Building From Older Parts

[faulkner132]

I'm building a test machine with some old parts I have laying around, so I want to get some opinions.
Which would you go with:

Option 1:
Celeron 1.3 / 100 FSB / 256 L2 Cache
384 MB Ram (2 slots)
Biostar Board
Integrated video
Integrated LAN
Via Chipset
3 PCI slots left over

Option 2:
Pentium-3 800 / 133 FSB / 256 L2 Cache
512 MB Ram (3 slots)
Mystery Board (?)
2/4x AGP Slot (I would probably use a 16 MB ATI Rage-128 2x AGP card)
No integrated LAN (would use an Intel or 3-Com card)
Via Chipset
2 PCI slots left over


The machine will be loaded with (most likely):
1. XP Pro
2. Server 2003
3. Some variety of Linux

I am curious what others think.

[Cricket]

Both motherboards have VIA chipsets?

What are you going to do with the computer?

I guess if I had to choose, I'd go with the PIII set up.

Cricket

[glc]

I'd go with the Celeron - that's a Tualatin core, same amount of cache as that P3, the only downside is 100 FSB instead of 133. I'd try to stuff as much ram in it as you can (PC100 or PC133 will work fine), even though it's a Via chipset (UGH) a Biostar board is not too bad - the "mystery" board raises some red flags, it may be a PC Chips or some other turd. Onboard video is fine for a test machine as long as you can find drivers for your proposed operating systems - same with onboard lan (but you can disable it and use a 3Com or whatever). If the Biostar has an AGP slot, you can drop a card in and it will disable the onboard video.