P3 still cuts the mustard

[Ceefer]

I've just bought a PIII 500mhz Compaq Deskpro EN SFF system for my sister-in-law, from Ebay. Total cost, including postage was £68. I've installed Win98SE and it runs all the applications she needs just fine. It has 128mb PC100 memory and a 10gig HDD and speed-wise in day-to-day use is really not that far behind the PIV and AMD systems that I use. In fact I'm so impressed with this little PC I'm thinking about getting one for myself.

[iranu]

Gave my aunti a k7-750 athlon plus 512mb ram - runs windows xp fine even on a crappy, really old 10gig h/d.

The reason why large companies never put in enough ram to start with is because their so called suppliers/IT providers, for example EDS, advise them that they get cheaper machines with only 128mb of ram knowing full well that in 2 years time they can charge extortionate £££'s for an upgrade.

[DJWillis]

Still using a lot of old kit that was bought from work when they upgraded.

Compaq EN SFF's (P3 450's) and Dell GX110's (P3 700's). If you get some more ram in them and make sure that the latest BIOS's are on them there very nice desktops.

I have a few, more then happy, family members running these boxes with XP or SuSE. The trick it to get 256 if not 512 in them . That I will agree with. PC133 is so cheap second hand it's silly not to upgrade.

Thay also make tidy little servers for light duties like DNS, file server (if you dual NIC) etc. .

[Flibb]

I use a Deskpro P3 500 as a file/print server. Just leave it on all the time as its so quiet.

Also jave a P2 laptop that runs 98se and does office hapilly, it also has a 30gig HD in for storing mp3, photos and large mapping files. It is also setup for running astronomy software including ccd capture.

[smtkr]

My father is still using my old Pentium 3 800EB with a Voodoo 5 and 512MB PC133. It does everything he wants.

[JimmyBoy]

hehe got a similar system to another poster, a pIII 450mhz with 384 mb of ram,

with a fresh install of xp its alright to be honest, reasonably quick for the net n stuff, perfect for my parents

[Spunkey]

I've got a P3 450 system sitting in my cupboard at home

Problem with mine is that back when i put it together in late 98, i had the absolute genious idea of buying an Intel CC820 mothoerboard
i found out about the recall on it about 2 years late. Not only does it have pathetic performance despite 512Mb of PC100, but i cant overclock the bugger as its totally nailed down

It still runs Quake3, Half Life and GPL pretty respectably on its Voodoo3 3000 though

[Rys]

Shameless pimping of one's own threads, but here's a bunch of P3s (18 of them) being slung together in a cluster:

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=36583

Plenty of life in Intel's old dog yet. 11GHz of compute power!

[Mblaster]

The PIII's in some of the rooms at college are painfully slow, over 10 seconds to load IE and load the intranet homepage over the network (2 sec on the 2.4GHz celerons). They are PIII 733 with 256mb of RAM I think.

[Zak33]

/\ they have either 4 tons of other apps running in the background OR just need fresh OS installs.

[Dooms]

At work we are currently trying to replace all the P3 733 and 800mhz machines with p4 3.2ghz because they no longer cut the mustard

[NiROE]

I have three perfectly good PC's at home, two of which are more than fine for gaming.... and what do I spend most of my time on... My little P3 600 320mb RAM Compaq laptop.... *shrugs*

[pdug175]

I put a P3 700 in my GFs computer and what with all the crap installed on it - it's still terribly slow. Mind you if got my hands on it, im sure it would run much faster!

[chriswood_7]

My PC at uni has Twin 3.2 xeons with 8 gig of RAM, then again it did cost £5k!!

Silly money..

Much better to get a few PIIIs and link em all together!!! Cant beat the old PIIs and PIIIs!

Chris

[|{££|"]

hehe i have a amd machine 1200mhz and 512sdram and it flys, even plays HL2

[Dakaras]

Im rebuilding a Celly 500 atm Ill let you know how it gets on