• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Your input requested: Scope of the Pentium subforum

I routinely visit thrift stores and scout "E-waste" dropoff points and I rarely see anything older than a Pentium 4 anymore. The few Pentium III and older machines I do come across are usually missing parts and clearly have not been in active use anytime in the recent past. So, people who want to use machines of this generation, either to enjoy games and software from the Windows 95/98 era again or to make use of older hardware that modern PCs don't support anymore, are going to need help with troubleshooting, obtaining parts, finding drivers, etc., and that's where our community can be an asset to them, as most of us remember when these machines were new and still know all the tips and tricks we had to learn when we were using them. And I'm sure many of us have a stash of parts from this era that could be of great help to someone who needs something specific but doesn't want to pay the often highly inflated eBay prices for it.
 
Sure, why not? I don't see any reason to define so narrowly what discussion is acceptable on a broad forum like this one. Chances are the people starting threads about the slightly-later-era hardware are gonna be the same ones who are already here anyway. :p

The P2 is 19 years old; the P3 is 17 years and there was virtually jack difference between them... Actually you can argue that anything between a 150 MHz P-Pro and 1100 MHz P-III are all extensions of the same thing anyway. And then you get stuff like the K6, which initially competed with the P1 but the later revisions were sold directly against the earliest P-IIIs.
 
All that stuff can be talked about in an off-topic area. We were talking about where the Pentium on topic area should end.

If you allow newer stuff to have its own specific area then you end up being a free windows help desk.
 
I only think the help desk issue would come about if Windows XP was considered on-topic, which I wouldn't want.

For me the ideal limit, [planning for future years and no changes], would be P3-500 and a Windows 98SE [or similarly dated OS]. How you would word that in a description I'm not completely sure, but that's where I think the line should be (personal opinion). I see it as all basically the same stuff anyway, and I don't think the Pentium forum is so busy it couldn't handle a few threads about a slightly newer processor being discussed by vintage collectors.
 
Actually I'd almost say lump this forum together with the 386/486 forum and call it the "DOS+VGA era." That would probably keep things relevant. Sure, we'd get the odd thread from someone running FreeDOS on a K6-2/550 or trying to get some game going in Win95, but who cares? They're not going to bring the board to its knees. Better than a bunch of hand-wringing on whether 20-year-old tech is "truely vintage enough."

Subdividing everything into 10 different forums for each minor architecture change just makes it tiring to check through them all with no real benefit.
 
Hello
In some countries an Antique Car is any car that is over the age of 25 or 35 years.
Computers COULD be vintage if they are more then 25 years old, date today minus 25 = 1991.
- just a thought -
now throw out , i had an ibm 315 pc server and in my eyes it was a vintage computer. But thinkcentre model 8183 (P4) , not vintage in my eyes..

Of topic, but same subgroup division discussion, i would like to say - a subdivision in the "PCs and Clones" COULD be inboard 386 and likewise accelerator card subdivision.
/cimonvg
 
xjas said:
Subdividing everything into 10 different forums for each minor architecture change just makes it tiring to check through them all with no real benefit.
Click to expand...

Creating subforums arbitrarily based on CPU generations is just stupid.

I've never understood the need for three different subforums/categories for basically the same thing: PCs and Clones. People should think about what a category is really; a compromise between what's interesting and relevant to a specific group of users ("PC guys" in this case) and the amount of posts made within that particular category in a certain time frame (too much traffic will make people lose overview and makes it hard to follow up on threads etc).

Too many categories is bad because that too will make people lose overview. Too few is also bad for the same reason if there's enough traffic.

So my answer to this question is; there shouldn't even be a Pentium subforum.

Oh btw, the new subforums are basically stillborn because there was never a need for them and I feel pretty safe in my prediction that they will remain dead. People don't use the Internet to meet locals despite what the pr0n ads at the sides of your screen tell you. ;)
 
Last edited:
I'd make it "pentium and later". Since this is the VINTAGE computer forum I can't imagine much "abuse" here, I don't see a flood of Intel Atom and Core i7 discussions coming towards us. I'd just try to not over-regulate stuff until the need arises.
 
kyodai said:
I'd make it "pentium and later". Since this is the VINTAGE computer forum I can't imagine much "abuse" here, I don't see a flood of Intel Atom and Core i7 discussions coming towards us. I'd just try to not over-regulate stuff until the need arises.
Click to expand...

Agreed.
 
KC9UDX said:
I'd stop at Pentium Pro. Everything newer than that seems too much the same to me. But that's just me.
Click to expand...

I would say anything with an older CPU bus than the P4's quad-pumped bus. After all, PII and III use exactly the same bus as PPro (see the below pic for an 'interesting' eye-opener....... and yes I have the matching 440FX dual-proc MB to match my matched pair.....):
IMG_20160219_130249_720.jpg
 
Last edited:
Quite difficult questions, in the mid 1990's the x86 CPU landscape became more complicated, Cyrix, IBM, NS, AMD, Transmeta and others came with their own designs instead of cloning just the Intel chips, first time that they started to redefine the sockets or created completely new ones incompatible to Intel. Very interesting and a lot of interesting topics in this era. I know well as I have worked @ tech support @ msi at that time... (I kept some interesting boards and cpus from that times, all working)

I would propose to think about another subforum category for above socket 5/7,means for Slot 1 (PII/III), Slot 2 (1st XEON gen), Slot A (AMD K7), socket 370 (Celeron). Keep Pentium 4 and Athlon XP and above out there, they are still tooo new, systems which can run Win XP sense/usefully are not that vintage yet...
 
Last edited:
The Pentium area was created 5.5 years ago in response to popular demand - http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?22115-Pentium-area .

5.5 years later I think the experiment has worked well and I would support the Pentium area expanded to the P2 or P3 era. The new cut-off would be somewhere around 800 Mhz.

My objection to the title "Pentium and beyond" is that there are people who will post something egregiously off topic, and then will get irritated when you move it. Without even a slightly mushy guideline as to where the cut-off is you will get people who think it is their god given right to post about anything.

What I don't want to see is this to turn into a Windows support forum. When the faster machines were new the Internet was already pretty widespread and there is usually plenty of online resources for those machines. That's quite a bit different from the early 8088 or 286 class machines, which are pre-Internet era and not as well documented. The VC Forums is supposed to be filling that gap in the public knowledge, not just providing another venue for late model x86 support.
 
Mike, I don't know how you'd draw the line. You could say "P6 or earlier", but there are still P6 (mobile, I think) chips being made today. What about non-Pentium chips, such as those by VIA and AMD? Is my VIA C3 or C7 chip included or excluded?

Perhaps any chip capable of x64 operation should be excluded. It's not perfect and doesn't solve the P6 problem, but it does cut out a lot of non-candidates. A socket 462 Athlon would be included, but maybe not socket 754, as that supports an Athlon64 CPU (although not all 754 CPUs were 64-bit capable).

Just some random thoughts...
 
mbbrutman said:
The Pentium area was created 5.5 years ago in response to popular demand - http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?22115-Pentium-area .

5.5 years later I think the experiment has worked well and I would support the Pentium area expanded to the P2 or P3 era. The new cut-off would be somewhere around 800 Mhz.
Click to expand...

Best not to include the PIII then. The Coppermine runs well past 800 MHz in some iterations, to say nothing of Tualatin which goes to 1.4 GHz. They all share the same socket and can be used on the 133 MHz bus. Not trying to agitate, just wanted to point out a potential problem.
 
The line has always been fuzzy and quite frankly, we've never really been that strict about enforcing it. Go read back through the forum archives to see ...

We need a rough line of demarcation. Otherwise, people will feel free to post anything. And that's not acceptable.

Also, we've never been picky enough to include or exclude specific implementations from specific manufacturers. That concern is bogus. This is about rough classes of machines, not specific subgenres or stepping levels.
 
mbbrutman said:
The line has always been fuzzy and quite frankly, we've never really been that strict about enforcing it. Go read back through the forum archives to see ...

We need a rough line of demarcation. Otherwise, people will feel free to post anything. And that's not acceptable.

Also, we've never been picky enough to include or exclude specific implementations from specific manufacturers. That concern is bogus. This is about rough classes of machines, not specific subgenres or stepping levels.
Click to expand...

Well then, if I read you right, a PIII is a PIII. If so, no problem.
 
What's the difference between a P][, and a P///?

I always thought it was just a marketing thing.
 
PIII added SSE extensions to a Pentium II. Otherwise, PIII is just a faster PII with some improvements to the cache, especially when the cache was reintegrated into the same chip instead of being external. Pentium M and Core were minor improvements to the architecture with Core 2 adding 64-bit instructions to the mix.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top