Comment by linsomniac 6 days ago
That reminds me of 1999, where I threw a party to help my friends modify their Celeron 300A CPUs so they could run dual-socket. My dual 300A running at 450MHz would run Starcraft under WINE faster than Windows could run it because at the time Windows couldn't do multi-core. Under Linux one processor would run the graphics (in X) and the other would run the game mechanics, and it would blaze.
Yes, the dual Celeron 300As, if you could take advantage of multiple cores, were faster than the higher end CPUs, particularly if you overclocked to 450MHz. My box was stable at 450MHz for around a year, then I had to gradually down-clock it, eventually back to 300. Never really did much to track down why that was, just rolled with it and figured I should be grateful for the overclocking I had.
I also ran a dual Celeron system overclocked to 450mhz - it was great value in 1999. Abit even launched a motherboard that let you run dual Celerons without modifying the processors, the legendary BP6:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6
This was first board to let you use unmodified Celerons, the "hack" to let dual CPUs work with those chips was performed at the motherboard level, no CPU pin modifications needed.
iirc those overclocks needed thermal paste to be reapplied, plus dust in case probably crushed airflow
For some reason I feel like running home stuff fell out of favour. Or perhaps, I stopped doing it. I would prefer to do it again however I don’t ever have an idea what to do with it since these days I just stream everything from the internet. And I have plenty of cloud compute for whatever I want to do.
People call it "homelab" or "data hoarding" these days, but yes, the easy access to hours and hours of movies and music was "solved" for the average person by the content streaming sites, so there's not as much a drive as there used to be for it.
Heheheh, drive.
Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium?
EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE-k4hYHIDE