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Building my childhood dream PC

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#31

Post by fabiensanglard »

p_ing wrote: post #16
fabiensanglard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card This is exactly what the IBM PS/1 2168 have (see the unboxing section).

The video frame doesn't render; on macOS Firefox it shows "No video with supported format and MIME type found.", so I missed it. But looking at the pictures, it only has ISA slots on the expansion board, unless I'm missing something. But I missed that part of your post. I haven't seen integrated VLB before, only slotted. Does this board have an expansion to 2MiB? Though that would only matter if you wanted higher res…

It is in the unboxing page. ASTRA.EXE shows the video card and the bus: https://fabiensanglard.net/2168/unboxing/#:~:text=The%20inte...

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#32

Post by fabiensanglard »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #11

Jealaous of that video game library. Fabien has good taste indeed.

Every times I think I a "done" I see something I want to add. The technique I used to limit myself is "whatever can fin on the three top shelves".

It worked until I started to store some boxes horizontally.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#33

Post by christkv »

vunderba wrote: post #3

Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686 166mhz processor. From the article: > 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel. Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent. I think the closest approxim…

I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU performance was terrible in Quake.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#34

Post by keyringlight »

cesarb wrote: post #27
p_ing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card. Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a p…

> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector nea…

MY likely-underinformed opinion is that the ATX form factor for building PCs is creaking at the seams for the generic '1x dGPU' specification, but there's a number of factors that work against a change to something substantially better. It'd need a number of companies to offer new product lines at the same time, probably incompatible with ATX and all the challenges that would bring.

It's not just the huge heatsinks to get rid of the heat output, the power input is another. Also while dGPUs are growing at the high end, low-end dGPUs seem under-served, while AMD have APUs that I think could make a lot of people very content they don't seem too eager to make them easy to get hold of, and intel have the building blocks for a similar product but are hesitant to providing something beyond the minimum

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#36

Post by p_ing »

keyringlight wrote: post #34
cesarb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector nea…

MY likely-underinformed opinion is that the ATX form factor for building PCs is creaking at the seams for the generic '1x dGPU' specification, but there's a number of factors that work against a change to something substantially better. It'd need a number of companies to offer new product lines at the same time, probably incompatible with ATX and all the challenges that would bring. It's not just the huge heatsinks t…

Intel proposed the BTX format [0]. Didn't catch on. ATX has a lot of momentum (including the related mATX, EATX, and so forth).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(form_factor)

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#37

Post by bitwize »

christkv wrote: post #33
vunderba wrote: post #3

Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686 166mhz processor. From the article: > 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel. Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent. I think the closest approxim…

I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU performance was terrible in Quake.

I had a Cyrix 6x86MX and it was good enough for Quake (I played Quake originally on a Pentium-60, and it was fine).

The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-issue instructions like this, so clock-for-clock their performance suffered compared to Intel.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#38

Post by vel0city »

keyringlight wrote: post #34
cesarb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector nea…

MY likely-underinformed opinion is that the ATX form factor for building PCs is creaking at the seams for the generic '1x dGPU' specification, but there's a number of factors that work against a change to something substantially better. It'd need a number of companies to offer new product lines at the same time, probably incompatible with ATX and all the challenges that would bring. It's not just the huge heatsinks t…

The popularity of the mini-ITX board size really shows this along with alternative mounting locations and risers for GPUs.

The old ATX power supply standard really needs to get phased out. I'm hopeful to see progress on ATX12VO become more common.

But even separate from that I see things like the Ryzen Z series opening even smaller devices while still offering a lot of graphical punch. I love the Z1 Extreme on my Legion Go, it's an awesome platform. And yeah, having that plus an external GPU could be cool but as noted it's $$$.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#39

Post by wpm »

p_ing wrote: post #23
AStonesThrow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented. I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff. My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddl…

The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a 3Dfx card. Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a p…

As someone with those "special" needs (if 10Gb/25Gb Ethernet and HDMI-capture are that special), it is incredibly frustrating.

The CPUs all come with enough PCIe lanes for a single dGPU at x16, x4 for the PCH/chipset, and maybe another x4 for a single M.2 SSD. If you aren't building a bog standard gaming PC with one SSD, one huge GPU, and nothing else, you get a configuration that doesn't match what you need. Bifurcation is hit-or-miss, if you can even physically get to the second PCIe slot, if that slot is even big enough. Random M.2s are linked to the PCH with random modes and bandwidths that change based on other configuration options.

All due to the stingy lane count on consumer platforms, again, targeting the lowest common denominator. It was even worse before Ryzen came out and offered a generous 24 lanes (16 for a GPU, 4 for the PCH, and 4 for an SSD) vs Intel's 20.

Of course, PCIe lanes aren't free, but somehow, having "I/O" targeted workloads means you also must go and spend 2-5x as much for "workstation" or server class motherboards, which also are engineered to a common "usual needs" spec that add in a bunch of shit I don't need, and usually require sacrificing single-core speed unless you get top of the line $10K+ server CPUs that draw 5x the power.

What I'd really like is instead of 4 lanes going to the chipset, I wish all of them did. Or at least, all of them went from the CPU to some switch chip that would allow me to set which lanes go to what slots, and have a software configured lane/bandwidth allocation. 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0 is 48 lanes of PCIe 4.0 is 96 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which is more than enough, but trying to actually unlock all of that bandwidth is still limited to the hardware configuration of the motherboard, and no way to reallocate unspent bandwidth. Instead of it all being hardwired for specific configurations, to the CPU directly OR to the chipset, I wish they were all wired for x16 (or x4 for the M.2 slots) direcly to some switch chip, which is then fully wired to the CPU's remaining lanes after PCH/chipset connections. If I need to stuff 4 slots with x16 cards, but they only run at 3.0 speeds, that would still leave 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 I could allocate elsewhere.

I'm sure this is probably technically impossible, or would be incredibly expensive, but a man can dream.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#40

Post by dep_b »

Could be a fun exercise:

- Commodore 128 with dual floppy drive vs my tape-only C64 - Maxed out Amiga 1000 with a bunch of sampler and MIDI extensions vs my A500 + 512kb - B/W PowerMac G3 fully expanded just because - Dual Celly 300A @ 450 with Dual Voodoo II vs my 450 with single Voodoo II

Nothing after that had this "I really want this, but I can't get it" thing. I just bought what I wanted.

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