Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

blakerwry

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I agree... BX is sweet... orginally designed for single CPU 100mHz operation with pII's and is able to push 133mHz, use PIII's, and run dual CPU configs... awesome.. simply awesome.
 

Fushigi

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honold said:
they really only have socket 478 for desktop offerings

p3s are for servers only, celerons have been moved to 478, and 423 is unused
I'm mostly staying out of this as I don't follow the Intel side of things anymore. I just wanted to point out that AMD has Socket A for 1- or 2-way servers, Socket A for low-end (Duron/Thunderbird), and Socket A for mainstream. All one of their socket specs are in use and have been in use for quite some time.

This talk of dropping a modern CPU into an old motherboard is backwards. The beauty is that you can drop an "old" AMD CPU on a current mobo and it'll work just fine. I could, as a T-bird owner, buy a current mobo, drop my T-bird in it, and run just fine using the advances the KT has over my current aging mobo. Not much of any performance boost, but things like built-in goodies, USB 2, etc would all be nice. Then, when my performance needs change, drop in a 2600+ or higher. Minimal cost and I can spread the cost over time if needed. AMD's single-socket design supports a better upgrade path.

Yeah, I could add most of the goodies via PCI cards, but that'll mean redundancy in the future and I'm out of PCI slots anyway.

AMD is providing the best upgrade path for my situation.
 

Tea

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honold said:
p3s are for servers only, celerons have been moved to 478, and 423 is unused

Exactly: everyone who bought socket 370 or socket 423 is now screwed. (Never mind all the incompatible different versions of those sockets.)

PS: Most practical, hands-on people who work with hardware all the time do not have Honold's irrational hate for VIA products. Nor do we take a single horrible example by an incompetent motherboard manufacturer and reason from that that all boards using the same chipset are crap. The ECS horror board Tannin wrote about a little while ago, for example, does not demonstrate that the SiS 735 chipset is pox: merely that PC Chips make pox boards.
 

honold

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tea: fuck off, idiot

you've declared that i'm
a) not practical
b) not hands-on
c) don't work with hardware all the time
d) irrational
e) prone to use one example to set a rule

because i stated that via's bad rep came to fruition around the kt133, and cited specific, factual examples of bad experiences i've had with them

funny the 735/k7s5a was brought up...

right now at my desk i have 3 pcs:
1 kt133a-based
1 sis735-based
1 epia-based

that's 2 athlons, 1 c3. no intel. 3 via chipsets. and they all work well.

i have about 15 k7s5a systems in the office that run 24/7 in heavy development use with no problems, and i've probably built about 10 more that are also in use with no problems.

so yeah, i'm the anti-via intel fanboy.

want some ketchup for that shoe?
 

honold

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okay i admit it, we are biased here

12 employees

p4 celeron: 1
c3: 3
g4: 1
p3: 8
p4: 15
celeron: 17
athlon: 17

so we are using more intel than amd
 

honold

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i see we're missing the edit button here too :'(

meant to say '2 via chipsets' and 'anti-amd fanboy'

i am reticent to employ via chipsets when an alternative (sis, nvidia) is available but i don't expect them to burn the building down - i've just found via-based boards require much more massaging than your average sis/nvidia/intel
 

Tea

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No need to be offensive, Honold.

If you had cared to read my post before replying to it, you would have seen that I said nothing of the sort. I said "most practical people", leaving room for the reader to infer what he will, according to the explanation that seems to him to fit the observed facts best. Your rather bizarre inability to ever do anything useful with the most common chipsets on the market (at least according to your own reports), chipsets that many, many other people around the world use on a daily basis without the slightest trouble, suggested to me that there were two likely explanations:

1: You are incompetent or foolish. Personally, I didn't believe this for a second: I have seen abundant evidence in your posts to show that you are in fact highly intelligent, and usually both well-informed and rational.

2: You are an expert outside his field. This, on the face of things, seemed a much better explanation, as it fits well with the observed facts.

No doubt there are other possibilities which have not occurred to me, but failing these, if you assure me (as you seem to be doing) that you do in fact have extensive hands-on experience with VIA chipsets, then I must reluctantly gravitate toward the first explanation.
 

Mercutio

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1. As a moderator (someone who DOES have an edit button), I'm more than entitled to tell you, Honold, to be more respectful to Mr. Wilson.

2. Via's QA area bears an uncanny resemblance to my computer room.
 

Buck

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honold said:

Much tidier then my shop, and more room. They seem to use a lot of Post-it notes, although I've found those small sticky notes to disappear rather easily around me. I also don’t have any open shelves, so things look much more neat at first glance (until you open the cabinet doors).

My apologies for the ignorance Honold, but I just don't see the comparison of a gas station with VIA's lab? Maybe you can help me out with this mental image.
 

honold

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Tea said:
No need to be offensive, Honold.
likewise
If you had cared to read my post before replying to it, you would have seen that I said nothing of the sort. I said "most practical people", leaving room for the reader to infer what he will, according to the explanation that seems to him to fit the observed facts best.
clearly i felt something was implied
Your rather bizarre inability to ever do anything useful with the most common chipsets on the market (at least according to your own reports), chipsets that many, many other people around the world use on a daily basis without the slightest trouble
i couldn't begin to make a sweeping statement about what the most common chipset on the market is, but i don't see where you're deducing that i'm 'failing to EVER do anything useful' with 'them' (assuming them=all via chipsets since the kt133).

it's was my common experience from the mvp3 through the kt266a that 4/5 via-based boards will go off for light use without a hitch (provided you install the 4-in-1s and pci latency patch) and that the 5th would be such a nightmare that it effectively negated and overcame the savings and ease of the other 4.

the only recent via purchases i made were those epias, 2 of which had chronic ethernet issues. i haven't owned a kt333 or kt400, but looking at mailing list and forum posts regarding them has been enough to maintain my 'i'll use it when i have to or i am given a sufficiently compelling price/performance offer stance'. in the present tense, i always go sis or nvidia for athlons.

my field is network administration, and my history is hardware. i ran the whole hardware circuit starting at best buy, then lead teching, then direct to compusa lead teching (commission), then general electric capital information technology solutions (gigantic outsourced hardware support for large local corporate clients like anheuser-busch, bank of america, a.g. edwards, edward jones, etc). worked for a bunch of misc corporate hardware contractor joints, compaq, and dell along the way.

i hit the glass ceiling on that one pretty fast - not bragging, it's a low ceiling.

the only constant about it is that i've always had a personal interest in hardware and always keep up on it, read forums/lists, grudgingly help everybody i'm acquianted with, etc.

my interests in networking started as a sysop of a bbs on an hp 8086 when i was like 12 years old. i had a c book, but i never read it - i wish i had.

i eventually found that being a complete expert in the hardware field is about as economically satisfying as being able to make a great ham salad. as my work here deals with clustered computing software development, i have a LOT more to do with hardware than i have in more recent jobs - probably 15-20% of my time is spent on it.

so i wouldn't consider myself incompetent or an expert out of his field, but hey, that's me talking.
 

honold

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i just truly imagine one of those post-it notes looks like this:

buy milk
call mike 806-408-6972
implement pci bus parking
pick up suit from cleaners
fix mwq bug

for my money, that doesn't look like the kind of environment where i want testing/qa/documentation done for the hardware i buy. they're working with lots of physical devices, and their physical organization appears to be a joke.

what's on their intranet, i don't know. maybe their testing, documentation, and qa processes are perfect but judging from how long the pci issues took i doubt it :(
 

honold

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i was actually looking at that article/picture when the ceo of my company, a member of the 3-person team to design the first on-chip ethernet implementation, spit his coffee out and said, "THAT'S VIA'S QA DEPARTMENT?! NO WONDER THEIR PCI IMPLEMENTATION SUCKS"

don't shoot the messenger :)
 

CityK

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I think honold meant something along the lines of your typical "Joe's Auto Shop" mechanics garage...and there definitely is more then a passing resemblence with all the parts lying around everywhere etc etc...

Anyways, I love those pictures. That guy looks like he hasn't slept in 3 days and still has 237 bugs to correct in the Via's latest...and the work environment just screams "Geniuses at Work".

CK
 

LiamC

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Thank you K. Say hello to J for me :) I should have got off of my arse and looked on George's site...
 

NRG = mc²

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I also think you should remove the first mention of socket370... all socket370 boards can support coppermine core.. infact, this is the core they were made for. And as most of us know, socket370 is very similar to slot 1 so adapters are available making upgrading possible in almost all situations.


Not all. Early ones designed for PPGA Celerons could not, even some with the 440BX (as opposed to LX) couldn't.
 

honold

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there have been all those nutjob slotket adapters to help people along the way
 

blakerwry

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NRG = mc² said:
I also think you should remove the first mention of socket370... all socket370 boards can support coppermine core.. infact, this is the core they were made for. And as most of us know, socket370 is very similar to slot 1 so adapters are available making upgrading possible in almost all situations.


Not all. Early ones designed for PPGA Celerons could not, even some with the 440BX (as opposed to LX) couldn't.

What aprt of what I said don't you agree with? the fact that Socket370 was designed for the coppermine core? The fact that Socket370 is in many ways simliar to slot I? or that upgrading is usually possible via an adapter?

Any way you look at it, the first mention of socket 370 goes out the window, considering that intel designed socket370 for the ~810 chipset and that chipset most certainly supported coppermines. ....I know some manufacturers made socket370 BX boards(even dual ones), but AFAIK these also supported coppermines.
 

NRG = mc²

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This part

all socket370 boards can support coppermine core..

I had an early S370 DFI board I think, that wouldn't do coppermines. But ten again, whta do you expect from a company named "Diamond flower international" or something like that. :mrgrn:
 

time

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I used a few DFI boards back in the days of the HX chipset (Pentium). Some of the features, such as CPU overheating alarm and shutdown, were pretty impressive by the standards of the day.

Socket 370 was introduced to support PGA Celerons (366MHz+). The chipsets at the time were Intel 440ZX (and LX?), but many people started using Via and SiS alternatives.

Coppermine broke this by introducing FC-PGA: http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20000229/index.html

IIRC, Via based boards were able to support both the original PGA and newer FC-PGA chips - part of the better feature set that made them extremely popular. It was only with the introduction of i810 that Intel reclaimed this market.
 

Vlad The Impaler

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considering that intel designed socket370 for the ~810 chipset and that chipset most certainly supported coppermines

This statement is incorrect. Intel designed socket 370 for PPGA Celerons.

The Intel i810DC100 as it first came out did not support the Coppermine core. That was left to the i810e which also did 133FSB as well. As time went on, Intel introduced later steppings of the i810 which introduced Coppermine support at a lower price than the i810e. Here is an example of a board I sold a couple of hundred of that was not Coppermine compatible for the majority of its production life: http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/810/370SWD.htm

wow... I didn't realize they used chipsets below 440BX in the s370's.
Many of the larger box-movers did cheap 2volt Celeron PPGA solutions based around the 440LX and EX chipsets, so they could give them a seperate AGP video card and claim upgradability; a trait sadly lacking in the i810.
 

honold

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Vlad The Impaler said:
Many of the larger box-movers did cheap 2volt Celeron PPGA solutions based around the 440LX and EX chipsets

when i was the senior network administrator at a dot com startup in 1999/2000, another employee and i prided ourselves as the highest paid box movers west of the mississippi. i was something like the 20th employee, and we swelled to 140 employees within six months. the company sold for 140m, which was unfortunately just after the gold rush ended. in the peak of ignorance, i'm sure it was a 1b company.

i have a little photoshopped image of us holding boxes on the cover of fortune :)

just yesterday i was talking to a guy who was in upper management at a large company (maritz) in the late 70s/early 80s. he said his value from retirement, bonuses, and what-have-yous ended up being worth about 1m by 1999 - at which point HE LOST IT ALL ON THE STOCK MARKET.

how that is possible, i'll never know. i didn't want to offend him by pressing, but i'm certain a monkey could pick stocks with a dartboard in 99 and beat the s&p.
 
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