What to do with Pentium II 233mhz MMX?

[taltamir]

does it have enough ram for folding at home? Does it support the necessarily commands (SSE and the like)... and even if it does... the calculations / watt would be atrocious... Actually, with the new GPU clients it is no longer worthwhile to run folding on CPUs, period.
Much less ancient ones.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn

Originally posted by: graysky
Make it your PVR. Run Knoppmyth (mythtv distro of linux). Although you probably won't use it for capturing live tv, you can use it to play your avi/mpg movies as long as you have video board with s-video out.

233 mhz isn't really enough to decode divx, xvid, mpeg4, etc. Full screen DVD playback will be choppy at best. That said, mythmusic would work just fine as long as you don't care about the visualizations.

exactly.. it is too slow to surf modern websites.
It is too slow to play back video of any kind.
It is much slower then any router you can buy, and will perform poorly, and will be big and power hungry in comparison...

Is it even fast enough to decode modern music formats?

It is a paperweight.

Depends on what you consider a modern music format I'd guess.
It should have no issue with mp3s of any bitrate, I don't use any other music formats, so I don't know what kind of requirements they have.

I will say that I was using an old p3 450 laptop up until a few months ago for random websurfing. I installed OpenBSD and installed Opera through the ports tree. It had 192MB of ram, and I disabled flash. It worked just fine (but a bit slow) for 4 out of every 5 pages I'd visit. A 233 is barely more than half of that, It would work, but it would be really painful.

I don't see many real practical uses for a 233mhz box, but if the OP wants to experiment just for the sake of experimentation, there are all sorts of projects that he could try.

 

[GundamF91]

I'll probably play with it, trying to get Win98SE to run on it for nostalgia sake. It's quite odd that even though I now have a Q9450, I still remember having such a fun time playing with the Pentium.

 

[Assimilator1]

How much RAM does it have?

Btw someone mentioned o/cing it, whilst the rig would probably be ok at 75MHz FSB I wouldn't go higher without taking an image of the OS etc, remember this mbrd was made long before the ability to lock the PCI bus, so at 75MHz FSB the PCI & IDE are at 37.5MHz & at 83 FSB 41.5 MHz! ,which at that speed will quite possibly lead to data corruption on your HDD, aside from other problems.

Originally posted by: taltamir
does it have enough ram for folding at home? Does it support the necessarily commands (SSE and the like)... and even if it does... the calculations / watt would be atrocious... Actually, with the new GPU clients it is no longer worthwhile to run folding on CPUs, period.
Much less ancient ones.

RAM could be a problem ,though I don't think the op said how much it had.
SSE doesn't matter IIRC but your dead right about output/watt it would be terrible! .
Re GPU clients, only true if you have the right graphics card.

A PII 233 will play mp3s fine ,I used to play mp3s on my 1st rig which was a Pentium 166MMX .

 

[graysky]

Originally posted by: BurnItDwn

Originally posted by: graysky
Make it your PVR. Run Knoppmyth (mythtv distro of linux). Although you probably won't use it for capturing live tv, you can use it to play your avi/mpg movies as long as you have video board with s-video out.

233 mhz isn't really enough to decode divx, xvid, mpeg4, etc. Full screen DVD playback will be choppy at best. That said, mythmusic would work just fine as long as you don't care about the visualizations.

Really? Just SD should be okay, no? My slowest machine is an 800 MHz Athlon and it's totally fine. I'll admit to not actually experiencing playback with his CPU, but I would think it'd be okay for xvid... x264 might stress it... it [knoppmyth] is a free download and installation is quick and easy.

 

[SickBeast]

Overclock it to 291mhz on the 83mhz bus and stick Win2k on there.

:beer:

 

[Assimilator1]

And as I said watch out for data corruption if you do that, you shouldn't forget to mention that .

graysky
IIRC the approx min for playing fullscreen DVD is PIII 500 or Atlon 500.
Just looked up min Divx requirements & a PIII 733 or equivalent is needed.
Your Athlon 800 is quite a lot faster than a PII 233 .

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
And as I said watch out for data corruption if you do that, you shouldn't forget to mention that .

graysky
IIRC the approx min for playing fullscreen DVD is PIII 500 or Atlon 500.
Just looked up min Divx requirements & a PIII 733 or equivalent is needed.
Your Athlon 800 is quite a lot faster than a PII 233 .

Actually, you can play full-screen DVD (without enhancements) with a PII-300, but just barely. The OS gets sluggish on a machine like that. When overclocked to 450Mhz, my PII decoded DVDs handily, and had enough CPU left over for desktop tasks. OTOH, a K6-2 500Mhz still would skip frames here and there playing back DVDs.

 

[Assimilator1]

Fair enough, K6-2s had crap FPU performance so that's probably why they have problems & that's also why I didn't list them .

 

[shortylickens]

I work in a big electronics repair facility.
Many of our instruments had software designed for them back in the DOS days and since the company is too cheap to pay software engineers to make Windows XP programs, we end up using a lot of old computers to work on the older instruments.
One of our techs recently cleaned out his workbench and we unearthed a 386-40. Still worked fine. You hook it up by serial to an old piece of equipment and talk to it with some sort of ancient DOS Hyperterminal or something.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
And as I said watch out for data corruption if you do that, you shouldn't forget to mention that .

Oh come on now, I had my P2 233 running at 291mhz on the 83mhz bus for years without a single problem! :beer:

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had a K6-2 400 on a 430TX mobo. I overclocked it to 450 on a 75MHz bus, and my WD IDE drive had errors over certain parts of the HD. It was very subtle, I had to do a full HD compare or something like that to detect the error. Chances are, without extensive testing, you never would have noticed it. Then again, it was probably an ATA-33 or ATA-66 drive. Modern ATA-100 drives would be affected less.

 

[Assimilator1]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Assimilator1
And as I said watch out for data corruption if you do that, you shouldn't forget to mention that .

Oh come on now, I had my P2 233 running at 291mhz on the 83mhz bus for years without a single problem! :beer:

I don't doubt you did , but many HDDs & some PCI cards couldn't handle the overclocked PCI/IDE bus.
My old S7 Asus 430TX rig ran on 83MHz FSB without probs (with a 3.2GB WD & 9.1GB Seagate HDD) for many months without any problems, but when I tried to o/c my mates PII 233 to 83MHz FSB it corrupted the data on the HDD & killed windows!:Q, luckily he wasn't there & another mate rescued me .

Only one way to find out!