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You know what seems to be extra rare? Pentium II and III Xeons.

VERAULT said:
I remember how stupid I thought these slotted CPU were. And I thought it was a bad move for AMD to copy intel on this one too. They went right back to chips on the mainboard which showed they were garbage.

I had Pentium 1 machines (75, 133, and 166mhz which later I upgraded to 233mhz when the cpus were cheap). But I was really Running AMD K6-2 at the time which I thought was the bees knees with my voodoo 2 sli. I didnt get a slot 1 machine until after they were outdated and to this day never even touched a slot A system.
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Don't know who in marketing thought the slotted CPUs were going to be a good deal. While working for the feds around the early 2000's, we had a boat load of them for about a year and then they were replaced.
 
clamps can fail on those too.

But honestly it sounds like it was either taken on and off too much or you didnt adjust the clamp. Its just metal, you can bend it for a tighter fit.
 
VERAULT said:
clamps can fail on those too.

But honestly it sounds like it was either taken on and off too much or you didnt adjust the clamp. Its just metal, you can bend it for a tighter fit.
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Well, our pocket of the government got into clones too. They would go with some contractor who would low bid and win then find an outlet for some Harry Swartz PC brand. Most of the failures as I remember were no name mobos. Then someone in accounting would get wind of it and it was back to name brands for a while.
 
Agent Orange said:
Well, our pocket of the government got into clones too. They would go with some contractor who would low bid and win then find an outlet for some Harry Swartz PC brand. Most of the failures as I remember were no name mobos. Then someone in accounting would get wind of it and it was back to name brands for a while.
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Yep sounds like typical government work. Hell I got my HP Laserjet with built in duplexing and jetdirect for free as it was like a year old and the were rolling out "new" printers which were no better than the last. I got my Color LJ New in the box and free because it didnt adhere to company standards. Gotta love waste.


EDIT: Wasnt the First celeron released on slot 1? Thats reason enough to think the whole thing is awful. Think about all the junky computers released after that and the whole fight to the bottom that ensued. Its when computers ceased being interesting. Well to me anyway.
 
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VERAULT said:
Wasnt the First celeron released on slot 1? Thats reason enough to think the whole thing is awful.
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What was really “awesome” about the Slot 1 celerons was, being a bargain basement product and all, Intel didn’t want to waste money on the elaborate cartridge around the PCB, so as a result they require different retainer clips on the motherboard to properly secure them. This created some minor annoyances, like Celerons being a little gimpy to use in some old PII motherboards, ”universal” retention towers on newer boards sometimes not working perfectly with either type of CPU, etc. I don’t know how common it really was, but there were horror stories about mail-order Celeron PCs arriving with the CPU rattling around inside the box.

FWIW, the first version of the Celeron with no L2 cache was true garbage, but the second gen ”Mendocino” (300-533mhz) with the built-in full speed 128k of cache was a totally solid product. (Helped by moving from slot1 to the first flavor of Socket 370, of course.) Celeron jumped the shark again with the Coppermine variants by sticking with a 66mhz bus all the way up to 766mhz, and by pairing them with some pretty gawdawful motherboard chipsets. 12x bus multipliers are just too much even if you *do* have a ton of cache, let alone when your whole deal is eking by with less to enhance cheapness.
 
I still have a few socket 370 celerons in inventory, and one working celeron eMachine. I plan never to use another Celeron.
 
eMachine.... Disjusting junk. I remember when people thought Packard bell was garbage in the 486 days... but eMachine was complete trash.. And they loved that celeron...
 
I still have an ABIT BP6 dual socket Mendocino Celeron board in the garage. (Which worked the last time I touched it... gawd, like six or seven years ago? I should dig it out and pull out the battery, if it's not too late. Although I guess reading this it's probably likely to blow up from bad capacitors if I used it for any period of time anyway.) These things were the ultimate in nerd mad science when they came out in 1999; you could be the first kid on the block with an SMP machine for less than the cheapest single Pentium III, and if you had any luck at all you could overclock your 300-something mhz Celeron A's up to around 500mhz, where they could embarrass a real dual Pentium II setup on most benchmarks.

Alas the one I have now, a junkbox find, has 466mhz Celerons in it, so it won't overclock much. The *original* one I had at the dawn of the millenium had 400s in it, which weren't stable at the full 600mhz you'd get from running at the "standard" 100mhz FSB instead of 66mhz, but it was mostly stable at 92x6 for 552mhz. So, yeah, loads of laughs.

I still kind of regret not getting a Pentium Pro machine to play with in the window where they were being thrown out and playing with stuff like that was still interesting to me, but I figure having a BP6 mostly scratched that itch already. Other than the amount of cache and over twice the clock speed it really is the same thing, even down to motherboard chipset family. It's just a ghetto as heck version of it.
 
VERAULT said:
EDIT: Wasnt the First celeron released on slot 1? Thats reason enough to think the whole thing is awful. Think about all the junky computers released after that and the whole fight to the bottom that ensued. Its when computers ceased being interesting. Well to me anyway.
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Well, as I recall the first Slot 1 system I had was a 440FX dual slot 1 with twin Pentium Pro 200's in Socket 8 to Slot 1 slotkets. This only ever worked for 440FX as I recall, none of the later chipsets could slot a PPro. I still have the PPro chips and the slotkets, and the motherboard might be around here somewheres.

Pentium II was the reason for Slot 1, and celery^Hon came later.

But now Socket 370 was originally built for Celeron, and then when enough full speed cache could be put on-die that PIII could be put in 370.

Got a maxed out IBM 1RU server here with dual Tualatin Pentium III-S 1.4GHz processors and loaded with 4GB of RAM. Running Debian 12. Runs rings around any P4 less than 2.4GHz and gives 2.4GHz Netburst Xeons a run for their money. Nothing in Socket 423 could touch it.

And I still remember those insanely overclockable Celeron 300A's in Slot 1......
 
lowen said:
Well, as I recall the first Slot 1 system I had was a 440FX dual slot 1 with twin Pentium Pro 200's in Socket 8 to Slot 1 slotkets. This only ever worked for 440FX as I recall, none of the later chipsets could slot a PPro. I still have the PPro chips and the slotkets, and the motherboard might be around here somewheres.

Pentium II was the reason for Slot 1, and celery^Hon came later.

But now Socket 370 was originally built for Celeron, and then when enough full speed cache could be put on-die that PIII could be put in 370.

Got a maxed out IBM 1RU server here with dual Tualatin Pentium III-S 1.4GHz processors and loaded with 4GB of RAM. Running Debian 12. Runs rings around any P4 less than 2.4GHz and gives 2.4GHz Netburst Xeons a run for their money. Nothing in Socket 423 could touch it.

And I still remember those insanely overclockable Celeron 300A's in Slot 1......
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Socket 8 to slocket? I didnt even know that was a thing. Pretty facinating.
 
That cpushack article mentioned it, so I’m curious, does anyone actually have a working set of Pentium II Overdrive for Socket 8s? Those have got to be ranked pretty high on the Holy Grail list of rare P6-family CPUs.

Ironically enough AnandTech’s benchmarks show Celeron A‘s solidly beating them clock-for-clock, so maybe my BP6 wasn’t as ghetto as I gave it credit for.
 
I mentioned I had a working set of the overdrives (purchased NIB from computergeeks.com). I kept the boxes thankfully. They should be 333Mhz with 512K cache I think.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
That cpushack article mentioned it, so I’m curious, does anyone actually have a working set of Pentium II Overdrive for Socket 8s? Those have got to be ranked pretty high on the Holy Grail list of rare P6-family CPUs.

Ironically enough AnandTech’s benchmarks show Celeron A‘s solidly beating them clock-for-clock, so maybe my BP6 wasn’t as ghetto as I gave it credit for.
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Newer chipset and faster RAM are the only thing going for the Celerons. 512K cache at clock speed vs 128K on the Celeron and same FSB speed.
 
Unknown_K said:
Newer chipset and faster RAM are the only thing going for the Celerons. 512K cache at clock speed vs 128K on the Celeron and same FSB speed.
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I think I’d also lump costing like 1/8th as much into the things going for the Celerons. And as the benchmarks showed it’s pretty rare for the cache difference to matter much. (Not to say it *never* does, you can find applications that’ll break it, but for general purpose computing 128k did fine at the time.)
 
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