nforce 2 with soundstorm, hands down. barton mobile 2500+ overclocked to the max, alpha PAL8045T heatsink-fan.

I would rather go with Thermaltake Big Typhoon.

The alpha PAL8045T and swiftech um... forgot its name...it was a HUGE and heavy pin-fin heatsink that looked like a metal porcupine... were the ones making the huge splash right there at the end of the athlon era, mostly because they were the most massive and low c/w rated heatsinks available, and they used the socket A through-motherboard mounting holes. To each their own, but I loved that era and I had myself a PAL8045T and personally, to me, nothing could say ultimate socket A athlon without an 8045T on it. 😀

Option 2. Way more interesting setup IMO.

Nice! The heatsinks concern me as athlon has pretty high tdp? I have a couple of very large 370 sinks but i dont think theyd be up to the job. Might just go option 2 though....lets see what the rest have to say... Its gonna be put to the vote ppl! Course , ehmm, i still retain the right to vary the bla bla bla (damn its hard to type on ipwad while lying on a couch)

If you're going to build an Athlon, you have to use an ultra noisy turbine of a heatsink, that's just the law I'm afraid.

Thermaltake Dragon Orb comes to mind.

😉

Also, cut four holes in the side panel and two in the top. One for each fan yousee. 😁

If you want the ultimate in satisfaction, try finding a 1ghz Slot A Thunderbird. It's damn near impossible these days unless you want to sell your children to buy it. Finding one cheap would give you tremendous bragging rights. Even a 1ghz Orion isn't that easy to come by. My collection is currently topped out at 950mhz for each one, and even those weren't easy to find at affordable prices.

That is a hard choice. Between Slot A and Barton there's a considerable amount of time... Personally i love my dual MP much more than my 1GHz Slot A. The possibilities with Socket 462 are more wider, much more faster, stable and cheaper.

If it's just for the heck of it, I'd try and grab one of the early Athlon 600 models that do not say Athlon, but instead AMD 7th generation processor. Those were among the first besides engineering samples, that were shipped and sold outside the company. Plus, they were the first CPUs that beat everything from Intel at that time hands down.

In fact, I still have one from that era, but from the overclocking madness of those days, I've removed the plastic cover in order to be able to attach a gold finger device. Oh those sins of the youth!

[GPUT]Carsten wrote:

If it's just for the heck of it, I'd try and grab one of the early Athlon 600 models that do not say Athlon, but instead AMD 7th generation processor.

<------- Like the one in my Avatar? Mine's a 550, I've had it since it was new. Bloody expensive back in the day but great investment given how long the system was useful for. Put enough RAM with it, it can still function fine on the web today.

For building an Athlon/Athlon XP era machine, it really depends what you want to use it for. The Slot A+Voodoo5 would make a great 3DFX Glide box, and the Athlon XP would run many newer games, but no 3DFX stuff unless you find a good glide wrapper. Really, Slot A and Socket A with FSB333/400 comprises of separate generations, even if it's the same architecture, the performance difference being on the lines of Pentium II vs Pentium M.

If you want it to be as overclockable as possible, I'd have some fun with an NForce2 chipset, and try and locate an Athlon XP-M 2500+ Socket A laptop chip. The 2500+ desktop chips overclocked pretty decently anyway, the XP-M's are the same thing, but run on lower voltages and had better binning (cherry picked from the best silicon), better quality and more overclockable chips, lower power consumption even on desktop boards, etc. You'd probably get best results with one of those. Just make sure you get a Socket A though, as XP-M chips came in Socket 563 and Socket 754(K8 based) variants as well.

As for Heatsink's on the Socket A, I was always a big fan of the Thermaltake Volcano 7/9. I had a 7 on my Duron 1GHz and a 9 on my XP 1900+, they were big & awesome for their day, quiet and kept the chip cool. I didn't do any overclocking with it though, but I would imagine it would do a decent job. You can probably get one cheap now - and if the fan goes bad it can be replaced with a standard 80mm case fan.

maddmaxstar wrote:

As for Heatsink's on the Socket A, I was always a big fan of the Thermaltake Volcano 7/9. I had a 7 on my Duron 1GHz and a 9 on my XP 1900+, they were big & awesome for their day, quiet and kept the chip cool...

I had a Volcano 7. That beast was the opposite of quiet! The fan spinned @ over 6000 rpm! The Thunderbird 1400 FSB133 was a hot chip to cool...

Really miss that setup with the Voodoo 3...

TBird 1400 was a Hot Mofo though, my Duron 1000 was always cool to the touch, though it had half the TDP of the 1400 (46w vs 72w).

I also remember modifying the heatsink a little so the thermal diode came in direct contact with the heatsink and properly spun up/down when under load, rather than waiting for the ambient temp to rise.

I liked the V9 better though. I didn't care for the Nerf Orange motif, it had an option of a thin thermal diode that could sit by the chip, or a potentiometer that could clip on to manually control Fan RPMs. The potentiometer allowed to make it as quiet as needed as long as the load temps didn't get too high.

sgt76 wrote:

What would you consider to be the ultimate Athlon platform? Not neccesarily in the sense of speed but in terms of satisfaction of building and ownership. Can be anything from Pluto to Barton.

My favourite athlon system was:

abit an7 + xp3000+
ti4800se or 7800gs+
santa cruz

I got huge satisfaction from this setup, sadly put away now as it couldn't keep up with WoW 🤣.

But the ultimate althlon for me would I think be luckybob's dual cpu voodoo5 box 😉.Retro Rig Photo Thread

maddmaxstar wrote:

TBird 1400 was a Hot Mofo though, my Duron 1000 was always cool to the touch, though it had half the TDP of the 1400 (46w vs 72w).

I also remember modifying the heatsink a little so the thermal diode came in direct contact with the heatsink and properly spun up/down when under load, rather than waiting for the ambient temp to rise.

I liked the V9 better though. I didn't care for the Nerf Orange motif, it had an option of a thin thermal diode that could sit by the chip, or a potentiometer that could clip on to manually control Fan RPMs. The potentiometer allowed to make it as quiet as needed as long as the load temps didn't get too high.

Durons were awesome. I have recently been reading some old reviews and running at identical clocks the Duron is only a tad slower than an Athlon at most tasks. They also overclocked very well.

sliderider wrote:

Durons were awesome. I have recently been reading some old reviews and running at identical clocks the Duron is only a tad slower than an Athlon at most tasks. They also overclocked very well.

I wouldn't agree on the overclocking with big exception of Applebreds.
The price/performance ratio was unbeatable, like 10% less then Athlon performance for 2/3 price.

I was happy for a time with my Duron. I had the 1.0GHz Duron with the Morgan core, which was based on Palomino core and had the Athlon XP enhancements like SSE and a Thermal diode. It was pretty impressive to get something like that inexpensively, especially with it's performance vs Thunderbird and the PIII/Celeron, but it got old quick as CPU speeds really ramped up after that. 7 months later the XP 1900+ was affordable and a good drop-in upgrade, so I bought one. The Duron was in my backup for a few years though.

Thanks for the input everyone. With your inputs and some research on my part , I have a pretty good idea of what's out there and what I want to do now. I'll be sure to post up pics of the completed rig once it's done... 😀

maddmaxstar wrote:

[GPUT]Carsten wrote:

If it's just for the heck of it, I'd try and grab one of the early Athlon 600 models that do not say Athlon, but instead AMD 7th generation processor.

<------- Like the one in my Avatar? Mine's a 550, I've had it since it was new. Bloody expensive back in the day but great investment given how long the system was useful for. Put enough RAM with it, it can still function fine on the web today.

Exactly; but I can't remember if mine did also have that fancy sticker. All I remember was AMD 7th generation processor on the of the plastic casing.