Any tech-spotters in?

[bald_pig]

Speccy!

[Dos_Box]

Speccy!

 

And we're there

Here they are in their full glory:

 

1. Atari 8 Bit

 

2. Commodore 64

 

3. Colecovision

 

4. Megadrive

 

5. N64

 

6. ZX Spectrum

[bald_pig]

I spent about 15 minutes thinking of home computers and googling for their carts -.-

[VeryPC_Colin_M]

Could 6 be a ZX Spectrum cart???

 

edit - Ah too late! I didn't refresh the thread page!

[Garacesh]

Just 2 and 6 to get and I thought they would have been easy ones!*

 

My original thought for 2 was game boy, but iirc they have chamfered edges

[Arthur]

While we're on the subject of carts, can anyone ID these two?

 

 

1. 
    
    
   
2. 
   

[caffrey]

Is that a pentium 2 slot 1 ? Oh and AMD slot A ?

[Arthur]

Is that a pentium 2 slot 1? Oh and AMD slot A?

Correct for both.

 

1. 
    
    
   
2. 
   

[caffrey]

I had a dual slot 1 server back in the day

[Arthur]

I had a dual slot 1 server back in the day

Dual Celeron 300As? I seem to remember a lot of people overclocking those CPUs too.

[Dos_Box]

I had a dual slot 1 server back in the day

 

I remember the faff of trying to add a second PII to a server with NT4.0. You had to have the exact matching processor and reinstall NT4.0. If you were lucky it picked it up!

Edited April 12, 2017 by Dos_Box

[synaesthesia]

Ooooooh those were lovely. Was it the Abit BE6 II mainboard? A pair of 300A's at 450Mhz each was everyone's wet dream at the time. A 300A at 450Mhz pretty much minced the available P3's too. I didn't get to play with any of those but I did get a Celeron 366a running stable at 550Mhz. Made mincemeat out of my brother's P3 500 which he paid triple the amount for That was on an Abit BH6 I believe.

[Tesla]

Correct for both.

 

1. 
   
2. 
   

 

Is it just me that thinks these look cooler like this than what they're like now? ( I had no idea old processors looked like this....)

[deKay]

Well, technically they don't actually look all that different. The processor is inside the case on a board, rather than just being "bare" as they are now (and were before these).

[Norphy]

Is it just me that thinks these look cooler like this than what they're like now? ( I had no idea old processors looked like this....)

 

The reason they looked like this was one of necessity. Intel and AMD wanted the L2 CPU cache to be faster and closer to the CPU. Before this, the L2 cache was on the motherboard, could be any speed and size. Process technology was still too big to locate the cache on-die at a reasonable cost so they had these daughterboards with a L2 cache module and the CPU on them.

 

This brought its own problems, the cache speed was still slower than the CPU and as CPU speeds increased, the cache speed frequently didn't. They had to put clock speed dividers in so when the CPU ran at (for example) 500MHz, the cache only ran at 250MHz. AMD were especially bad for that, the first 1GHz CPU that they released only had cache chips capable of running at 333MHz. This made overclocking a bugger as well.

[synaesthesia]

It also is where those Celeron 300a and 366a chips came into life. They were slightly newer than the vastly more expensive Pentium class chips and they had increased the cache speed loads, although had less of it. What they didn't seem to count on, is even at stock speeds the Celerons were damn quick, and when they were overclocked they made the Pentium processors look slow.

[Tesla]

The reason they looked like this was one of necessity. Intel and AMD wanted the L2 CPU cache to be faster and closer to the CPU. Before this, the L2 cache was on the motherboard, could be any speed and size. Process technology was still too big to locate the cache on-die at a reasonable cost so they had these daughterboards with a L2 cache module and the CPU on them.

 

This brought its own problems, the cache speed was still slower than the CPU and as CPU speeds increased, the cache speed frequently didn't. They had to put clock speed dividers in so when the CPU ran at (for example) 500MHz, the cache only ran at 250MHz. AMD were especially bad for that, the first 1GHz CPU that they released only had cache chips capable of running at 333MHz. This made overclocking a bugger as well.

But... They look cool and shiny so must be better?!?

[Norphy]

They were a nuisance to cool, a annoyance to overclock and, once the cache went on-die, utterly redundant as they took up considerably more room on the motherboard than socketed CPUs do. I will say this in their favour though, they were a lot more robust than socketed CPUs are. No bent pins with those things!

[3s-gtech]

But they could still be forced in backwards, damaging the socket or the awkward retaining clips either side. Pretty robust really though!

[sted]

But they could still be forced in backwards, damaging the socket or the awkward retaining clips either side. Pretty robust really though!

not easily though (that said when i worked in a retail pc shop a customer bought the wrong type of ram and proceeded to fit it with a hammer then wanted a refund lol)

[GuyJD]

Most of what I remember about Slot 1/A processors was that the heatsinks on them there the sharpest things known to man.

[mikeyd101]

ahhh slot 1, used to run a celeron 266 overclocked to 400. Was cheap performance in the day. I remember that the celerons came without the slot 1 case so just wobbled around.

[EliteCommander]

I still have some data on a couple of zip disks somewhere... without a zip drive... most likely meaningless information now though... plus I would have to find a machine with a parallel port to use it...

 

I'm fairly sure that just before they disappeared they made a USB one, maybe worth a search.

[GrumbleDook]

I'm fairly sure that just before they disappeared they made a USB one, maybe worth a search.

 

I need to pick up a cheap USB floppy drive to clear out the last batch of disks I found a few weeks back. Just tried the one I had in storage (last tried 4 years ago) and it is knackered. Tried to boot up an old Linux box (last booted 4 years ago) and the m/b has died (smouldering away!).

 

Just goes to show how we still need some legacy hardware at times.

[Dos_Box]

I'm fairly sure that just before they disappeared they made a USB one, maybe worth a search.

 

One here on Ebay for £47 - Iomega ZIP Drive (USB)

I guess they are cashing in on people who have a stack of disks with content they need to get off them.