports, USB Ports, Serial and Parallel ports, etc. I might get a Socket 370 Baby AT motherboard and processor in place of the Socket 7 board I have which doesn't have AGP, and people are asking for an arm and a leg for a Super Socket 7 motherboard that has AGP and support for K6-2+/K6-3 processors.

[@sergheiadrian]

The CPU must be a Duron (Spitfire - green die, square shape) 750MHz (judging by the CPUID).

[@nviso209]

Hey Phil! Where did you get your test bench & how much was it in US Dollars? I currently use an old beatup piece of crap Rosewill case but want something very minimal & nicer like you're using here. Thanks man & keep up the awesome content!!!

[@philscomputerlab]

Google Tech Station!

[@JoshuaNicoll]

THIS WAS MY FUCKING JAM BACK IN THE DAY

[@kurtisrinker1202]

hey Phil what is that awesome test rig you are using. me wants one!!

[@philscomputerlab]

Tech Station. I bought it from the US.

[@RandomActivities]

I need to show my Skt A rig.

[@xiardark]

where did you find a geforce 3 ti 500? and that couldn't have been a cheap card. Last time I looked, it was about $200 U.S. used. I ended up going with the vanilla Geforce 3 (non ti) for about $40.

[@TehPlayer14]

1:32 mis spell? Not GPU?

[@unorganized_account]

TehPlayer14 there the same

Only This .. AMAZING!