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Pentium III Coppermine chips turn 20

computerdude92

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It's amazing how useful these old CPUs are given their advanced age. Throw Windows XP on them and you have an excellent lil productivity system! Or Win98 for better game support, of course. :)

The first Coppermines, 500MHz-733MHz were released Oct 25, 1999. That's 20 years and a week old! Can we consider them vintage now? Pre-SSE2 stuff has not been supported by software since 2017.

The Athlon K7 Argon core Slot A 500MHz to 700MHz chips all turned 20 recently too. They were released between June 23 to October 4, 1999. Athlon T-Bird and XP's have a little way to go before celebrating their 20 year mark.


The tagline for the Pentium (First generation) thread section says "For discussion of collecting newer systems. Many of us wouldn't consider these "vintage", but some of us feel you should collect them before they're all recycled!"

That description text for that section has not been updated in years. Should we vote to redefine what is vintage on the forum and create new thread topic sections too?
 
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I think the Pentium II/III have a very short time frame to make a forum section for. Most of the sections involve a group of chips that were mainstream for a decade plus had some years both before and after since smaller numbers of systems were using the same chips. To get a similar length, a new section would have to cover from the Pentium Pro to the last Pentium 4 and the AMD counterparts. 2006 with Core 2 and Phenom being introduced would be a good break.

A vintage topic doesn't exactly seem fitting until about 5 years after currently developed software stops supporting the last chip.
 
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