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Video: The Agony, Ecstacy and Mystery of the Abit BP6

🕑 Added 2024-09-27 16:22:19 +0000 UTC

Comments

Cathode Ray Dude

oh you know what, I'll make a post about it. It's a big mess haha

Javier Matusevich

Any news on part 2? This was so exciting.

Andreas

Holy shit, the corrupted graphics being a phobia trigger – I thought I was the only one!

Aerin Neir

holy shit the quality in this episode was crazy the graphics for the SMP explainer was really good

Evan Grove

Neat! I have an old HP Vectra XU5, which has sockets for two Pentium 133s - only one is populated, though. It's a pretty regular looking AT PC until you see the second socket. Based on some digging through pcmag archives, my particular model (XU5/133C) was north of $4000 when new, and there's a memory upgrade in it that suggests it may have cost the original owner closer to $5000-$6000.

This Old Computer

Also, yeah I think a lot of us ran them with Windows 2000 betas / release candidates. Somehow these and their keys leaked all over the Internets at the time and even RC2 was more than usable enough, and a great quality-of-life step forward from NT4.0.

This Old Computer

I enjoyed this one quite a lot. As somebody who had a BP6 with Celerons back in the day, I spent the first half of the video kind of bracing myself for... IDK, that somehow the point of these things would be missed. But then you nailed it. These things were an absolute killer deal if you could take advantage of, or at least appreciate SMP. I'd been installing ~$4k IBM Intellistation ZPros (dual PIII Xeons) around this time in my college job and once you got used to that sort of performance, you were hooked. I was close to just buying one for myself but then... BP6 got you 90% of the way there for 20% of the cost. Sold. Sadly my BP6 died at the hands of a cheap PSU that just went off the rails (so to speak), resulting in actual flames being emitted from the board. And at this point I could get a used ZPro for $500 so I did that instead. :)

Snuguru Maestro

Windows shifts the load from one cpu to another just for cooling purposes. so you don't have one scorching hot cpu and a cold one next to it. And this is even more important with multi-core. uneven distribution of heat causes all sorts of issues at nano-scale. In case you wanted to know

Cathode Ray Dude

Thank you, glad to hear it! I tried really hard to make it accessible!

Nick Kreider

Your layman's terms explanation of multitasking and multithreading about 36 minutes in is probably the best concise way of conceptualizing that that I've ever seen

Patrick Moore

I had friends who were masochists that ran Gentoo. I'm not 100% sure, as it's been...24-25 years, but I probably ran some version of Mandrake.

Dante Blando

The BP6 was a pimp for cross-compiling Gentoo builds. Also, Gentoo used to matter. I loved Gentoo, so long as I wasn't trying to use X. It was a fast build box.

william fordon

Man.... I missed this era of computer building by like 2-3 years. First build was an Athlon in like 2003 and still haven't escaped AMD's prices.

Kris Asick

I actually remember the first time I ran into a game after the year 2000 which parallel-processed so well that I got CPU bottlenecked HARD: MechWarrior Online. When this game came out, I was still on a dual-core CPU, I forget exactly what kind but it was 2 GHz. MWO had very steep CPU requirements, recommending a quad-core CPU at 3.2 GHz, but I met the GPU requirements just fine and heck, I could run Skyrim at a decent framerate so I was like, "Pfft, no game burns THAT much CPU power!" So I tried running it and my average framerate was about 2 FPS with both CPU cores hard-maxed at 100% usage. I looked into what was going on internally and MWO had some IMPRESSIVE parallelism going on for a 2013 game, commanding no less than a DOZEN threads all at once, one of which I was able to identify as handling all of the networking code, and between those many threads it was really only pushing 4 of them to any level of intensity... so yeah, if I had a quad-core CPU at the time instead of dual-core it probably would've played just fine. It wouldn't be until I started getting into VR in 2020 when I'd finally get CPU bottlenecked again on an 4/8-core FX-8350, and now I have a 12/24-core Ryzen 9 5900X, so... I'm probably good in terms of games for at least a decade. :B

The Clayote

Linux gaming is actually a fine experience now! Almost entirely because of the boatloads of cash that Valve shoveled into WINE/Proton. You might annotate the part of the video where you say, "they were all gaming, and that was a far worse experience on Linux than it even is now" with something like, "WINE actually *is* an emulator you dorks, shut up."

Bike Forever

Great video telling the tales of hardware I never knew existed. Keep it up.

Cathode Ray Dude

Absolutely incredible - I remember that trough as well, I threw out at last a dozen dual ppros that nowadays I would climb into a dumpster to rescue.

Zac Doyle

Oh boy, early symmetric processing. Somewhere along the way in the late 1990s, I had stumbled onto the fact that SMP existed and at the time, they were expensive new while simultaneously no one wanted the things used on ebay. I certainly miss late 90s early 00s ebay for computer parts. No one gave a shit about anything but the top of the line parts. I was able to buy 4 matched (that was somewhat important then) pentium pros and a 4 socket motherboard for less than $100 around 4 years after these had been released. Funny enough, it would cost another $200 to half fill the thing with 72pin memory modules because while processors and motherboards were cheaper than dirt on ebay, storage and memory could still be painfully expensive even when was becoming outdated. I also wound up with a 4 x 7.2k rpm Barracuda scsi array which all together sounded like a damn jet turbine spinning up. And what did I do with all of this? Ran a piddly webserver, a winamp radio station, some early shitty file serving/backup software and eventually some raytracing stuff of zero consequence. Looking on ebay today, looks quad socket boards are rare and dual socket systems are around $500. Good grief...

Ada

Oh hell yeah. This video's exciting all on its own _and_ makes me really look forward to part 2. Yesss

ed_von_slack

i just love being really interested in things that i’ve never heard about until a few minutes ago 😅 worked out great again (the title as it is now on youtube is perfect)

Newsom J Gibson

I was teen around this age but was team AMD (and broke), so I knew about the 300As in theory, but never got to play with one.

w7com

I remember having one of those boards racked up in the Westin at Flying Crocodile. Served irc.nethead.com for many years running FreeBSD. Thanks for the memories!

Kirk Lane

Having finished watching this now, this is a strong nostalgia shot back to the late '90s and that time my dad came home from work talking about this newfangled "overclocking" and something called a "300A". We'd just paid somewhere in the ballpark of $2k for a prebuilt-from-commodity-components Pentium II 350MHz box. A month or so later we built a Celeron 300A setup for less than half of the price that was its equal or better in every way, and I don't think either of us bought another pre-built desktop for two decades following. I only broke my streak because stupid GPU prices made it cheaper to buy a prebuilt than to put my own together.

Kerne

Thanks for the good history lesson professor. :D Even today, most people don't need dozens of cores for general applications unless they're a power user. I even just watched this video on a Chromebook with a fairly recent model Celeron that actually runs Debian 12 surprisingly well. (I also have a pet peeve about the terseness of wiki articles. They make me appreciate the set of Encyclopedia Britannica my parents shelled out their hard-earned money for to help me with my school reports.)

sdomi

note: during the patreon credits, a bunch of (longer) names got overlaid over each other. probably not severe enough to warrant a re-render, but i thought you should know

c

That’s good.

Moanis

I don't think I'm exaggerating by saying this might be my favourite video of yours, and I've watched (and rewatched) every video of yours going back to the "Forgotten History of Home Video" video at least two or three times. I don't know why exactly this was, but this was just absolutely delightful to watch. I can't wait for Part 2. Have a lovely day, Gravis!

sdomi

yep. SO GOOD.

TheJBW

The BP6 was the motherboard in the first computer I built as a teen, somewhere around Christmas ‘99. I only had money for one CPU, and by the time I had saved up enough to buy a second in late ‘00, it made more sense to upgrade to an Athlon (thunderbird core). I actually ran windows 2000 beta mostly back then, as it had the stability of NT but was compatible with most 98 software and ran games at virtually the same speed as well. I think I might still have the burned win2k CDR around here somewhere. I actually have a BP6 setup now on the rack, and am in the SEA area, if you happen to need access to a second one for some reason (doubt it).

Nick R

Abit of a Mystery....

Patrick Moore

This average joe ran Linux on his BP6 and used it as a home file server and also for NAT, since we were fortunate enough to have a cable modem back in the late 90s.

c

I like it but, “The Mystery of the Abit BP6” is probably better for the algorithm.

Colin Hoad

The great god Typos demands it!

Cassie Cable

Keep that title, i click on agony 10 times more than not when I am a computer user

Zen The Fox

Gravis you are spoiling us with uploads. I know I shouldn't but I'm probably gonna watch this whole thing rn 🤣

Kirk Lane

That is the look of pure smug that anyone who dropped the coin to set up a BP6 back in the day had on their face, permanently.

Soleil

I love the title and hope you keep it. I'm gonna be "that girl" and say that you might want to correct the spelling of "ecstasy" before full release. Because I've now corrected your spelling, I expect that this comment has 37 typos that I've missed, as is tradition.

Colin Hoad

Sorry to be That Guy, but unless there's a pun I'm missing, shouldn't it be "ecstasy"? CAVEAT: I'm British, so maybe this is an aluminum/aluminium thing...