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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

> Halfway through my freshman year I decided to swap the motherboard and CPU for a crazy motherboard/CPU combo. There was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent you from using them in a dual CPU setup, so I had two 366mhz Celerons overclocked to ~433mhz (sometimes up to 533mhz, but that was less stable) and started playing around with OSs like Linux and BeOS to actually take advantage of them.

Half of HN alive at the time probably had that motherboard - ABIT BP6 was the reason I got my hands on a copy of W2K, and also started playing with Linux.

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I'm still bummed that CPU manufacturers basically killed off the third party chipset industry. Maybe it was inevitable when memory controllers moved on-die, but I remember when there was actual competition in the chipset business.

Like Cyrix and AMD? I don't recall any other mainstream x86 alternatives.

Chipset, not CPU. For example, Nvidia was a well known chipset manufacturer around this time, shortly before memory controllers went on package and 3rd party chipsets died off.

Don't forget the venerable Via, SiS, Chips and Technologies, OPTi, ALi, ULi, etc.

They weren't venerable. They were anything but. They were designed to be a lower BOM on the motherboard and 90% of them were buggy garbage.

Yes, yes indeed. The nVidia nForce chipset (for AMD) was such a leap ahead because it was fast, flexible and reliable.

For Intel, you just picked an Intel chipset and that was that.

Speak for yourself, mate! Many fun times were had with machines built by each. I have particularly fond memories of the SiS 630 / 730, Via's KT133A, and lots of old ALi, OPTi and ULi gear from the 286, 386, and 486 era.

There was a period with quite a few:

* Rise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_Technology

* NexGen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NexGen

* NatSemi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)

* WinChip/Centaur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_Technology

* NEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

And other more obscure options. Most were gobbled up by the other giants (AMD/ATI, Nvidia, Intel, etc).

ABIT was such an amazing motherboard manufacturer, thanks for the KT7-A Thunderbird platform <3 R.I.P.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Abit

It was a cool board. I didnt technically have one, but I built my dad a W2K server on a BP6. I always wanted to hack on it and overclock with it. But after I handed it over, I wasnt allowed to touch it, "you'll burn up my processors." Since he didn't care about overclocking he had dual P2-400s or maybe 450s. It was a beast. He could run SQLServer and compile Delphi apps so hard.

I got my kicks though with a BF6 and a 300A. Those were the times; atleast until the AthlonXPs (AXIA -- anybody?) were released.

The first PC I built myself had an Athlon XP Barton 2500+ and 2x 256mb sticks of DDR2-400. It wasn't top of the line by any means but great bang-for-buck in 2003.

Had pretty much the same thing... but only one overclocked Celeron to 433. Was amazing upgrade from my pentium 133 with a Matrox Millenium; which I somehow used to complete Half Life in low FPS agony.

I still have distinct memories of "playing" CS in 640x480 on a PII with the same card, which didn't do 3D at all iirc. 12-15 fps with the software renderer, depending on how many bots you had.

Ah, the Lemonium. That brings back memories.

Oh yes, fond memories of my BP6. You just felt like you're doing something you're not supposed to, which was fun.

agree -- that dual celeron setup (often with a peltier cooler) was suuuper common, I knew so many people who rushed out to get them and run at 500? it was my second exposure to SMP though: First was dual socket Pentium Pro 200mhz which ran nt4.0 for the longest time (which I still keep that hefty cpu around on my desk for laughs)

I also had a BP6 with two Celeron 400As. Stuck on Win98 for a while until Win2k graphics drivers got good enough for gaming.

Are you me? I also started with a dual socket PPro that I picked up somewhere cheap (it was decent, though getting outdated).

The only reason (I feel) all this stuff worked was because of how bad the P4 stank at the time, otherwise we'd all have been climbing the clock speed.

> There was a brief moment where Intel Celerons didn't really prevent you from using them in a dual CPU setup

I think for a while Intel started labelling the socket 370 celeron boxes as “for single core systems only”, but it was a lie.

I'm slightly confused, how would games of that era benefit from a dual CPU setup?

Old games were decidedly single-threaded and built for a single-core world. It was only in the mid-to-late 2000s that games started to be more optimized for multi-core CPUs. And multi-CPU is even more difficult because there isn't any cache sharing.

Well you have to have another core free to run your sick winamp skin, otherwise how will you keep up your K/D?

That was the fun thing, they didn't really benefit - you'd have to get them running on Windows 2000 to even have a chance at using that second CPU.

However, once you got that working, you could play your game AND listen to music at the same time! Phenomenal.

Which you definitely got from one of the many legal music streaming services at the time ;)

Games didn't (not directly), but your workload did. If you ran an NT OS (2000/XP, primarily), the system would gain from being able to run background tasks without needing to preempt your game's logic.

It's impossible to run Windows as an exokernel, so you would inevitably gain some benefit (even if negligible).

To add evidence: also had it.

I wonder if there something like this today you will have in college? Some low cost graphic card rigs? Or is it more like some cloudflare set-ups today?

I am starting to feel old.

It was just single-CPU, but I had the ABIT BH6 with a Celeron 300A, one of the most overclockable setups ever. Mine was stable at 450mhz without any special cooling.

    > Half of HN alive at the time probably had that motherboard - ABIT BP6

LOL. Yep. Me too.

Cathode Ray Dude's channel has a great video about the history of this amazing motherboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE

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