When I used the Abit BP6 in a Linux box build, I did it as a one-Celeron budget PC with expandability, and put some notes on the Web at the time:<p><a href="https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/" rel="nofollow">https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/</a><p>That page includes pricing info for each component, and how I bought it. For example:<p>> <i>Abit BP6 Dual PPGA Socket-370 motherboard, UDMA-66, 2 ISA, 5 PCI, AGP 2X, 3 168-pin PC100 ECC, max. 1GB RAM. Retail version.
(Essential Computing $120 + $14.25 UPS Ground + $3.60 insurance = $137.95)</i><p>> <i>Intel Celeron 500 Retail version, with warranty and CPU fan and heat sink.
(Egghead $135.99 + free UPS Ground = $135.99)</i><p>The box was my workstation, and for a time also a public Web server on ADSL. I never actually added a second Celeron (cost money, and I still wasn't feeling CPU pressure) nor the UDMA-66 (reported to be less reliable).
The super socket 7 motherboards were amazing.<p>They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though).<p>Some of these boards had both sdram and edo ram slots along with an agp slot, pci slots and an isa slot.<p>So you had an era where motherboads could take a P-75 or an amd k6 550 cpu. They could take ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) or you could put in faster ram. You could run a pci grapchics card if it’s all you had or you could run an agp card. I used my old 486s isa soundblaster awe in that board for a long long time since pci was of no benefit for a soundcard.<p>The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway and it was fun to be able to frankenstein computers so much back in the day.
I did love that era, in terms of it providing a young frugal person with the opportunity to buy upgrades piecemeal. It felt like there was more generational overlap, as you describe, so it was possible to just go out and buy a new CPU, or a new graphics card, for a few hundred carefully saved dollars of birthday and christmas money, and get a sizeable upgrade in performance. That era is over, especially with the current pricing crunch.<p>What I am hoping for is that this leads to a resurgence for all those used computers out there... plenty of great machines from the last decade that should have no problem being competent workstations for 90% of people's needs for the next decade onward if treated well. This is where open standards and open source truly shine.
Pretty sure I had a Pentium 4 mobo that was kind of like that in 2002-2003 timeframe. Was still rocking my old ISA Sound Blaster 16 (the big ass one with the connector for a CD-ROM drive) alongside a Radeon 7500 in the AGP slot.<p>It wasn't much but I could run Alice, Max Payne, GTA 3, Dungeon Siege on there, all at like mid settings, so I was a pretty happy camper for a high school kid putting paper route money into my own PC.
ISA slots were definitely rather rare on motherboards by the time you got to the Pentium 4 era, so that's cool that you managed to find one that also offered DMA, since I believe Sound Blaster cards needed that to properly function.<p>I think I would have done the same with my AWE64 Gold if that was still an option for me in the early 2000s.
This brings me back. My first DIY PC used an Abit motherboard. It was a great computer and was still functional after 5 years before I upgraded. I never knew about the poor quality capacitors. I guess I lucked out.
Interesting read. I had the Abit BP6 and it was a killer in performance/price. The problem I had with it wasn't the capacitors but rather that the PCB itself was a bit thin to support 2x CPUs/fans.<p>Another cool thing was that the BP6 supported Ultra DMA/66 (aka ATA/66) and it did so by adding a second controller so you had twice as many buses. Looking a pic of it now, it really was a Franken-machine with AGP, PCI, ISA busses too.
Ah, I kept that BP6 for 10 years before selling it.
It meant I could write multithreaded concurrent software and run it at home with LinuxThreads (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads</a>) then NPTL (native Posix threading lib).<p>Mine was not very stable under even moderate overclocking though!<p>Good times!
BX6 r2.0, the motherboard of the first PC I built myself, and still the favorite I ever had to work with.
Abit, there's a name I havent heard in a long long time...
The thing that jumped out to me was the mention of the engineer jumping ship to DFI. Despite DFI still existing, they stopped making consumer stuff back in 2012, and it seems like they somehow disappeared from the consumer mindset even more than Abit did.<p>I recall that there was a while during the Athlon 64 era that DFI was the gaming board to get. But I feel like I hear references to Abit more often than DFI.<p>I think my old Opteron machine with a DFI board is kicking around somewhere still.
A friend of mine won an Athlon XP in a forum contest, I think it was Extreme Systems or Extreme Overclocking. He ended up pairing it with an Abit NF7-S, which I recall being a legendary board at the time. He brought it over to my place and we would LAN Unreal Tournament 2003. Those were the days!
This is a specifically strange article, niche on niche is putting it lightly.
> The Abit BP6 was legendary with enthusiasts because it let them make a dual CPU system with cheap Celeron CPUs.<p>And 2 celerons were cheaper than a CPU with double the performance?
Yes, because there weren't really CPUs then that had double the performance.<p>Celeron CPUs were usually CPUs that shared the same core architecture as the current Pentium standard, but often had a lower core clock speed, lower core memory speed, and/or had smaller L2 caches.<p>Workloads have different constraints however, and simply doubling cache, clock speed, or memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily double performance, especially when running more than one application at once. Keep in mind, this is Windows 98 /NT/2000 era here.<p>Symmetric multi-processing (SMP) could be of huge benefit however, far more than simple doubling any of the above factors. Running two threads at once was unheard of on the desktop. These were usually reserved for higher-binned parts, like full-fledged Pentium workstations and Xeons (usually the latter.) But Abit's board gave users a taste of that capability on a comparative budget. Were two cheaper than a single fast CPU? Probably not in all cases (depends on speeds). But Abit's board gave users an option in between a single fast Pentium and a orders of magnitude more professional workstation: A pair of cheaper CPUs for desktop SMP. And that was in reach of more people.<p>In short, two Celerons were probably more expensive than a single fast Pentium, but having SMP meant being able to run certain workloads faster or more workloads at once at a time when any other SMP system would have cost tons.
>Celeron CPUs were usually CPUs that shared the same core architecture as the current Pentium standard, but often had a lower core clock speed, lower core memory speed, and/or had smaller L2 caches.<p>This had an interesting side effect: Celerons of that era overclocked extremely well (stable 300 -> 500MHz+), due to the smaller and simpler on-die L2 cache relative to the Pentiums of the era, whose L2 cache was much larger but had to be off-die (and less amenable to overclocking) as a result.<p>An overclocked dual Celeron could easily outperform the highest-end Pentiums of the era on clock-sensitive, cache-insensitive applications, especially those designed to take advantage of parallelism.
That was a bit of a two edged sword as the heavily overclocked Celerons would benchmark extremely well, but be somewhat disappointing in actual applications due to the lack of cache space. It was right at the start of the era where cache misses became the defining factor in real world performance. CPUs ran ahead of DRAM and it has never caught back up, even as per-core CPU performance plateaued.
Yeah; mine ran very stable at 466 for >decade. It was impressive.<p>You could attempt to head toward ~700 but I never could keep it stable there.
Going from a single CPU to a dual CPU would, in theory, double performance _at best_. In other words, only under workloads that supported multithreading perfectly.<p>But in the real world, the perceived performance improvement was more than doubling. The responsiveness of your machine might seem 10 or 100x improved, because suddenly that blocking process is no longer blocking the new process you're trying to launch, or your user interface, or whatever.
Just by the release MSRP:<p>2x Celeron 366 MHz @ $123 each - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_processors" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_processo...</a><p>1x Pentium III 733 MHz @ $776 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_processors" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_proc...</a><p>And that's assuming that performance scales linearly with clock frequency (which it doesn't).
For some reason you left off the part that explains that the Celeron had a PII core.<p>> Socket 370 era Celeron processors had a Pentium II core, but Intel disabled the ability to change the multiplier to discourage overclocking
Many, but not all. There were Coppermine derivatives eventually:
<a href="https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/TYPE-Celeron%20(Coppermine).html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/TYPE-Celeron%20(Coppe...</a>
They may have sought to discourage overclocking by locking the multiplier, but...<p>People pretty routinely nearly doubled the clocks on Celeron 300As, anyway. :)
Not "for some reason"; I didn't see it as relevant. If anything, it being a PII-lite with overclocking disabled makes it seem like a <i>worse</i> option? What am I missing here?
You could over-clock the Celeron and get even more performance. Both the slot-1 and ZIF style...
they may have been, yes. back in those days, a CPU with multiple cores were meant for the server or enterprise workstation market and priced accordingly.<p>Celerons were consumer-grade budget kit.