A dilemma for the ages

[kiwiko]

Oh dear oh dear I've been having quite the dilemma for a week now that has been eating me alive by the legs.

you see I found grandmas old IBM in my garage last summer and immediately became infatuated with its dull beige dusty (and kinda rusty) beauty. Of course one cant help but think how far the system can be upgraded and to see what said upgrades could do, so I put my head down and do lots and lots of reading. I slap in a whole gig of SDRAM to replace its original 256 megabytes, I throw in a whopping 350 watts worth of power supply over its old 145w, and then I finally place in (with great care) an ATI FireGl X1 gpu. Now dear reader you may be wondering; "Waowie that's great and all, but aren't you forgetting the CPU?" and to that I answer... uhhh... yes I forgor the CPU.

This is where the dilemma begins.

My autistic brain sees the motherboard as the "Soul" of a pc, as it dictates what components can and cant be used, what software can be run, and what the theoretical limit of performance can be, and given my IBM has some old ties to my family I am very VERY attached to its motherboard. Said motherboard is (at least I think) an Aptiva 2178 with a slot 1 Pentium 3 at 733 Mhz, now those of you who are paying attention might notice that this P3 Coppermine is paired with a whole gigabyte of ram and the fastest workstation gpu (I think dont quote me on this) of 2002. So I'm stuck with a slow cpu and I'm without a Tualatin adapter, looks like I have a choice to make.

I can either:

A: spend a frankly silly amount of cash that I don't have on an adapter
or
B: replace the motherboard for something cheaper and more practical (i.e. socket 478 and a P4 Northwood from 2002)

now if I wasn't attached to this system so much I probably would have gone with option B, its cheaper, objectively faster, wont bottleneck my system, gives me more ram capacity, and is more period correct with the rest of my parts (kinda). I do really want to keep the current motherboard despite all these point since it feels special to me. Perhaps I will finally come to a decision once I have the money (summer job cant come sooner) but for now I'm going to pray to the IBM gods if there are any that I can somehow get my grubby little hands on an adapter for cheap.

hope this was at least a little funny to read but goodness gracious me I needed to get this of my mind.

 

[comraider]

That CPU is just fine to be honest! With the incredible amount of RAM you've got in there and a good graphics card, I don't think you'll have any bottlenecks for whatever you throw at that PC. I honestly wouldn't let myself be bothered by the CPU at all, you can have loads more fun by tinkering with some expansion cards over time, trying out different OSes, games, getting it online with retro browsers, etc. And please don't change out the motherboard.. feel free to have a separate rig with an older case to mess around with other stuff, but I can tell this has sentimental value for you and for good reason. Keep it true to its identity and enjoy it!

 

[Dannyboy]

Question is what would you like to use it for, what OS do you want to run and what games do you actually intend to play? Your Aptiva is an ideal Win98 machine, and you wouldn't need more than 512mb ram. With a good gfx card you would be able to run many mid-late 90s games really well, even some from the early 2000's. I use a IBM p3 933 machine myself for that. I have the same inclination as you, and don't want to swap out alle the original parts, only upgrading components that the original setup supports - exception to this being that, when the original MB eventually does fail, I would give it a new configuration, perhaps with more modern components.

 

[kiwiko]

Question is what would you like to use it for, what OS do you want to run and what games do you actually intend to play? Your Aptiva is an ideal Win98 machine, and you wouldn't need more than 512mb ram. With a good gfx card you would be able to run many mid-late 90s games really well, even some from the early 2000's. I use a IBM p3 933 machine myself for that. I have the same inclination as you, and don't want to swap out alle the original parts, only upgrading components that the original setup supports - exception to this being that, when the original MB eventually does fail, I would give it a new configuration, perhaps with more modern components.

in the post I alluded to pushing the system as far as it can practically go so in this case I'm aiming for early Xp and late 98 games. On top of that since I'm a game dev in school I want to make a period correct game on period correct hardware so the more power the better. So for things like coding, compiling, rendering, modeling having the power of the top end Tualatins would be sick.

 

[dwaco]

But what do you want to do with it?

Your system should be great to explore the Windows 9X era stuff. Windows XP era however is long, and P4+2002 GPU only represents the beginning of it.

I'd keep your current CPU and motherboard especially if you attached to it. Moreover, it is an IBM system, so keeping only the case doesn't feel right.

 

[dwaco]

in the post I alluded to pushing the system as far as it can practically go so in this case I'm aiming for early Xp and late 98 games. On top of that since I'm a game dev in school I want to make a period correct game on period correct hardware so the more power the better. So for things like coding, compiling, rendering, modeling having the power of the top end Tualatins would be sick.

Basically here you have conflicting desires.

• You want period-correct hardware (which is already a stretch given that you put ATI FireGl X1 into Aptiva 2178)
• You want as much power as possible

You cannot attain both without some money and/or sacrifices.

If you want to have Tualatin in your machine, then you just want it, yes, you will indeed have the feeling that you pushed your system closer to the max. And quite possibly with warm feeling. Is it necessary to explore Win9X? No.

Is it necessary to explore WinXP? Well, in the end much more powerful systems could run WinXP and having just a Tualatin or P4 will have you still feel your system is not powerful (enough).

 

[Dannyboy]

Agree with dwaco, there will be a trade-off regardless what you choose to do. Upgrading to tualatin will be quite costly. Upgrading to P4 will mean exchanging the original parts for something else, from a different period, which seems like a heavy price, since neither of the options given are guaranteed to give you the performance that you hope for.

For the time and money that you would spend on upgrading an already great Aptiva PC, you might as well buy another, later IBM desktop for XP instead, and save yourself some time and probably some money (Who can say no to more IBM machines, after all? )

 

[Watson]

I agree with @comraider keep your motherboard. Also, Tualatin adapter boards aren't that expensive for slot 1, unless I'm missing something here. Throw up a wanted thread here on Amibay and see what comes up

Edit: My bad. I was thinking of the slocket adapter but, your board only supports Coppermine upto 1Ghz, so you'd need a Upgradeware Slot-T or a PowwrLeap, right?

 

[kiwiko]

Right you are Watson, I'm gonna need a Powerleap specifically since my board doesn't have any voltage control at all (at least I'm pretty sure it doesn't).

also yes i know there are tradeoffs for both options which is why i made the silly post lol, oh goodness gracious help me