My Desktop PC History

My PC history and I literally mean PC's, so we're talking after my Atari ST, this is a list of the machines I've owned and used in order and a little bit about what I did with them.

486-SX-25 (1994)

The first PC I used was built by a company based in Baseford in Nottingham, it was at college and was equipped with an Intel 80486SX, it ran at 25Mhz, ran DOS 6.2 and a netware network layer.  It had 4MB of ram and basically was very much locked down, that was until we figured out how to quit out of the netware login screen (repeatedly CTRL+C whilst hitting enter fast).  The college had loads of these machines of this specification, the three main IT labs of course but then there were two more directly outside one of the lab doors, another in the head of Chemistry's office and a bunch in the library.

I primarily programmed in Turbo Pascal on these machines, I remember playing about with writing my first games on this in EGA graphics mode.

486-SX2-50 (1994)

My first home PC, it was from Watford Electronics and had their own ISA riser connecting to a dual speed CD-ROM, I remember Encarta amazed me, as well as working out how to just play CD's whilst programming.  I of course did my college work on the machine, and I remember my brother did his too.

The machine came with 4MB of RAM and a 200MB hard drive... MEGABYTE... I remember windows 3.1 ate into the disk significantly.

But DOOM came into view, now at the time I had no idea really what SX meant, but it had effects on DOOM's speed.  One of them was the maths.

I actually programmed around the limitations of t he SX chip without realising it and this came back to save me (or curse me) later.

Later we got Dark Forces and another 4MB of RAM, giving us a total of 8MB in this machine as I went to Uni.

But basically the SX had no floating point unit, it had only integer mathematics as well as a bunch of other operations being missing.  It was basically a DX chip which had failed QA and had come part of it disabled, but this was a "2" which meant it ran twice as fast as the machines at college.  And that speed difference was reflected in my little home brew games suddenly running twice as fast.

This remained my main and only PC going to Uni, but in my second year of Uni, sharing this machine with my A-Level studying brother I needed my own and these "Pentium" machines had been released.

Pentium-100 (1996)

The power of the penium, with the EDO ram SIMM's was so massive compared to the 486, and this was the first machine I started to program in C on.  Indeed, it was also the first machine I wrote Java on and even played with Linux.  But I never loved this machine.

Running at 100Mhz, it was blisteringly fast to me, but I was still using DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 for the most part.

I should have, it was the first machine I bought with my own hard earned money, I did keep it until my final year at uni, but by then I had started to build my own machines.... But I'd also been to work in IT.

HP Pentium-166 (1998)

This was a machine at work, it was mainly a windows 95 platform for me to work with, I soon had Windows 95 at home too, so things balanced up.  All I used this for was some very basic database work, which the prior incumbent in my job had left (and which was awful).

Compaq Pentium-II 233 (1998)

Another work machine and at 200Mhz, it seemed like the things of legend, but this was a compaq deskpro to which all the analysts and myself upgraded, with  massive 17" CRT monitors, they were really nice machines.

I did a bunch of Pascal programming on it, a bunch of Cobol and some database work (I think it was in FoxPro).

Pentium-III 300 (1999)

Returning to Uni for my final year I built this machine myself, I remember this was a slot-1 processor, and I put a whopping 32MB of RAM into it.  I wrote my dissertation on it and networked it to my older Pentium 100.

Voodoo3-2000 AGP.... Which I only sold in 2013 on ebay, at a profit.

Cyrix-150 (1999)

This was actually my pentium 100, but I found the Cyrix chip for sale for only £10 at maplins so bought it and stuck it in the old PC, to find it was a massive performance improvement when compiling and running both C and Java.

Celeron-III 450 (1999)

This was a machine I actually built for a customer, I spent a bit of time making PC's and making money doing so in the late 90's.  And this was one which stuck out to me because it was such a nice performing machine, it included a graphics card (I think it was a Voodoo3-3000).

The build was with a gigabyte motherboard using slot-1, but the processor was socket 370, buying it and using a daughter board was cheaper than buying a socket 370 motherboard, and performed no differently.  It actually made adding the cooler so much easier.

Pentium III 500 (2000)

I bought this after uni, just a new chip, with 128MB of RAM as I set off away from uni.  I just played a lot of games on this machine, dabbled with Java, but I didn't have the compiler suite we used at work to my programming was mostly all in the office.

Pentium III 500 (2001)

This was the office machine I had at the time, I'd had one before, but don't recall it, this one however was by the local computer firm in Redditch and I remember it was a 500mhz Pentium III.

GeForce... At some point at home in 2001/2 I got the first GeForce card at home and started to babble with OpenGL on Linux.

Pentium III 1ghz (2003)

Another office machine, this was a bod standard HP I think, the job here was C++ programming, but coming from a pure Borland using history (all the way from college to now) I was suddenly not in a Borland using shop and... well... I didn't stay at this job very long.

Pentium IV - 1.5ghz (2004)

A prescott Pentium 4... at the high speed of 1.5ghz, this was my first hyper threaded machine, it was built from the ground up for gaming... so it had 1.5GB of RAM (the most I could afford)... the dual thread pentium 4, overclocked to 2ghz on air.

A pair of GeForce 8800GTX in SLi.

I bought it to run Battlefield 1942 really well, and was really very good.  I also played national league Day of Defeat and started my dual obsessions with World of Warcraft and Eve-Online on this machine.

Core 2 Duo 3ghz - Wolfdale - 2.3ghz

I built this machine for my father, he didn't appreciate it at the time.

Core 2 Quad Q6600 - 3ghz (2007)

This was my main driver for years, and the machine I first put into the Cosmos 1000 case.  It had various RAM, disk, graphics configurations until the last iteration being a GeForce 260 GTX (squared) so this was two GeForce 260's on the same card in SLi together.... It was really good.

I spent time coding for Lordz Game Studio on this machine, as well as playing lots and lots of games.

Core i7-920 (2012)

Yeah, we're at Core i7.... the best I could accord for the i7 release set and it went into the same case as the Q6600 was in.  This machine was a main-stay until I actually swapped out the Core I7 (4 cores 8 threads) for a Xeon which was 6 cores and 12 threads... I did that in like 2016... so I've had 12 threads at home for a long old time.

Ryzen 5 3600X (2018) -> Ryzen 9 3900X

Team Red.... Aside from the cyrix I've always, always been Intel... Ryzen turned my head, and the 6c12t 2600 was the first I could get my hands on.  But the motherboard was purchased with upgrades in mind and the same machine now has a Ryzen 9 3900X 12c24t.

It was a mchine built around the 64GB of RAM, dual m2 NVMe and a stack of 4TB disks, all in a corsair obsidian case.

Project - Socket 771 to Socket 775 - Xeon Conversion

I've been conducting an experimental project, one I've seen all over the net by others, but which had lots of different information... This is the conversion of a socket 775 motherboard to a socket 771.

First of all, why?... Why would we do this?... Well, the socket 775 is a commercial socket, supposedly sold to us mere mortal customers who buy one machine and one CPU at a time, and the motherboards and processors in the class were/are quite expensive.

We're talking about the Core 2 era, Celeron D, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad.  I remember the Core 2 Quad machine I put together was really rather expensive at the time.  So, between six and eight years on, we're retiring those machines; yet they cost us a lot of money, and despite depreciation rates we users can still make use of these machines.  They can be useful as render farm nodes for 3D or movie work, they can be used as servers, to host basic information, or upload/download points, even as firewalls.  All roles they can fall into easily.

I personally am going to be using the machine I've got as a quiet webserver, retiring a venerably serving Pentium 4 Prescott for this old Dell machine.

So, what is the base machine?

Well, it's a franenstein, the in-laws have had me build them a new machine, so they had an Intel D31PR motherboard holding a Celeron D 450, and one gigabyte of RAM, a totally unhelpfully slow machine.  Even they noticed it was extremely slow.

From my spares they had enough parts to basically rebuild their machine, which I did, and it left me with their old motherboard.  I wanted to upgrade the processor, expand the RAM and add a RAID array controller card, but my budget is extremely low, we're talking £20.

Well on Amazon, I can get a RAID controller card for £13.. This left me £7... Hmm.. Luckily, the IT Department at work were able to donate to me some old DDR2 RAM, so I had the maximum 4GB the board can handle.

£7... Upgrade the processor?.... A challenge... Ebay... Core 2 Duo's and Quads, going for over £25 a pop, most of the Quads were going for £30+.  Way out of the budget.

But there were dual core Xeons for around £4... And I saw this hack out there on the wires, so I set about working.

The first step is to strip everything down, clean it perfectly, and get a scalpel.  The first part of the modification is to remove the tabs from the processor, these tell the user which way to orientate the CPU for insertion, they do nothing else... A consumer CPU is orientated horizontally, so there are tabs top and bottom to stop you inserting the wrong CPU.

And the Xeon has gaps left and right, meaning it'll bounce off these tabs on the socket 775.

Taking the scalpel, I started to cut the tabs, now I DID THIS WRONG!  A much better approach is to leave the current CPU in there, with the tabs engaged into the socket 775 CPU, and then cut between the CPU and the edge of the socket.  So the CPU acts as a guide and the delicate socket pins are protected out of sight below the CPU.

And clean the cuts you make up.

Remove any debris...

Then you need to go back to ebay, and buy a Xeon Socket Modification sticker, this is a little sticker, which will cover two rows of connections on the bottom of the CPU, it will allow most of them to pass through the plastic, but two pins are headed with a little connector, and behind the sticker these connectors actually swap the two pins over.

So, two pins, and the orientation, that's all that's different about a Socket 771 and a Socket 775 CPU.

The stickers are bar shaped, so they indicate which pin to swap, but lay the CPU down with the notches to the top, and from the bottom count 10 connectors from the bottom right, moving left... Voila, stick it down carefully.

Insert into the Motherboard socket now, so the notches are to the "top" of the socket, add the heat-sink assembly, and build it back up on your work bench.

Now, some videos and advice says you need to go to sites, and download patches for your motherboard.  During my project here I've found most Intel brand motherboards do not need any patching, only third party boards.  It seems Intel include all the microcode for all their processors (this is only a guess, I have no proof other than using five different intel boards, and two none-intel boards and always having to patch the non-intel branded ones, whilst the intel ones just work).

Then powering on...

It worked, I've gone from a Celeron D 430 to a Xeon 5130.  They're very similar processors, but the Xeon has dual cores and a much faster FSB.

http://ark.intel.com/compare/29735,27216

My YouTube play list, for my crappy videos covering this project can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5XLYa90LcKTVuFqJkxI35Q6gU9NzNEKP