Return To Castle Intel: 16 Years Of Motherboard History

[shadowmaster625]

Nice. You forgot the most important intel chipset: the 865. You can find old computers on ebay for 50 bucks that have everything a modern computer needs, if they have that chipset. All you need to do is slap a 1950 pro agp card in there and you can even play games on it. But obviously its best for a budget pc. Whats really funny is what happens when you slap a $130 30GB OCZ vertex into one of those $50 machines. You end up with a computer that is light years faster than any computer you can buy new for under $300.

 

[cangelini]

I'd hesitate to call the 865 Intel's most important, honestly.

 

[cruiseoveride]

Asus FTW!

 

[QEFX]

"The real nugget here is the “OverDrive Ready” stamp on the CPU socket (Socket 4), a feature so ancient that it stumped our first set of Intel engineers." Your Intel engineers must be quite young, or I'm just way too old, as this brought back memories of the entire DX2 = 2 times but DX4 = 3 times logic, more than just 2 (sorry for the cheap shot VIA) chip brands & P1 being slower than a DX4 for more money. Great times for resellers.

Too bad you didn't go back to the days of everyone having 2 socket MBs (CPU + FPU). Everything is new again if you wait long enough.

[citation][nom]cadder[/nom]The original PC's with 8086 and 8088 processors could be overclocked in various ways. I remember some kind of add-on product for the IBM PC that upped the clock speed. I went to the local CompUSA (the original one!) to buy one and they told me it was a crappy product and talked me out of it. I remember various clone computers that upped the clock speed to 6 and 8MHz.[/citation]

Yep, change out the clock crystal or junk the Intel chip for something the gave more performance per clock tick.

 

[knutjb]

I had a Compaq with the funky power connector between the ISA and PCI. The power supply died and I couldn't for a replacement for a reasonable price or get the guy who had it to test the board. The woes of living in a small town. So I bought a P4 1.8, the progress of planned obsolescence... Enjoyed the flashback.

 

[Guest]

First, do the late 486 Classic/PCI boards not qualify as Intel "commercial release" boards? Those predate Batman, I think. Also, Neptune was the name of the original 430NX Socket5 chipset. I thought the recalled dud of the CapeCod board would be worth mentioning in this article. I actually had a friend that ended up with one of those and went had to deal with that recall.

 

[ancientlore]

Nettop is not a contraction from laptop and network. Think instead of a settop box with networking to the whole house. If you consider today that many homes are deploying NAS boxes that function as both Audio/Video servers AND could also be used for daily/weekly backups, it would see that, especially for cable, the 'set top box' should evolve into the set top / cable modem / entertainment server. Ie: an even great cost reduced multimedia PC. A PC is every bedroom, all connect to the central home nettop box. Files, internet, music and even TV served out.

 

[ancientlore]

Nettop is not a contraction from laptop and network. Think instead of a settop box with networking to the whole house. If you consider today that many homes are deploying NAS boxes that function as both Audio/Video servers AND could also be used for daily/weekly backups, it would see that, especially for cable, the 'set top box' should evolve into the set top / cable modem / entertainment server. Ie: an even great cost reduced multimedia PC. A PC is every bedroom, all connect to the central home nettop box. Files, internet, music and even TV served out.

 

[ancientlore]

Nettop is not a contraction from laptop and network. Think instead of a settop box with networking to the whole house. If you consider today that many homes are deploying NAS boxes that function as both Audio/Video servers AND could also be used for daily/weekly backups, it would see that, especially for cable, the 'set top box' should evolve into the set top / cable modem / entertainment server. Ie: an even great cost reduced multimedia PC. A PC is every bedroom, all connect to the central home nettop box. Files, internet, music and even TV served out.

 

[ancientlore]

Sorry about the re-posts. *IF* you post a reply while displaying the first page of comments, it replies with an error that it cannot open a subpage. It did that repeatedly, and I tried a few things to get around the error- thinking that the comment wasn't even being posted. It appears that the comment is posted, but then the error occurs. Sorry! error said something about http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/498-intel-skulltrail-badaxe.html#bow_comment cannot be found, or something similar to that. Don't want to create more multiple posts. I am assuming that if you first move to the last page of comments [2nd here] that no error occurs.

 

[apache_lives]

the i820 featured RDRam for P6 yes

 

[Guest]

Wheres the Intel Zappa boards? Those were GREAT boards for their time!

 

[zodiacfml]

i think the term nettop came actually from netbooks, i've seen and heard of asus eepc netbooks before anything about nettops.
it's quite effective, my first impression of the word nettop, is a desktop pc with netbook costs and capability.

 

[Guest]

These early boards did have on-board serial and parallel ports. See those pin connectors near the PS/2 ports? That is what those are for. Unfortunately, for the Mercury and Neptune chipsets, these were flaky.

 

[Belardo]

For those who were in the PC building/selling business back when RD-RAM showed its ugly face... it was a bad time for the PC business.

Intel was shoving RD-ROM onto the vendors as the "next thing". While many people remember the 820 Chipset debacle (PIII with RD-ROM used a Memory Translator Hub to convert the DDR into signals the PC could deal with since intel demanded RD-RAM - the very short version: CPU->NB->MTH->SDR) which meant VERY expensive, complicated motherboards. Or you bought a 820 board with RD-RAM slots and paid about $600 for 512mb of RAM, rather than $100~150. Then the failures happened, Intel got sued and and to replace motherboards/memory. The 815 motherboards were FAR better, built for SDR PC133 RAM and lasted most of the P3 life as it was FASTER and cheaper but had a 512mb limit (this was before Windows XP).

The P4 NEEDED RD-RAM to get any performance. But the early P4s were SO SLOW that P3 and AMD CPUs were easily faster with SDR. SAD.

But HOW intel really screwed the industry is that the memory makers were gearing up for the RD-RAM standard. Paying RAMBUS $$$ for severely
flawed tech (Fast RAM with very high latency). But, people were not buying P4s and the P3s were selling with VIA chipsets (SDR) since Intel had nothing to ship to support their P3 CPUs. Yep, there were severe shortages of SDR memory which drove the prices WAY up. Still cheaper than RD-RAM. Took about 6 months for the memory prices to stabilize.

Intel made the killed chipsets. The 440LX (PII) and the 815 was most noticeable for stability, performance and features.

And this... is why we DON'T have intel dictating the memory market, and hopefully never again. I'd actually would prefer if they stay out of the GPU market... but we'll see.