What have you done with an early Intel recently?

[eyoungren]

Never touch a running system. 🙂


An AMD a day keeps Intel away. 🙂

(I know there were many more manufacturers than just those two in the 90s.)

My first real build was an AMD 586.

Computer got stolen the night my wife and I moved in to our first rental.

 

[eyoungren]

My first real build was an AMD 586.

Computer got stolen the night my wife and I moved in to our first rental.

I should clarify that this was my fault.

The rental was not in the best area, but was affordable. My wife, who grew up in East LA (Los Angeles) advised that we should just return for our second load of items in the morning.

I, the middle class raised, rural white boy who didn't lock doors at night, didn't listen. And between leaving and returning, the computer and other items were stolen.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

It's funny how some neighbors will bake you an Apple pie and others will help themselves to your belongings.

 

[lepidotós]

But in the 90s I was all about non-Intel processors (they were cheaper).

Between looking at ARM MacBooks, the Powerboard Tyche laptop in my signature, and the RCS Blackbird, I'm willing to say there's always gonna be people to go against the Intel grain for as long as Intel survives as a company. Even now when asked I always suggest Ryzens over Core i, or ARM/OpenPOWER if possible.​

 

[Amethyst1]

I'm willing to say there's always gonna be people to go against the Intel grain for as long as Intel survives as a company.

Yeah, but is that always done because the alternatives are superior in one way or another or because of “ideological” reasons? 🙂

Of course, in the years AMD wasn’t competitive (2006—2016) Intel was able to charge higher prices and all, then “suddenly” with the ryze of Ryzen they lowered prices and gave us more cores.

 

[MultiFinder17]

Yeah, but is that always done because the alternatives are superior in one way or another or because of “ideological” reasons? 🙂

Of course, in the years AMD wasn’t competitive (2006—2016) Intel was able to charge higher prices and all, then “suddenly” with the ryze of Ryzen they lowered prices and gave us more cores.

Amazing how a little bit of competition will light a fire under a company's bum, eh? 😛

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Im one of those people who prefer AMD. This doesn't mean I didn't have Intel boxes/laptops over the years but all of my gaming builds except my most recent were all AMD and that was because I could almost always count on savings from the cpu/lobo/ram and would then push that savings to a boss gpu. Another reason was at the time, AMD was the first to make it to 1ghz and that Athlon cpu purchase corresponded to one of my early gaming builds which definitely influenced my builds from that point onward.

 

[Amethyst1]

@eyoungren

Just when we talked about the W5700...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/394254647313

https://www.ebay.com/itm/394253263490

MODS: NOT MY AUCTIONS!!!

 

[Corefile]

Of course, in the years AMD wasn’t competitive (2006—2016) Intel was able to charge higher prices and all, then “suddenly” with the ryze of Ryzen they lowered prices and gave us more cores.

I think this is the marketing dept. of Intel more than the engineering depts. The latter just wants to make great products whereas marketing is all about milking the market to maximize profit. When you lead then you get lazy and don't execute well in the market. Just be thankful we have AMD to allow Intel to be laser-focused on where they need to get to otherwise we'd be in a terrible x86 CPU hell.

 

[eyoungren]

@eyoungren

Just when we talked about the W5700...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/394254647313

https://www.ebay.com/itm/394253263490

MODS: NOT MY AUCTIONS!!!

Nice!

I'm not after new video cards, but would that work in my 4,1 that's been upgraded to a 5,1?

 

[eyoungren]

It's funny how some neighbors will bake you an Apple pie and others will help themselves to your belongings.

We were renting a duplex and our house was the rear house. My sisters-in law and my mother-in-law eventually came to rent the front house.

That gave me access to the front yard where there was a small hole in the chainlink fence next to the neighbor. Their dog liked to come through that hole and run around our property.

So, after twenty years of rural living I dealt with this in the same manner you'd treat a misbehaving farm animal. First time the dog poked his head over in to the yard he got met with the flat side of my flat bladed shovel.

That dog never came over on my side again. The neighbors suspected but never said one word - probably because they knew that I knew they took our stuff!

 

[eyoungren]

Yeah, but is that always done because the alternatives are superior in one way or another or because of “ideological” reasons? 🙂

I went with AMD at those computer shows because it was cheaper and it did everything the Intel processors did. Ideology didn't come along for me until later when I actually started caring about this stuff.

 

[Amethyst1]

I'm not after new video cards, but would that work in my 4,1 that's been upgraded to a 5,1?

Yep, provided you're running Catalina or a later version. With a USB-C hub, you should™ be able to plug all your six displays into one card... and USB 3.x devices. 🙂

Im one of those people who prefer AMD.

Same here. My first build was in September 1999 (I still have the receipts for the stuff I bought, which is how I remember after all those years) and used a 400 MHz AMD K6-2. Little did I know the lack of on-chip L2 cache was detrimental to performance.

This doesn't mean I didn't have Intel boxes/laptops over the years [...]

Same here. In the laptop universe, Intel's CPUs were more power-efficient (excluding the not-so-mobile Pentium 4). The [ultra] low voltage Pentium III and Pentium M were excellent, AMD's CPUs simply used much more power.

AMD was the first to make it to 1ghz and that Athlon cpu purchase corresponded to one of my early gaming builds which definitely influenced my builds from that point onward.

I still remember the GHz race in 2000. When I did my second build in July 2001, I went with a Duron rather than an Athlon though as it was significantly cheaper, and I was kinda put off by the horror stories of 1 GHz Athlons blowing up within seconds if the cooler wasn't mounted 100% right...

 

[redheeler]

I just had Thunderbird, Firefox (with 4 Tabs and Netflix running), Preview, Affinity Photo with a 290mb picture, App Store and Activity monitor running at once without any slowdowns. Netflix continued to play smoothly most of the time, sometimes just some minor hickups when switching between apps.

Actvity monitor reported still 40% CPU inactive and about 8gb ram were used. According to your signature you have 4gb - I guess if you upgrade to 8gb your slowdowns should be gone.

View attachment 2065950View attachment 2065951

This is off-topic but Star Trek: Enterprise is underrated!

 

[lepidotós]

Yeah, but is that always done because the alternatives are superior in one way or another or because of “ideological” reasons? 🙂

Using myself as an example, why not both? POWER9 4-core is the exact same 90w as my current i5-6600K, same node, but gets four times the work done per core (plus any IPC dkfference), has super high IO bandwidth, apparently runs cool enough to be passively cooled as opposed to the tower cooler on my i5, and has gobs and gobs of L3, 10MB/core. ARM is clockless and can shut itself off to save a huge amount of power, and has been able to since 2004. Intel... has Windows? And a black box that can access your processor and RAM at any point. Even if I was 100% certain that everyone in the world was honest, I'd still not want to give the opportunity, and so I dogmatically don't.​

I still remember the GHz race in 2000.

I don't, but history is repeating itself, seeing as there's now a fight to get to 6GHz and beyond, so I'm sure I'll get to experience it... second-hand. For now, I might throw together a 750MHz Slot A Athlon build to try out older versions of Linux, like SuSE 7 or Debian 3. Possibly throw ReactOS on it as well to see how it fares.​

 

[Amethyst1]

I don't, but history is repeating itself, seeing as there's now a fight to get to 6GHz and beyond, so I'm sure I'll get to experience it... second-hand.

It's also repeating itself in that high-end CPUs and GPUs can use enormous amounts of power...

For now, I might throw together a 750MHz Slot A Athlon build to try out older versions of Linux, like SuSE 7 or Debian 3. Possibly throw ReactOS on it as well to see how it fares.

That would be so much fun. 😀 I have fond(?) memories of cutting my teeth on SuSE 6.x and 7.x back in 1999/2000/2001.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Yep, provided you're running Catalina or a later version. With a USB-C hub, you should™ be able to plug all your six displays into one card... and USB 3.x devices. 🙂


Same here. My first build was in September 1999 (I still have the receipts for the stuff I bought, which is how I remember after all those years) and used a 400 MHz AMD K6-2. Little did I know the lack of on-chip L2 cache was detrimental to performance.


Same here. In the laptop universe, Intel's CPUs were more power-efficient (excluding the not-so-mobile Pentium 4). The [ultra] low voltage Pentium III and Pentium M were excellent, AMD's CPUs simply used much more power.


I still remember the GHz race in 2000. When I did my second build in July 2001, I went with a Duron rather than an Athlon though as it was significantly cheaper, and I was kinda put off by the horror stories of 1 GHz Athlons blowing up within seconds if the cooler wasn't mounted 100% right...

That's funny because I initially was going to buy a Duron and clock it (a number of my friends did go this route) but ultimately I forked over the extra cash for the Athlon 1ghz cpu. I can't say I wasn't happy with it as that paired with a voodoo5 just absolutely crushed gaming of that era.

It never blew up on me either, so I count myself lucky as I was not exactly laser focused on rig maintenance at the time.

 

[lepidotós]

It's also repeating itself in that high-end CPUs and GPUs can use enormous amounts of power...

Yeah, 450W is almost the entire capacity of my 550W PSU, on top of a 380W processor, and transient power spikes... soon enough I feel like ~240v sockets are going to start showing up in new construction houses soon just for the 2.5kW power supplies of the future.​

That would be so much fun. 😀 I have fond(?) memories of cutting my teeth on SuSE 6.x and 7.x back in 1999/2000/2001.

I'm thinking KX133 (probably the ASUS K7V board, I see one for $70), 1x256MB, Aureal Vortex2 SQ or Trident 4DWave, PCI SATA with two 128GB SSDs for quad booting (if for no other reason than IDE hard drives are finite, but SSDs aren't yet), and either a Voodoo3 or Matrox G400 Max. Another thing I don't mind not being period correct is the PSU, I'd probably look for a Seasonic or something that has a stout 3.3v and 5v rail stead of old stock because I like having shelter from the rain.
And this case, the beige and blue one specifically.

On the topic of early Intel Macs, I'm gonna be picking up my MagSafe power supply to see if the new RAM (2x2GB) did revive my MB2,1 so I can finally libreboot it and sell it. I'm kind of attached to it and don't really want to but I need to in order to make room for a 13" MBP M2 or I'd never hear the end of it.​

 

[Eightbitgamer757]

Yesterday I picked up a clean looking mid-2007 iMac that didn't work for a cheap 10 dollars at a yard sale. It turns out it just had no RAM, so one stick from a donor laptop later, I now have a fully functioning (and surprisingly smooth) iMac, it's so smooth I'm reconsidering my original plans to sell it. I might hold onto it as an intermediate between my Catalina MBP and PMG5. This thing is just too nice to let go of. And someone threw in a 1tb hard drive for me too, what a deal!

 

[MacFoxG4]

I've always thought of building my own PC one day, just to say I did it. I've never had any particular loyalty to either Intel or AMD, but I think I would put a Ryzen in my build just because of the good things I've heard about that series of AMD CPUs. Though now that I've completely switched over to using a Mac for daily tasks, I really don't do anything on PC anymore. With that said, I am sure there will come a time where I will need something more powerful than this 2012 MBP and with my hesitance towards buying Apple's unupgradeable new Macs, perhaps building my own PC is still in the cards. I got rid of my awful ideaPad after 5 years of putting up with its terrible keyboard and mouse. The vast majority of the things I need to do can be done on macOS, and if I need Windows 10, I could just use a VM. The only piece of software that I use that was exclusive to modern Windows, and even then only for college classes that required it, was Microsoft Visio, so I made a Windows 10 VM in VirtualBox and installed Visio. The VM runs okay, I have it set to 1 CPU and 4 GB of RAM. It's useable for my needs. I would much rather run Windows 10 in a VM then keep that ideaPad around. I later found out that I could run Visio in browser through my school's Office 365 subscription and on top of that a current class I am taking is using a piece of software that is similar to Visio, but has a native Mac version, so the Windows 10 VM is kind of pointless now. Speaking of OSes I don't particularly care for, I ended up having to put Catalina on a separate partition because apparently this Mac still gets firmware updates. I plan on erasing Catalina from here once the last firmware update comes out. Sorry to those who like Windows 10 and Catalina, but to me they are among my least favorite versions of Windows and macOS respectively.

 

[Amethyst1]

It never blew up on me either, so I count myself lucky as I was not exactly laser focused on rig maintenance at the time.

Maybe those stories were a bit overblown (pun intended 🙂 ).

soon enough I feel like ~240v sockets are going to start showing up in new construction houses soon just for the 2.5kW power supplies of the future.

I already have 220…230V in my part of the world, so 380V would be the next step. 🙂

I'm thinking KX133 (probably the ASUS K7V board, I see one for $70), 1x256MB, Aureal Vortex2 SQ or Trident 4DWave, PCI SATA with two 128GB SSDs for quad booting (if for no other reason than IDE hard drives are finite, but SSDs aren't yet), and either a Voodoo3 or Matrox G400 Max.

Sounds solid but watch out for blown capacitors on the mainboard. I really liked my Matrox G400.

But I'd forget about a PCI SATA card for Debian 3.x or SuSE 7.x — they're too old to have a driver for that. SATA only came in 2003.

I’d stick to the on-board IDE channels. A CF-to-IDE adapter and a couple cards to switch back and forth between several OSes might be worth considering … or just SATA SSDs on a SATA-to-IDE adapter.

 

[rampancy]

The MacBook Pro 3,1 that simply won't die is still going strong with a PCIe Lane Width of x1, so I've put a cheap 240 GB Kingston A400 SSD in it to give it a kick. If I'm feeling especially hedonistic I may actually just go for broke and try to use this Mac to overcome my phobia of replacing the thermal paste in an early Intel MacBook Pro.

 

[zackkmac]

Scored a newer logic board for my $50 2007 black MacBook2,1 - managed to get a 2009 5,2 board for $11 shipped after spending all day yesterday trying to get it to install Yosemite or El Cap. This new board should allow for macOS newer than those, and better performance. 🙂

Also have 8GB of compatible RAM to throw in it once that's done, and I also removed the SuperDrive yesterday as I bought it with a disc stuck inside and prefer the quieter operation of having no drive at all.

 

[lepidotós]

Sounds solid but watch out for blown capacitors on the mainboard. I really liked my Matrox G400.

I hear it's a good card. Debated whether to get one and pair it with a pair of Voodoo2s, but the SLI'd Voodoos only get up to V3 2000 performance and are locked to at most 1024x768 even though I'd be hooking it up to a 1600x1200@75 display, so I'm gonna go for the Matrox now and sometime down the line add a V3 3000 for Glide games, the... three of them that were ever released for Linux. I know I could use a compatibility layer like OpenGLide, but I've heard real Voodoos look better.​

I’d stick to the on-board IDE channels. A CF-to-IDE adapter and a couple cards to switch back and forth between several OSes might be worth considering … or just SATA SSDs on a SATA-to-IDE adapter.

Yeah, that's what I've decided on for now, after asking VOGONS. Someone mentioned it might work if I bumped the kernel up to 2.6.x, so I'll give that a shot and see if it enables the card. 60MB/s isn't bad, but 90MB/s is even nicer, plus it'd enable using newer and thus less likely to fail CD or DVD drives. I have a dead IDE CD drive in my Optiplex GX1 SFF, and it's no fun.
Also, I just remembered that I have an SB0090 that I found in a thrift store in there that I never got working, so I may throw that in there instead if it works with OSS.​

Scored a newer logic board for my $50 2007 black MacBook2,1 - managed to get a 2009 5,2 board for $11 shipped after spending all day yesterday trying to get it to install Yosemite or El Cap. This new board should allow for macOS newer than those, and better performance.

Nice. My own 2,1 does boot with the new memory but there's definitely a power fault somewhere since the battery doesn't charge, and hooked up to the power, it might turn on for a few seconds while the charging light is amber but shuts off again when it's green. Or I could (should) just replace it with another 2,1 board...
How hard was it to swap them?​

 

[rampancy]

Scored a newer logic board for my $50 2007 black MacBook2,1 - managed to get a 2009 5,2 board for $11 shipped after spending all day yesterday trying to get it to install Yosemite or El Cap. This new board should allow for macOS newer than those, and better performance. 🙂

Also have 8GB of compatible RAM to throw in it once that's done, and I also removed the SuperDrive yesterday as I bought it with a disc stuck inside and prefer the quieter operation of having no drive at all.

Good luck! It's not impossible to put a 5,2 A1181 motherboard in a black A1181 case -- the only thing to watch out for is that the screw bosses on the bottom case won't fully match the screw positions on the motherboard (regardless of what A1181 variant you're putting the motherboard into), making fitting the heatsink problematic. One person used a copper shim to ensure proper contact between the heatsink and the CPU, but I find that kind of solution somewhat worrying (especially since they mentioned that in their case only one screw was able to fasten the heatsink to the motherboard).

IIRC, the legendary dosdude1 did this when he did his "World's Fastest A1181" CPU transplant mod, and solved the above problem by taking a Dremel to the plastic standoffs on the bottom case holding the metal screw bosses, cutting them from the bottom case, and simply supergluing them into the correct positions for the 5,2 motherboard's heatsink. I suspect that's what you'll have to do here.

Oh, and since you took out the SuperDrive, you'd might as well put in its place an optical drive bay caddy for a second hard drive or SSD (it's easy and affordable since the 5,2 used SATA for the optical drive, and SATA-SATA optical drive bay caddies are cheap and relatively easy to find). I've said before that this is one of my favorite upgrades for the 5,2.

Also: I had no idea the 5,2 could support 8 GB RAM. I've always seen 6 GB mentioned as the maximum, but after looking into it, I've just read posts from folks on the Apple Support Forums saying that they've gotten 2 x 4 GB DDR2-667 SO-DIMMs working. Wow. I hope you were able to get 2 x 4 GB DDR2-800 SO-DIMMs for a good price! (I always complain about how expensive they are on here...)