Ahh, the mention of Celeron 300A gives me a good dose of nostalgia. Sorry for the tangent. There was a local retailer and warehouse that turned out to be ran by Russian mobsters (I didn’t know, I was a naive teen), but they had everything under the sun and the prices were (probably literally) a steal, although retail packaging was curiously rare. The guy behind the counter had a box full of loose 300As and let me pick my pair, and I went back and forth between home and the warehouse a couple of times until I had a stable pair. Seeing two of those things hit 450 stable with just a flip of a BIOS setting, for only $100something a piece felt like I had pulled the wool over the world’s eyes.
That was my first SMP system, running NT4. Ended up hosting Starsiege: Tribes, Q3, and a bunch of other stuff (often simultaneously) at college. However, I dropped out after my first year and couldn’t host at home, so the machine was largely unused, and I sold it. I regret that.
Yes, the Abit BP6 was the one! Nestled inside an InWin Q500 full tower case[0]. I was a pretty big Voodoo guy initially. I already had a Voodoo3 but I was working at CompUSA and befriended the Creative Labs rep. He fixed it so I got the TNT2U and I was impressed. I flipped back and forth on the two based on game optimization. When GeForce hit the ground I never looked back.
The late 90s/early 2000s were exciting times for PCs.
That was my first SMP system, running NT4. Ended up hosting Starsiege: Tribes, Q3, and a bunch of other stuff (often simultaneously) at college. However, I dropped out after my first year and couldn’t host at home, so the machine was largely unused, and I sold it. I regret that.