Super Socket 7 computers - why are they needed today. Stage 1 hardware. What to add, what to remove...?

Question

Iron

There is such a feeling as nostalgia, sometimes she wakes up and begins to gnaw ruthlessly. Photo report and graphs will be presented a little later.
Why was the board chosen specifically for super socket 7 - after all, it all started a long time ago with zx-spectruma, then there was Vegas 20 (NEC's clone 286 with 1 MB RAM and 40 MB hard), then the 486 board with 66 / DX2 appeared - and it was a revolution for me at that time ... Now, after 15 years, I wanted to assemble such a machine that would run the old programs and at least some new practical application for it. And if 486 computers, in my experience, are only capable of playing mp3 and watching VideoCD, then I still expect more from Pentium.
So, the weak and strong points of this platform, the motherboard is at home, so the name is a little later:
Strong:
+ a set of system buses from 60 MHz to 100 MHz (+ setting the frequency multiplication by jumpers and choosing a power supply with a spread of 0.1V)
+ the presence of ISA, PCI + 1 AGP slots (which makes the system omnivorous)
+ all IDE, FDD, USB controllers are installed on the board (which in the days of 486 one could only dream of)
+ successful BIOS - loading HDD/FDD/CD/USB + UDMA
66 support ... only 1 for FDD and 3 for IDE - non-standard pinout of the USB connector on the board
- only 2 DIMM slots and for some reason there are two long SIMMs nearby (an incomprehensible marketing ploy, anyway, SIMM works slower than DIMMs, if they are used together, then the whole system will be pulled down by the memory, and it overclocks a little worse. Just as difficult find SIMMs larger than 32 MB, it would be better if there were 4 slots for installing DIMMs)
There were no particular problems with the choice of memory ... and although, later in the experiment, SIMM memory will be used, now two DIMMs with a total capacity of 256 MB are installed on the computer, this would car, yes at that time.
Processors - here the situation is a little more complicated, but in the end, from the Pentium 100, AMD-K6-PR100, Intel 166 MMX and Cyrix M2 - 300, 166 was chosen - due to the fact that it has more cache and it worked great on 2.5 * 100 which almost turned it into the last 266 MMX, with one exception that 100 is more than 75 and 83 on which MMX worked normally. Ideally, you should look for AMD - K6-2 or AMD - K6-3 - but on the other hand, this is not quite a downgrade - since a system from the PI category falls into P II (at least in terms of performance, and this will be a completely different story when the stone will fall into the hands).
In order not to load ISA, the sound card was installed in the PCI slot, in the future I will try to substantiate my hypothesis in practice.
The same was done with the video card... and although, from the point of view of the downgrad, it should have been installed in ISA, in extreme cases, in PCI, the card was found in the AGP form factor - and very cheerful for this computer in the form of MX400 (64 MB).
The NEC 3.5 drive, CD-RW and DVD-R drives were installed as drives, the question is why ... and what will I watch movies on)
And 20 GB WD was chosen as a hard drive - working in UDMA 66 and divided into two pieces of 2 GB - FAT 16 (under DOS) and the remaining 17 (FAT 32) under Windows 95 OSR 2.
It is worth noting that this computer is not suitable for working with Windows NT below version 4, since the drivers for the AGP video card under NT 3.51 could not be found.
Of course, this is not a true downgrade system - but as a platform for experiments, it’s even nothing. A description of how OS / software and games have earned on all this will be soon ... Everything will depend on karma)
Am I right in thinking that this is one of the successful downgrade systems? But the selection of software for it is a whole song and already a completely different story.

Answer 1

To write what will come out or not to write, that is the question ... do you need such an experience or not?

Answer 2

AMD K6-II + worked at 466 or 450 MHz, overclocked to 600. I once had one, the owners of brand new slot celerons envied me.