• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Are PIII and PII CPU's still in demand ?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
EliteRetard said:
My work just paid 10,000$ for a new pentium 133MHz with 64MB RAM (just finished installing it today actually and now Im working on fixing all the settings in DOS). Might be custom built...paid near 200$ for an AT PSU not to long ago. Have to have a true dos computer to run the laser, and the old system died. Aparently no other software can directly drive the laser, I think because it needs to be binary. Whatever other front end you want to add will have to feed directions to the DOS machine to be interpereted and sent to the laser.

New laser is like 750,000$...and might still require DOS. I dont know if they have modern hardware that can understand windows talk.
Click to expand...

will a VM not work for you? just curious about it. Anyone try?
 
EliteRetard said:
My work just paid 10,000$ for a new pentium 133MHz with 64MB RAM (just finished installing it today actually and now Im working on fixing all the settings in DOS). Might be custom built...paid near 200$ for an AT PSU not to long ago. Have to have a true dos computer to run the laser, and the old system died. Aparently no other software can directly drive the laser, I think because it needs to be binary. Whatever other front end you want to add will have to feed directions to the DOS machine to be interpereted and sent to the laser.

New laser is like 750,000$...and might still require DOS. I dont know if they have modern hardware that can understand windows talk.
Click to expand...

My 920 with HT can boot windows 95 dos on a floppy. There must be some other reason.
 
Since the hardware he posted is ancient as hell, one of the devices used is probably ISA or something equally as old. I could be wrong though.
 
Like others have stated the demand is not really there, BUT when someone needs one of those chips they can go for a nice price. A lot of old hardware is still chugging along in industrial application and when it goes down they need a replacement fast and price becomes less of an issue.

That being said 99% of the time you PII or PIII is worthless.
 
OVerLoRDI said:
Like others have stated the demand is not really there, BUT when someone needs one of those chips they can go for a nice price. A lot of old hardware is still chugging along in industrial application and when it goes down they need a replacement fast and price becomes less of an issue.

That being said 99% of the time you PII or PIII is worthless.
Click to expand...

That got me wondering what the Space Shuttle is running. Logically they really wouldn't want to be early adaptors of new processors would they?

Google seemed to suggest it might be an 80486, though different pages disagreed. Wonder how much they pay for spares?

it also turned up this, which lists a bunch of out-dated computers that I guess are very unlikely to ever be upgraded (e.g. Voyager 1 and 2).

http://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html
 
peonyu said:
Since the hardware he posted is ancient as hell, one of the devices used is probably ISA or something equally as old. I could be wrong though.
Click to expand...

Even ISA doesn't really make sense for a setup that old. I know Pentium II board...even I think Pentium 3 and early sdram athlon boards had ISA slots still. They hung around for a long time after they fell out of mainstream use. I'm curious on this as well. AFAIK most of the original buses and interfaces were available on systems up until about the same time. Serial and parallel ports can still be found, if you really want them.

I can understand only DOS working...but I can't think of anything that ended in the P1 era.

Newegg still to this day sells a single (new!) DFI socket 370 sdram motherboard. I stumbled upon it by accident today actually. DFI must pump them out because some one is replacing their old stuff I guess?
 
PingSpike said:
Even ISA doesn't really make sense for a setup that old. I know Pentium II board...even I think Pentium 3 and early sdram athlon boards had ISA slots still. They hung around for a long time after they fell out of mainstream use. I'm curious on this as well. AFAIK most of the original buses and interfaces were available on systems up until about the same time. Serial and parallel ports can still be found, if you really want them.

I can understand only DOS working...but I can't think of anything that ended in the P1 era.
Click to expand...

Its more likely the laser is being driven by a VESA Local Bus card. That was popular before the Pentium Era and was pretty much killed when the Intel Triton chipset was introduced which supported PCI. There were very few motherboards during the original Pentium era that supported VESA Local Bus and to my knowledge non after after. So in essence the Pentium CPU was the fastest system you could ever get that supported VESA Local Bus.
 
GEOrifle
PIIs are worthless, top end PIIIs might have a tiny value for those few who upgrade ancient machines. Old RAM definitely has a little value (depending upon module size) for upgrading ancient machines, check out prices on completed listings in ebay.
e.g. 256MB PC133 RAM for laptops goes for about £10.
Old mbrds might be sellable for a small amount, if you're lucky & you happen to stumble across someone who really wants to fix an old PC.

Cerb
>>Having a PIII laptop, you really can't do much with them. Even with a light and fast web browser, all the CSS styling, flash, reflows from uses of AJAX, etc., just kill them.<<

Nah, at least not that I've come across, I've got an old PIII 1GHz Tualie laptop that surfs the net fine, just gotta watch RAM useage is the only thing as its only got 256MB atm. Btw it's running XP & IE8 (which isn't the lightest browser I'm sure you know 😉).
If you think you know some websites that'll bring it to a crawl (no games 😛) then give me some links & I'll test it.
 
eliteretard said:
my work just paid 10,000$ for a new pentium 133mhz with 64mb ram (just finished installing it today actually and now im working on fixing all the settings in dos). Might be custom built...paid near 200$ for an at psu not to long ago. Have to have a true dos computer to run the laser, and the old system died. Aparently no other software can directly drive the laser, i think because it needs to be binary. Whatever other front end you want to add will have to feed directions to the dos machine to be interpereted and sent to the laser.

New laser is like 750,000$...and might still require dos. I dont know if they have modern hardware that can understand windows talk.
Click to expand...

wat teh frak
 
As has been stated, for a web server, file server or hardware firewall, a Pentium 3 of any speed would do the job very well. I used to have a box with a 550MHz P3/256MB RAM. I stuffed it with hard drives and it was my FTP box and file server.
 
MikeShunt said:
if P3 and P2's were in demand I would be rich, I have a stack of old hardware.
Click to expand...

That's sort of the problem. I just recieved my second Thinkpad video cable. It was sold as a FRU number that it wasn't. It seems most of ebay has misbranded them.

I have a new one now coming for 10x the price so I can put this laptop back together.

When I was selling my PIII-S 1.4 CPU, someone in Hong Kong of all places called to buy it, the had a downed web server.

I paid about $100 for it originally. I sold it for $175 + the EMS shipping.
 
Assimilator1 said:
Nah, at least not that I've come across, I've got an old PIII 1GHz Tualie laptop that surfs the net fine, just gotta watch RAM useage is the only thing as its only got 256MB atm. Btw it's running XP & IE8 (which isn't the lightest browser I'm sure you know 😉).
If you think you know some websites that'll bring it to a crawl (no games 😛) then give me some links & I'll test it.
Click to expand...
Any image hosts with those ads that overlay. Reddit, Digg, etc., viewing more comments (basically, anything that causes reflows). ABP and Noscript add their own overhead, with FF (but, make it work fairly well). IE8 is basically unusable, even on a fast machine (like previous IEs, it does not respond to user input until it is damn well ready). Opera does OK, until you get near using all your RAM, at which point it just pukes all over itself.

FF does a great job under Linux, but the Xorg S3 driver lacks some features and performance, compared to XP.

I use it. But, it's easy to bog down, easy to get fed up with, and lacks the minimum requirements most people have. Netbooks pretty much killed the market for what I've got. Unless just the right buyer were come by, I doubt I'd be able to give it away, locally.
 
No problem using IE8 here, but your right you do have to wait for every damn thing to load.
I've no idea what you're talking about re reflows,ABP,FF,Noscript,way over my head 😉.
If by FF you mean FireFox, I don't like it, I've come across too many occasions where it suffers from memory leaks. I do plan to try Chrome at some point.

But anyway regarding my 1GHz laptop, like I said I haven't had any problems yet surfing the net with it, works just fine.
And also as I said, give me some links or names at least if you think you know some sites that'll bring it to a crawl.
 
Paid 230. for a PIII-800 chip in the day 960oc.
Gainwood golden sample geforce3 ti200 was nice.
Held on to my abit n7 and a agp xtpe.
I still have my 2nd pc a p75 with a intel overdrive 200 chip 2-3dfx.
 
386DX said:
Its more likely the laser is being driven by a VESA Local Bus card. That was popular before the Pentium Era and was pretty much killed when the Intel Triton chipset was introduced which supported PCI. There were very few motherboards during the original Pentium era that supported VESA Local Bus and to my knowledge non after after. So in essence the Pentium CPU was the fastest system you could ever get that supported VESA Local Bus.
Click to expand...

I thought about VLB...but unless I'm mistaken the 486 was the last processor with VLB based boards. I'm hazy on the first pentiums (60 and 66mhz) but I think even those ones used the PCI bus. And pentium 133? Wasn't that the highest supported on socket 5 chip?

Edit: Maybe it is VLB but the pentium 133 is one of those weird overdrive chips that came out for 486 platforms? I think those had the pentium name and I seem to remember 133 being the fastest one I ever saw for sale.

Edit:
http://forums.anandtech.com/archive/index.php/t-1016129.html

Apparently there were some VLB socket 5 motherboards, so I guess the mystery is solved!
 
Last edited:
Old P2 and P3 boxes can be useful for specific purpose boxes (i.e. firewall, router, FreeNAS, etc) or for running old software (Windows 98 or NT4/2000?) when you can't or don't want to virtualize, but other than that, I'm finding it difficult to justify repurposing old hardware especially if it's noisy and sucks up a lot of power.

An Atom CPU may suck compared to a Core i7, but it's still faster than most Pentium III CPUs and uses a whole lot less power.
 
Yeah I am actually in the market for a PII system (or preferably an p233mmx as they tend to have more ISA slots) just because of some older programs I want to run.. but not a PIII however. Been looking around off and on in town. No one seems to have any, not even the schools 🙁.... although ironically they still have some old apple 2c's and a few 2GS's.

I remember writing programs for them back in the day. How apple got to where it is today is totally beyond me. Them older apples had nothing on a PC even if it was an 8086. Well, then again apple did make the switch to intel...
 
Cerb said:
http://www.newegg.com/

Actually browse around, with many tabs, to build up a decent computer...ugh.
Click to expand...
Well I normally wouldn't open multiple tabs with this laptop due to the small amount of RAM it has & its age, (as I mentioned).
I would usually only open 2 windows no tabs, max, but as you asked I've opened 2 windows with 1 of them having 3 tabs, all on newegg.com
That's more than reasonably expected of it. And I never said it could do more than that.

All runs fine 🙂, animated ads run smooth, scrolling is quick (although obviously not particularly smooth). Browsed files on the HDD with 2xIE still open, no probs, reasonably quick. Even played a divx TV episode, still ran fine.
Inccidently, less WMP, there was 60-70MB free RAM (which I was suprised at!), seems I can do more with my old laptop than I thought 🙂, I could of opened more tabs or windows.

Upper end PIIIs at least can surf the net just fine :thumbsup: ,just gotta watch RAM useage.

Oh btw & I just ordered another 256MB RAM for &#163;8 to relieve any RAM shortage issues it has.
 
Last edited:
That does it, I am going out to buy me a brand spanking new PIII rig.

This is my new board.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-029-_-Product

This is my CPU.
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php...=Intel-Pentium-III-1GHz-133MHz-256K-FCPGA-CPU

Now why can't I find a new 939 board to replace the one with crapped out SATA ports? It is light years newer tech.

Sorry to re-open this thread up but when I saw the thread I got a good laugh. I had just seen these parts available online an wondered if they actually ever sell it.
 
Why on earth are you buying a new PIII rig?😕 lol

Btw if you really have a good reason to, don't bother with the coppermine PIIIs go for a Tualatin one. Also get the CPU off ebay, it'll be much cheaper!

Oh & your mbrd link didn't work for me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top