The Last of the RAMBUS PCs/ Ultimate 2002 Dream PC

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Ill be honest this era is probably one of my favourite eras of hardware purely because it was the type of hardware I was using for years. Brilliant System, and great video... It'd be interesting to see at what stage the 9700Pro isn't bottle-necked in terms of CPU side power.

[@bayviewguesthouse7126]

Era of voodoo 5 then ati 9700

[@SomeAngryGuy1997]

Probably with a top of the line Athlon 64 or Pentium Dual-Core if you have a 775i65G

[@NightMotorcyclist]

I held subscriptions to MaximumPC, PCGamer and Computer Gaming World and I remember all those articles on the Pentium 3 with RDRAM in the late 90s/ early 2000s and then the Pentium 4 paired with RDRAM (Willamette and Northwood). I was drooling at the theoretical speeds and how fast the systems could run with a top of the line GPU and asked my parents to get the Dell Dimension XPS line of PCs since we were long overdue for an upgrade. They got a cheaper HP instead but it had a similar configuration (Pentium III 800E with 512MB SDRAM and a GeForce 2 GTS). My aunt ended up getting a Pentium 4 based Dell Dimension desktop which was equipped with 512MB of RDRAM (dummy sticks occupying the unused slots) and a generic nVidia GeForce 3. I wanted that computer so much but in the end, thanks to the aforementioned magazines, I built an AMD Athlon Duron (Morgan Core) based PC a year after that which was then upgraded to an AMD Athlon XP 1800 8 months later. in order to do that I had to convince my boss to let me work 40 hours a week flipping burgers despite being a teen.

[@yosemite-e2v]

In the fall of 2002 I picked up an Epox 8K3A+, and XP1600, and 256 meg stick of DDR PC2700 to replace my Abit KT7A & Athlon 1333. That 8K3A+ was a great motherboard. My video definitely lagged behind this system, as I had a Ti 4200.

[@OzTalksHW]

It's so sad how Zalman went bankrupt. They used to make such fantastic CPU coolers for the price! And woah Prince of Persia Sands of Time. I remember playing that with my brothers for hours. Absolutely loved this video Phil.

[@philscomputerlab]

Zalman was always top quality, but also expensive. I think that cost them in the end with cheap tower coolers taking over the market.

[@frankb5728]

They're still around, I think their parent company went under because they committed fraud. Zalman is still around and they have products that look very similar to what they were offering in the past.. but support the modern CPUs as well. In my mind Zalman were the Noctua of the early 2000s.. I've seen a few reviews of their recent cases and other products and those were not well received..

[@UlrichLeland]

They're still going now, they have a website still up.

[@nimmen]

I had the cnps9900a led and it kept even a 125w tdp cpu nicely cool and quiet while looking good the same time. I've seen watercooling setups with temps higher than that beast. EDIT: They probably used some good quality heat pipes and implemented them very effectively into the design, maximally utilising the phase-change effect for cooling.

[@RicardoRamosRetrocomputacao]

Two factors: Mismanagement, and Chinese market.

[@Fr0z3nS0liD]

I grew up with a Pentium 4 2,8Ghz machine that had 512Mb of RDRAM and a Radeon 9700xt, so this was a pretty special build and video for me. It was a prebuilt dell Dimension 8250, so the same motherboard as you featured here as well. I had to let go of the system over a decade ago, but I did manage to save the RDRAM and terminator modules, the Radeon 9700xt and a Soundblaster Live OEM edition that I still own to this day. This video actually made me consider hunting for a compatible retro motherboard and processor just to see if I could go back in time to 2002-2005 and play some of those old games again, but I'd probably have to upgrade the RAM to 1GB at least. I remember having trouble with 512MB back in the day. Thanks Phil! =)

[@philscomputerlab]

Ah yes, the 9700 XT, that was the DELL special version :)

[@Fr0z3nS0liD]

Just a quick clarification, the video card is actually a Radeon 9700 TX, a special model manufactured by Dell that ran a little bit slower on the core and memory clocks than a 9700 Pro. You could probably flash a 9700 pro vbios on it and it would work just fine, or just overclock it.

[@philscomputerlab]

Ah yes, TX. Yea Dell hat quite a few "special" cards, like the Live! Sound Blaster and so on. Medion / Aldi were also large enough to get such products, the 9800 XXL for example and various other cards, often from MSI.

[@3800S1]

I remember also obsessing over the FX-57 reviews in the day. Also the 6800 Ultra and GTX 7800. I concur on the Zalman coolers. I still use their passive water cooling solution to this very day on my modern system. I still can't understand why no one makes an equivalent passive system today since everyone obsesses over silent systems. My cooler keeps my OC'd FX 8320 and silicon lottery OC'd GTX980 only from single digit to 20c above ambient depending on load. Better performance than any active custom loop I had built before.

[@HenrySomeone]

The reserator? Yeas, they were passive as far as fans go, but the pump was known for quite a bit of noise after some time...

[@Geforcefly]

I had the Zalman 7000AlCu which allowed me to take an Athlon XP-M 2400 to 2.4GHz without much trouble. IMO they are the 2002 version of the current Hyper 212 (very strong price to performance ratio)

[@davidschaper3238]

I've had an 8200 since 2002, great machine. I had mine with a GeForce 4600 Ti, 512 MB RAM and a P4 2.4 originally. Unfortunately the 4600 Ti broke. It now has a P4 3.05 GHz, 1 GB RAM and a Geforce 7600 GT.

[@philscomputerlab]

I also got a 8200 motherboard, but it doesn't support Hyper-Threading and the faster PC1066 RDRAM. But apart from that, it's almost as good.

[@davidschaper3238]

Yes, it uses the same 850e chipset, but they must have fixed some stuff on the 8250 (and added USB 2.0 using those VIA chips). You can get HT on the 8200 with a BIOS update Dell later retracted. Initially I had some problems with HT enabled though, I'd have to look whether I've still got it enabled.

[@argoneum]

Great video, thank you! I remember getting Pentium PRO board (with CPU, in 2004), after I heard about those machines for so long. The legend was that "even Windows can't hang them", this one was pulled off some ATM machine, and was quite amazing for its time (made in Ireland). I run the mandatory MDK benchmark, at the end the board was repurposed as a home server (wasting a ton of electricity), eventually replaced by Core 2 Duo machine (which is online 'till now). Funny thing, back in 2001 there was a ton of scrapped hardware using proprietary MCA. Later DDR (and iterations) won over proprietary RAMBUS. DELL hardware back then was built to last, I still have Tualatin-based Latitude C810 (with nice 1600x1200 screen), even battery is holding for around 20 minutes, after all those years. I use it for flashing EPROMs, sometimes for older games.

[@NinjaContravaniaManX]

I remember when the computer store I was working for at the time got one batch of P4 systems with SDRAM and one batch of otherwise similar Athlon XP systems with DDR RAM on the same day. By pairing P4's with the much cheaper SDRAM instead of Rambus, Intel was hoping to make P4 systems affordable for the average guy, but it was a huge bottleneck and the Athlon system wasn't only faster, but also a lot cheaper. My boss: "I know they suck, but try to sell the P4's first, order from headquarters! Just tell the customers something about genuine intel inside and compatibility issues with AMD..." Back then, the PC market was booming, but a lot of people buying PC's were housewives, grandparents, etc. who didn't know anything besides "intel inside", so it kinda worked at first, but during the next couple of days, quite a few customers came back in rage, wanting their money back... a lot of alcohol was consumed that week...

[@philscomputerlab]

Dam that sounds rough! I remember similar stories about the first Celeron. At first people bought it, seeing the high clock speed, and Intel brand, But then reviews came out...

[@Corialtavi]

I have an old Dell with Rambus sat in a cupboard. I did find a couple of Rambus sticks to upgrade it from 2 x 64 to 2 x 128 and it ran XP ok. It had a soundblaster card but I can't remember what graphics. thanks for this idea. I may revisit it and throw in a top of the range card from the time to see how it runs.

[@vettori8185]

“From back in the day that cost an absolute fortune” Well…. Prices are returning to former highs and beyond.

[@computercatgaming02]

I used to have a Pentium 4 with 128x2 MB of RAMBUS RAM, was fun to play around with.

[@Appalling68]

LOL at Rambus. I remember with great detail the back and forth debates (via Usenet, if anyone here is old enough to remember) about the Rambus gangsters subverting the JDEC standards of the day and suing other memory manufacturers for infringement on their “proprietary standard.” It was clear after a couple of years of this bs where that company was headed. Made an absolute fortune shorting their stock back in 2001-2002. I still to this day have money in the bank thanks to these vultures. Thanks Rambus!!

[@MinhasA]

I really liked your video! I recently purchased a 533 mhz bus Dell Dimension 8200 and am building it into a similar machine after watching your video. Thanks for the video and I'll look forward to upcoming videos - greetings from Ohio.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice! I wanted to get a full desktop, but this is a difficult undertaking in Australia :)

[@garyr7027]

Some of those games were what I played from back then. I remember trying to play Splinter Cell once with a card that wouldn't hardly do it, I ended up having to get a better card. Once I got it I was hooked on splinter cell game series from that day on.

[@philscomputerlab]

Awesome games no doubt!

[@GiSWiG]

Oh I like this video, I gota play those games, especially after hearing 'yes, yes..' from the good doctor in RTCW on your channel more than I ever did playing the game. You make me wish I didn't sell my Radeon 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro but I kept the 6800GT.

[@Sauceyjames]

I started collecting ThinkPads because they were such nice computers for the time, retro hardware is such a novelty to use, even some of the turmoils it brings.

[@LastOneLeft99]

I really miss those Zalman flower coolers. I love my AIO but still. My Zalman headsink was awesome

[@evilqtip7098]

I love that Graphic cards fan wow.. Great Video... Nicely done man love those old games back then.

[@EgoShredder]

I have a Zalman CNPS6000-Cu all copper cooler that I bought in 2002 for a then Celeron 1200 (now a PIII 1.4S). That cooler is just a thing of beauty and also a very good performer. Once I completely stop using the PC it is in, I will remove it and thoroughly clean it to have as a decorative ornament.

[@BilisNegra]

This video is my piece of cake. I was eagerly expecting for it since you mentioned you planned to do one on this topic... I did not hope it would be that soon, I really must thank you!

[@philscomputerlab]

It only appears soon, most videos are planned weeks, if not months ahead. Shipping is the ultimate killer, takes at least 2 weeks for stuff to arrive, usually 3 to 4 weeks :(

[@BilisNegra]

Please do not get me wrong. I do know it takes a lot of effort to put together a video like this. It was you who told me this video was on its way to be finished and uploaded as I commented on the "Rambus RDRAM Pentium 4 1.4 GHz vs Pentium III" video. Sorry for any misunderstanding.

[@V1R7U4Ltv]

Commands for quake on the console: cg_drawfps 1 for show fps com_maxfps for fps limit You down the console with ~ (left side of key 1) I think also work on RTCW. Love your videos and builds. Cheers!

[@AJRestoration]

My god, game nostalgia to the max!

[@ZeroHourProductions407]

Kind of surprised how well the rambus system holds up. Funny enough, i finally got a windows xp gaming system set up, though decidedly more "overkill" than this.

[@EvilTurkeySlices]

Jorge Ramos I have two xp gaming machines. One has an Athlon 64 x2 5000+, 4gb ddr2, and hd 7770. The other has an Athlon XP 2600+, 2gb ddr, and an HD 2600 Pro.

[@ZeroHourProductions407]

EvilTurkeySlices Yeah, the one i finished is a Phenom ii x4 965, 2x2gb ddr3 1600 ram, Radeon 7770, a usb 3.0 card and a pci wifi g card. If i could, i would entertain a graphics upgrade, since end of the line for full xp driver support is either an r9 270x from amd or a 780ti/titan/black from nvidia.

[@Complextro93kg]

Beast for its time. :) I wish i had something like that back in the day.

[@Trancelistic]

Lovely Thumbmail lol:) Gave me a smile:D

[@kokodin5895]

i love my period incorect oddities, but i wish pc 150 cl2 sdram existed :P

[@PorscheRacer14]

This brings back some good memories. Sheesh, I still have some odd hardware kicking around if anyone feels like dusting it off and making some retro builds. I wish I could keep every single computer I've built, but I already have 6 going. I can attest, the 9700 Pro is a beast. Going to need an Athlon FX to feed that card... but that's a good thing :)

[@HeyImGaminOverHere]

I have a Dell dimension with rambus but it isn't nearly as nice as that board is. Surprisingly capable system Phil, a wonderful build as always! 😀

[@johnstarks5323]

3:20 Back in the day, I had the Radeon 9800 Pro it was a beast of a card for it's time.

[@derstreit]

The Radeon 9700 Pro was one of the few hardware items i bought on launchday/as fast as it was available. Mine was a Gigabyte Maya 2 and cost 428€. I still have the bill here.

[@PierreVonStaines]

I bought that Zalman cooler back in the day. Still use on my Pentium 4 3.4Ghz - it’s a heavy beast and bends the motherboard a bit but cools pretty much everything around the processor. 👍

[@bdhale34]

I have a Zalman CNPS5x Performa on an Athlon II x4 645 (3.1GHz base) clocked to 3.875GHz and it runs below 53c under as massive a load as I can throw at it. Zalman makes awesome air coolers.

[@TheMetroRetro]

Watching it on a 4,8 GHZ 631 Pentium 4 8GB DDR3 running Windows 10 64bit. P4ever

[@ViperBenchmarks]

you can upgrade to pentium d its basicly 2x P4

[@balazsvilaga8040]

Im sure ots nice and hot where you are :) Also electricity bill must be pretty high.That OC is like 200W+

[@TheMetroRetro]

Nah it's a 65W Cedar Mill CPU and it's running on air, idle at 40C. And Penitum D is shit, sometimes worse than a P4 cause both CPUs a bottlenecking each other at full load, means that each CPU runs at a 400MHz FSB because they share one 800MHz FSB. Also the lack of hyperthreading is an absolute kill of P4 performance because it simply needs HT to compensate the low IPC. If all the Pentium Ds would have had a true Dual Core design with shared cache etc. (like Athlon 64 X2 or Core 2 Duo) and Hyperthreading enabled, they wouldn't have been half bad

[@philscomputerlab]

TheMetroRetro The low power Cedar Mills are the best / final Pentium 4 CPUs. Will definitely get used in a future project :)

[@TheMetroRetro]

I'm lookin' forward to it mate

[@EscapeVelo]

I just picked up a Cooljag Falcon 92 Cu cpu cooler. It's fantastic!

[@nitrax8629]

Just a quick note, you can change the frame limit in Quake 3 and RTCW (or any id Tech 3 game, for that matter) by typing "/seta com_maxfps 333" in the console (replace 333 with a lower value if needed). This may also work for the Call of Duty games too. Depending on the game, the console key combo is the ` key on its own, or ` + CTRL + ALT + SHIFT.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yup I know that setting, but don't bother most of the time, as these games run super well on anything half decent :)

[@sersoft_corp]

I've got a working rambus mobo with cpu and 4 sticks of 128mb, that fits into a standard mATX case, I can send it to you if you're willing to cover postage. It does require a custom power delivery connector in addition to the 20pin and 4pin connectors though.

[@Adam-rt7lp]

Great video as well

[@clearz3600]

I built a PC back in 2001 using RAMBUS. Cost a fortune, over €3k which I extorted from my parents due to my upcoming 21st bday and having starting a comp sci degree. It was a waste of money since there was no upgrade paths and I ended up switching to a DDR build a few years later. It was a beast at the time but didn't hold up for long due to how fast hardware was moving.

[@captklausstortebeker2752]

I had one friend that bought a Rambus memory based system. He was always weird, though.

[@LastOneLeft99]

Also ah yes Doom 3. I was still running my Radeon 9700 Pro when Doom 3 released. Sadly in fights like with the imp throwing its fireball it would bog down into like the teens/20s. I picked up a GeForce 6800 GT, overclocking it with a custom fan. Smooth sailing in Doom 3 after that.

[@davidcrowder1202]

i didnt know socket 478 had used rambus ram or had hyperthreading even thanks for helping my learn something! my first pc i built at 9 years old was a socket 478 p4 with ddr1 mine didnt even have hyper threading it was a 3.2ghz tho atleast. i remember wishing i had the 3.4 lol

[@philscomputerlab]

Both, 423 and 478 had rambus!

[@EdnovStormbrewer]

Woww, I'm shocked that old PC back in 2002 can handle graphics as good as PS3s/Xbox 360 at high resolution and good quality settings

[@stamasd8500]

The 2 early P4 systems I built in the past year are not as fast as this one (one is a P4 Willamette 2GHz with Rambus on a i850 motherboard, the other is a P4 2.8GHz on a i845 motherboard with SDRAM). Each of the motherboards was around $50 on ebay. But they both have a nice advantage over that Dell motherboard. They have PC/PCI connectors, meaning that I can also boot DOS and, with appropriate slowdown techniques, play DOS games with 100% compatible sound. I've posted on Vogons about them before. Both motherboards are QDI PlatiniX, one is the 4X model and the other 2E.

[@TheMissingxtension]

I had that gou cooler, with a 9800AIWonder. Bought the card at Fry's for about $300

[@haylspa]

I had the 7950 gtx 2x card what a Card!!!!! worst was it's support falling off so fast from its release 😭what a shame that was but that would be the mark of the end of this tech time the card dropped from your $1000+ value to $200- $300 over night :'(

[@RadioactiWeONE]

"ahh, there you are.." *STAB STAB STAB STAB*

[@mikv8]

My late 2002 PC was Dual Athlon MP 2200+ with 1GB DDR ECC Reg. memory and GeForce4 Ti4600 hardmodded to be a Quadro4 900XGL with all the 15K SCSI and stuff. Having a real dual-processor powerhouse I remember a fake HT P4 came out later that year and it seemed Intel was so into the marketing stuff with their inflated clock speeds, rambus and that HT fake dual-processing. While that 3.06 chip is actually a well performer but it came with its price and wasn't power efficient at all, I think AMD was a much wiser choise back them from 1999 to 2006. Unfortunately this is not the case nowadays.

[@TheVanillatech]

Phil use the console in Quake III / RTCW to set the max fps higher to give a more accurate result in performance. The command is /com_maxfps . Set it to 300 or something, then you will see what the machines are actually capable of.

[@danielson9579]

Sweet machine and them zalman coolers are very good :-)

[@strangeplains2466]

Kinda crazy how I'm watching about someone's dream build from the same year I was born in.

[@libestrato]

I installed a hd 2600 pro AGP in a core 2 duo system and the result was very good, I did not imagine that a pentium 4 3.06 would have lower performance in 3D tests because it is an AGP bus. Philip, is it possible for you to test an old graphics card in a more modern system to see if the performance improves?

[@Lolimaster]

Nice that you are well informed of the era of xvid and divx encoding :D If you can try to compare the system to the Athlon XP 3200+ Barton rev. It was almost an Athlon 64 minus the 64bit xD (my 1st one was Athlon 64 3200+ socket 754).

[@EvilTurkeySlices]

Nintendork I have an Athlon XP 2600+ Thoroughbred, and it could probably give a 2.8-3ghz s478 p4 without hyperthreading a run for their money.

[@jothain]

Nice. I build fairly similar setup and cost a lot, but I used it for quite long. Though I can't recall that did I have 9800 pro (was it available when rdram systems where new thing?) or one of the top of the line GeForce cards for that era.

[@JMUDoc]

I had that cooler, in pure copper - it was FRIGHTENINGLY heavy.

[@michaeldemel4934]

Until recently I didn't know that the Slot1 Pentium III had a chipset that used RDRAM (picked up an IBM 6867 IntelliStation E Pro). The place I worked at had a lab with several P4 RDRAM machines but they were dog slow, some of the worst machines we ever had. So rambus was pretty much just a small blip on my radar.

[@johannsmith5697]

I think i see this going in the core 2 duo with ssd and 9700pro direction! May even work with 98 ok too.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea the 9700 Pro has Windows 9x drivers :)

[@BlindNoir]

I (barely) remember that Delta Force game. I had some good PC gaming memories back in the early 2000s.

[@Ben-Rogue]

Damn thing is better than my 4 year old mid-range "gaming" laptop 8(

[@philscomputerlab]

LOL No way!

[@macdaniel6029]

Funny, this was my config in 2002, exept for Rambus. P4 3,06GHz HT, ASUS board (I think it had a granite bay chipset?), 9700 Pro and 1GB DDR1. Fastest machine in the hood ^^

[@sunnohh]

BEST THUMBNAIl EVAR, close to worst ram evar. Barring n64.

[@nacabaro3737]

Can you make what would be your first Pentium 4 gaming PC? Do a video of the build and benchmark it.

[@proCaylak]

I wonder why did those pentium 4s have a hole in its "golden triangle" side. Was there any purpose of it?

[@JackBandicootsBunker]

ProfesyonelCaylak I think it was an extra identifier to guide the user on physical installation, as some motherboards did not have the triangle printed in their PCB but their sockets.

[@proCaylak]

good point, but that hole is inside the heatsink and wouldn't it affect the heat spread negatively??

[@JackBandicootsBunker]

ProfesyonelCaylak The IHS is soldered to the die and the die is more off-center; there is less conductive surface, but it wouldn’t affect the heat dissipation performance as long as the heatsink is in full contact with the IHS’ “hot zone” (the area directly above the die)

[@AlfaPro1337]

Actually, just a simple Bing search will do the trick. www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/intel/37

[@proCaylak]

Alfa Proto thanks for the information, I did search it before I asked here but all I found was a bunch of jokes like "an indicator of magic smoke"

[@georgez8859]

Thanks for the video Phil, Lots of 8200 and 8300 machines out there. Big and awkward to work on. not one of Dell`s better ideas. you can still find aftermarket boards but they bring a high price [ASUS P4T533]. Still great to see these in action.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea I was hoping to get an entire machine, but next to impossible in Australia. Plenty of them on eBay USA though.

[@DragonProtector]

i like to sell mine for $500 or $1k

[@nitrax8629]

The 9100 series was much easier to work on, and used beefy CPU coolers as well!

[@stevef6392]

A friend of mine built a similar machine in late 2002. 3.06GHz P4 HT, Radeon 9700 Pro, Audigy 2, and a full gigabyte of RAM. But instead of going with the Rambus platform, he got an Asus board based on some SiS chipset, which took 333MHz DDR memory. I never understood why he chose that motherboard for an otherwise awesome build.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea Intel and SIS had 533 MHz single channel DDR chipsets available. We will look at those in the future :)

[@WaybackTECH]

Actually, there are a couple higher clocked HT models of P4 for Socket 478 with the 533FSB. Not sure it is worth the money trying to track them down though over the 3.06.

[@HoboVibingToMusic]

When i play RTCW on my modern machine it lags like crazy on max settings on every option. Any clue why? Spec: 6GB ddr3 1333mhz ram RX 460 2gb gpu Amd a8-5600k 3.6ghz quad core

[@georgemaragos2378]

Hi All, Phil, seeing you have state of the era memory speed and a fast video card, i would consider the bottleneck would be either the CPU or the hard drive, i noticed you have WD Blue Sata, so my concern would be if the motherboard is fitted with floppy / IDE / Sata connectors, then it will probably be sata 1 standard 1.5 ( 2000, or at best sata 2 3G ( 2005 ). My dell 2400 has 3G ram, so why not try to load a 1G ram drive, copy a CD Rom image to ram then rerun some tests, the ram drive speed will be at max so you may have better results

[@diomedes891]

I think i still have my old pentium 3 MB with RD-Ram laying around somewhere. I wonder what these would sell for :D

[@GizmoFromPizmo]

Load times are more a function of disk speed, though, aren't they? This m-board probably has UDMA 133 IDE capability and I'll bet you can't find a SATA 2 PCI expansion card. So you're kinda stuck with the slower load times.

[@Ridata01]

Philscomputerlab: i own a gravis ultrasound PNP just like you, i installed the 1 floppy disc driver, it installed all good, but i cannot make games work with sound, and when i choose gravis on doom setup there is no music. Can you please advice on how you were able to install gus PNP and what files exactly (full name of files) did you use and how did you run the games? Gus is very difficult to to install its not very user friendly like other cards

[@dmitriyvassilyev5849]

The dream RDRAM build would be 2xXeon MP 3.0/4MB cache (SL79V) with i860 motherboard.

[@jakeparkinson7695]

Interesting, makes me wonder whether an intel ivybridge/sandbridge comptuer with intel hd graphics would be good for retro xp games. Only one way to find out.

[@clintthompson4100]

Another great review personally I'm an AMD fan but it is nice to see what the intel P4 can do as well. Love the video. Can the board do 800Mhz bus for a 3200 or higher cant remember if intel made a 3.4Ghz or 3.6Ghz in the P4 Line the that board could support.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nope, 533 is the maximum and it only supports Northwood, so none of the Prescott. The next chipsets were the 875 and 865.

[@clintthompson4100]

PhilsComputerLab Well that sucks just a bit I guess we will all like to see the 9700 be put in a Athlon 64 or Athlon 64 x2 system so see at what speed the 9700 really starts to shine. Oh that would be sweet! Thanks again.

[@Lolimaster]

I really miss not having full copper heatsinks.

[@scratch8805]

Awesome stuff Phil 😎

[@Synthematix]

Could you do a review of the radeon 2600XT agp?

[@thepld]

Hi Phil! Thanks for the vid; I have irrational nostalgia for those crap RAMBUS kits I could never afford. Do you still do those tweak guides for old Windows / DOS games? I kind of miss those

[@philscomputerlab]

Nah, firstly they got little views, but I'm more annoyed at GOG / Steam releasing broken Retro Games and the community fixing it. The forums aren't about the games, it's just tech support :(

[@thepld]

Ya same experience here - of the last 4 games I picked up made before 2000 on Gog, all 4 weren't runnable by default on anything past XP- and of course, they all had 4+ star ratings.

[@coryschneider87]

Would be interesting to see a comparison of Intel Socket 478 CPU memory types, for example, using a Pentium 4 Socket 478 2.4Ghz CPU (or which ever), with RD800 and PC133 and DDR 400, basically seeing how memory speed affected the Pentium 4.

[@philscomputerlab]

We already did that in Intel vs AMD season 1, at least SDR and RDRAM!

[@duskoobradovic9870]

Can you add counter strike source to benchmarks plz. Great vid

[@sysierius]

But....will it run minesweeper?

[@MarkTheMorose]

I'm guessing that the motherboard is BTX, not really proprietary, just rarely seen outside of branded PC companies like Dell, HP, etc. In an ATX case, the left side opens up and the motherboard is against the right hand side; in BTX, it's the reverse.

[@philscomputerlab]

It's not BTX, it's totally propriety.

[@jameslewis2635]

I think that Radeon needs something like a Core2Duo to get the best out of it. Otherwise you might find a more powerful AMD CPU from the time period but I suspect that the Core2 series is where you would have to go as that was the start of the era where AMD CPU's were just getting out-paced continuously by the blue teams performance.

[@awnordma]

The Dimension 8200 series was big time money back then. A system similar to your build would have been around 3000 USD.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea that sounds about right! But it included a monitor as well I believe?

[@greyfox37]

Looking forward to the x800xt review

[@johnk7134]

the big question Phil, why we do it??Need to know...notttttttttttttt..just fun!

[@Soonjai]

IMO being 100% Period correct doesn´t matter. My Win 98 machine is equipped with an AMD AthlonXP 2800+, 1GB of DDR Memory, a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP as the main GPU and PowerVR PC-X 1 as the secondary GPU, for Sound I´m using a Soundblaster Live! and everything is sitting on a MSI KT3 Ultra2 Board. If I´m not wrong here the release dates of my oldest and newest components are about 8 to 9 years apart wich makes it hardly a period correct hardware mix, but to me it was much more important to get a fast 3DFX Machine than keeping it period correct to the timeframe of the Voodoo 5 being relevant.

[@Pholiage]

I remember rdram. It was ridiculusy expensive so naturally everyone wanted it. I had DDR memory at the time and afaik memory speed isnt that important for gaming (not in the same sense as memory dependent software). On paper rdram was much faster but when ddr2 came about it was pretty much dead. I switched to ddr2 and didnt notice much difference for games at the time. Had myself a shiny gainward geforce4 ti 4400. That ti made all the difference back then aswell....

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea it's an exciting time. RDRAM was the best solution, but only until 2002 / early 2003. Then Intel launched the 875 chipset, dual channel DDR 400 support, 800 MHz FSB CPUs and that was the new benchmark.

[@chriscrossan8034]

Hi Phil, how did you fit the heatsink? I have this board and due to the proprietary fitting I can't find a heatsink to fit the board and the Dell original seems impossible to track down!

[@philscomputerlab]

Chris Crossan I didn't fit it :D

[@harryshuman9637]

How much performance would you lose if you use the 9600 Pro on the AGP x4 board?

[@robinkonig5828]

Are you only doing reviews of retro stuff or will there be newer cpus also

[@philscomputerlab]

Take a look at the videos, I do a bit of everything.

[@MasterControl90original]

are you sure the cpu is 3,06 ghz? I remember clearly that the 3,06 was the one without HT and the 3ghz was the HT equipped one

[@philscomputerlab]

Yup I'm sure :) The video shows footage to look at.

[@UzY3L]

I have a question: if someone from 1998 would see this review, would it still exist today?

[@deathcube2006]

Hey Phil, how does it compare to a P4 3.06 with ddr?

[@philscomputerlab]

It should be faster than DDR, but with dual channel DDR I think there will be very little difference.

[@spy.re-drobe20]

had I known rambus was using more than 1gb of memory, I could have used that system as an alternative to pre-opengl 4.0 specification. but since I have a pc133 system that has more than 2gb pc133 support. I kid you not it supports 3GB! of pc133, if I need to upgrade I can use an extra 1gb pc133 stick. It's only on select "Compaq_ pentium4" models and I was sorta skeptic at the time.

[@Adam-rt7lp]

@PhilsComputerLab Hey bro loves your videos as you might know already. I wanted to ask you i got a fx 5600 ultra running in windows 98 what do you think will be a worthy upgrade? I wanna play at 1600x1200 max detail at 60fps

[@philscomputerlab]

The FX series works just fine under 98. Depending on the game a 5600 should be fine, but worst case look for a Quadro 2000 or 3000!

[@Adam-rt7lp]

PhilsComputerLab i runs great but i also play XP era titles such as nfs underground at 1600x1200 it starts to struggle when maxed out

[@philscomputerlab]

Well of course, just stick with 98 games and you'll be fine.

[@Adam-rt7lp]

PhilsComputerLab any power amd cards you recommend?

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea the 9600 Pro, XT or 9550 are all great Windows 98 cards.

[@racionator2668]

DX9 support, oh i would like to see can it run Source Game Endgine games like CS:S and Day of Defeat Source Can you benchmark theme maybe, they are for me retro gaming bc i grow up with CSS and DODs

[@SudosFTW]

need to get yourself 2GB worth of both PC800 and PC1066 before supply dries up completely.

[@DrBreezeAir]

That thumbnail though... I was one of those dinosaurs.