Retiring the AXP

[sedrosken]

As I said in Goodbye Firefox, I will be retiring my Athlon XP 3000+ based desktop. I think I'll take the CPU out, maybe frame it and hang it on my wall. Like I should have done for my PIII, as it was the computer that taught me how to fix hardware.

Humorously enough, I have never seen an uncovered Athlon XP in person. Now will be my chance.

It's getting its well deserved rest. It has no working sound. The HP case is... bad, hmkay?

The role of test bed will be falling to my Pentium 4 2.8 HT. It does have sound, and I can even cannibalize the RAM and GFX card from the AXP for it. SSE2 is becoming a bare minimum requirement to operate many programs today.

 

[sedrosken]

That heatsink was really hard to take off, and I'm sure I irreparably damaged some key components of the mobo, so now I couldn't use it again if I wanted to, but I now have a fully uncovered Barton core AXP. I will give HP their props - the thermal paste is still tacky. Must've been fairly high quality stuff.

 

[snowhiker]

I retired my old AXP in early 2013...

AMD Athlon XP-2600+ Barton @ 1.916 GHz on ASUS A7N8X-X | Kingston 2048 MB DDR @ PC-2700 | HIS HD4670 1GB (AGP) | Seagate ST3500630A 500 GB (PATA) | Antec 550 watt TruePower EPS12v (12v=36a) | HP ZR24w (24" IPS) | HP Laserjet 6Lxi | Windows XP Home.

I still use the HP monitor but the rest is collecting dust. I did apply the final WindowsXP updates to it on April 8th then turned it off. I hadn't used it in months and it was GDAM SLOW. I don't know how I was able to use it for so long.

As I posted in the "biggest computer mistake" thread I should never have waited so long to upgrade. So long old friend. So long.

Edit: I bought that HP laser printer in 1997? I think. Still works great, except it needs a parallel port.

 

[P5-133XL]

sedrosken: Sorry, but I feel that the Athlon processor you are killing is a better processor than the P4 that you are keeping.

snowhiker: You can attach a jetDirect and convert that parallel port to an Ethernet port. I got a used jetDirect EIO card off Ebay for my HP5 and never looked back. If the card is hard for the 6Lxi to find, you can always get an external JetDirect. While parallel ports are hard to find on a modern machine, Ethernet is not.

As long as my old machines have an PCI-E slot, I get a relatively modern GPU and fold on them. I put GTX460's (because I had a ton of these old cards) in 2x P4's and in an Athlon II 2600+. GPU folding is not limited by the CPU. these machines get the same points as If I put the GPU in a modern machine. I don't even bother with a KB, mouse, or monitor except when I originally installed folding because I remote to them using TightVNC using their network connection.

 

[Santilli]

IIRC, I went from an Athlon 3200, and switched that out for a dual core 3800 for something like 30 dollars. Doubled the speed of the processor for 30 dollars? How can you beat that?

It's still running, and since I have a Xerox dinosauer 130df Laser printer that has drivers only in XP, and likewise the sound card, Xplosion 7.1 IIRC, it is a very fast, functional, computer, that works for htpc, and back up office computers. The video card is a 9600 Sparkle, that runs most video just fine.

Often times you can find a decent motherboard, new, for very cheap for this platform, and if I didn't have DD around, I would look at that when my main box went down, and I did not have much money to fix or buy a new machine.

Adding a Samsung 840 would have brought the old Athlon into the new world...

While others here fold a lot, I'm down to 30 dollars this month for PG&E. That's thanks to NOT folding, LED lights every place, with low watts, a fancy heater from costco that is superefficent, and the next step is to get a more energy efficent TV.

 

[sedrosken]

Oh that AXP kicks the P4's butt, but I need it for a test bed and the AXP doesn't have SSE2 (believe it or not, that's actually a big deal, I was surprised).

 

[Tannin]

I still have an Athlon XP in service.

Also, Athlon X2 245 and Athlon X2 265 in my other desktop machines. All three work just fine for what I need.

Woops! The X2 245 isn't! I just checked and it's Pentium G630 2.7! Now that I think of it, I vaguely remember swapping the 245 out for some reason back when I first installed Windows 8. Ah yes, it comes back to me: I wanted BIOS support for >2TB drives, so I needed a newer motherboard, and it so happened that the one I had on hand was for Intel CPUs. You know, the silly thing is that I have been refusing the Windows 8.1 upgrade ever since it came out because I knew that the idiots at Microsoft had made 8.1 incompatible all of the Athlon X2 CPUs (and a stack of Intel motherboards, btw). I wouldn't have minded doing the upgrade on my Thinkpad, but I don't like to upgrade the OS on that one until I have tested it on a less important machine. Turns out that I always could have done it but I had completely forgotten about the motherboard change. This just goes to show how unimportant CPUs have become these days for most tasks - not too many years ago it would have been inconceivable to own a machine and know exactly what the CPU in it was.