Tag: Pentium III

30 Days of Geek #16: First computer you’ve ever owned & your favourite ever.

I’ve decided to partake in Jethro Carr’s 30 Days of Geek challenge, so I’ll be writing a post a day on my geekiness for an entire month! You can find all the posts in one spot here.

The first computer I co-owned (with my brother):

  • MSI MS-6161 Motherboard
  • Intel Celeron 366MHz CPU
  • 64MB 100Mhz SD-RAM
  • 4GB IDE Hard Drive
  • Floppy drive
  • CD drive
  • RTL8139B network card
  • And my first hardware modification ever: adding in a Creative Soundblaster (some 16-bit ISA model).

And my favourite combination ever:

  • MSI MS-6198 Motherboard
  • Intel Pentium III Coppermine 933MHz CPU
  • 1GB 133MHz SD-RAM (2x 512MB sticks)
  • 40GB IDE drive + 250GB SATA drive (which is still going strong as a backup drive)
  • Floppy drive
  • CD+RW drive
  • RTL8139D network card
  • This motherboard, as far as I can recall, had onboard sound

Note that these computers really are one and the same, since there’s a direct ancestry between them. I’ve never ever built a computer that hasn’t shared at least one major component with a previous computer (excluding laptop purchases).

My First Coppermine CPU

Yesterday evening in the mail I received, amongst a whole package of computer junk I didn’t really want, a couple of socket 370 CPUs. Four of them, to be exact. One is a Pentium III Coppermine CPU proper (an SL52R), the others are Celerons of various speeds.

You’ll notice that the SL52R is the same sSpec I was raving on about in my last post on this subject. So why did I rush out and buy one? Because to me, it has beautiful proportions. 1GHz is a nice round number. In my opinion the amount of cache is a nicer number than any other amount (256KiB instead of the 128KiB found in the Celerons and some Pentium IIIs), and the core voltage is nicer (1.75V). I would have preferred a 100MHz bus speed (instead of 133MHz), since that’s a nice round number, but you can’t have everything. Plus, a 133MHz bus does go a lot faster.

Unfortunately the picture isn’t mine; my digital camera has decided not to work in the cold this morning.

Pentium III Coppermine SL52R
Pentium III Coppermine SL52R