# Athlonium 64



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> Ads? Wut? There are no ads for me at all. You can disable that, I guess. To be honest, I miss aero.
> 
> 
> Good
> 
> 
> Same. I can't get it either. Pretty much all tech I have is in good condition. If you would have seen how horribly do cheapest used iPhones look, you could get a heart attack.
> 
> 
> 
> The problem is that Dells aren't popular everywhere. In my country it's hard to find, but it's possible to find other good deals. It's possible to find nicely configured gaming PCs at different price points. Some idiots take a pictures of windows activation keys and post them online. lol, I guess I can have free Windows.
> 
> 
> Obsolete? Upgrade!
> 
> 
> There are two infinite things:
> 1)Universe
> 2)Idiocity
> 
> 
> I found one common problem with pretty much every integrated graphics. They always seem to have problems with reaching high FPS. No matter how low you will go, they just can't reach very high FPS. I don't know why that happens, but it seems to be true. AMD's A10 7850K APU was somewhat different tho. Too bad it was just AMD FX 4100 + low end radeon combined into one thing, but it was awesome.
> 
> 
> 
> I think, that this rule was destroyed in early Pentium 4 era. Pentiums 4s heated, were slow, some died too early due to heat and had ridiculous power consumption. Athlon 64 CPUs were superior everywhere, but still Pentium 4s sold well. Also AMD Athlon FX CPUs were pretty much equal or slightly better than Pentium 4 Extreme Editions, the difference was price and that Intel CPUs were clocked much higher just to match lower clocked AMD Athlons. Something like Intel's 4GHz was equal to AMD's 2.6 GHz. That was ridiculous. Even Pentium 3 CPUs were more efficient and as I read there was cases, when people bought Intel's mobile CPUs, because they were more modern Pentium 3s with higher clock speeds, so that meant they were somewhat better than Pentium 4s. At that time I don't think, that Intel was any better than AMD. As I read benchmarks, in very limited scenarios Pentium 4 was any better than AMD Athlon 64. Intel's obsession with higher clock speeds ended up being it's biggest disaster. AMD Athlon was dominating then.


I'm actually curious as to how long a computer could last if kept in good storage and taken care of. I've seen plenty of those old things from the 1980s that still work. Oftentimes things break down in terms of rust, water or dust which is just bad maintenance. There is a phenomenon called electromigration which theoretically would cause stuff to stop working eventually. But just to think sometimes the old computer in my room is 17 years old and still works. I wonder how long like an iPhone would last. I changed the battery in old 4s and don't see any reason why it would fail except in the extreme case of the flash storage dying.

For my MacBook, they sold it without a battery so I had to buy one. In that case it's a new battery. I don't trust batteries though. I bought the iPhone battery from iFixit so it's reputable. But it's never comparable to the original battery.

I upgraded my MacBook to 4GB up from 2GB. 2GB is not really good enough for the latest software. A lot of people say 8GB is the real minimum. So apparently there's this claim that my MacBook could handle 6GB mismatched. Apparently there is this claim that it could read 8GB but then performance tanks. I mean realistically a 4GB stick of ddr2 is absurdly priced. I got 4GB for $17.99, one stick would be like twice as much. So I'm not even going to test that theory. It's perfectly fine for web browsing and light old fashioned gaming which is what I usually used to do anyway so I have few games that it couldn't play. It has a Nvidia 9400m so that was considered basically one of the best integrated GPUs at the time. The only problem is I broke the battery locking cap off when I was working on it so I just taped it back on and put a case on it anyway. I didn't upgrade to an SSD and I probably won't do anything of that nature until I actually get home from school because I don't feel like buying tools that I might already have at home. Once again something only has to be as secure as you think your data should be. But once those patches stop lining up, I think it would fair to say "retire that system." That's more of a software thing though. I could download Linux but that defeats the point of it being a Mac so that's no fun. I might actually downgrade to Mac OS 10.6.8 for better performance.

I get a sense that maybe because it's all on the same package, if it the regular CPU is taking a load then the graphics section will suffer performance losses. That's definitely true of the memory part, but overall maybe that too.

Pentium 4 was just an extremely slow bus speed with a very high multipler. The whole battle was to get a higher clock rate even though we already knew about the megahertz myth. Then they made the Core 2 chips which were actually based on mobile Pentium III chips called the Pentium M line. After that Pentium became the second to lowest-brand right above celeron. But it's amazing to see how you have the old pentium extreme edition running at 3.7ghz be destroyed by a core 2 duo in benchmarks. But that's an interesting processor to look up nonetheless. Pentium Extreme Edition 965 look up gaming videos. It will run the new Doom game pretty decently when overclocked (albeit at 4.8GHz which is insane.)


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I'm actually curious as to how long a computer could last if kept in good storage and taken care of. I've seen plenty of those old things from the 1980s that still work. Oftentimes things break down in terms of rust, water or dust which is just bad maintenance. There is a phenomenon called electromigration which theoretically would cause stuff to stop working eventually. But just to think sometimes the old computer in my room is 17 years old and still works. I wonder how long like an iPhone would last. I changed the battery in old 4s and don't see any reason why it would fail except in the extreme case of the flash storage dying.


I'm curious too, but I don't want that to happen. I think, that laptops will be first to die as they heat a lot.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> For my MacBook, they sold it without a battery so I had to buy one. In that case it's a new battery. I don't trust batteries though. I bought the iPhone battery from iFixit so it's reputable. But it's never comparable to the original battery.





Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I upgraded my MacBook to 4GB up from 2GB. 2GB is not really good enough for the latest software. A lot of people say 8GB is the real minimum. So apparently there's this claim that my MacBook could handle 6GB mismatched. Apparently there is this claim that it could read 8GB but then performance tanks. I mean realistically a 4GB stick of ddr2 is absurdly priced. I got 4GB for $17.99, one stick would be like twice as much. So I'm not even going to test that theory. It's perfectly fine for web browsing and light old fashioned gaming which is what I usually used to do anyway so I have few games that it couldn't play. It has a Nvidia 9400m so that was considered basically one of the best integrated GPUs at the time. The only problem is I broke the battery locking cap off when I was working on it so I just taped it back on and put a case on it anyway. I didn't upgrade to an SSD and I probably won't do anything of that nature until I actually get home from school because I don't feel like buying tools that I might already have at home. Once again something only has to be as secure as you think your data should be. But once those patches stop lining up, I think it would fair to say "retire that system." That's more of a software thing though. I could download Linux but that defeats the point of it being a Mac so that's no fun. I might actually downgrade to Mac OS 10.6.8 for better performance.


Can you upgrade CPU? It's possible to upgrade CPUs in some laptops. I upgraded mobile Sempron to Turion. Too bad 9400m is not discrete. If it was, you could have upgraded that too. 



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Pentium 4 was just an extremely slow bus speed with a very high multipler. The whole battle was to get a higher clock rate even though we already knew about the megahertz myth. Then they made the Core 2 chips which were actually based on mobile Pentium III chips called the Pentium M line. After that Pentium became the second to lowest-brand right above celeron. But it's amazing to see how you have the old pentium extreme edition running at 3.7ghz be destroyed by a core 2 duo in benchmarks. But that's an interesting processor to look up nonetheless. Pentium Extreme Edition 965 look up gaming videos. It will run the new Doom game pretty decently when overclocked (albeit at 4.8GHz which is insane.)


4.8 GHz on Pentium 4?! That's sick, considering you had to use LN2 to get 5GHz out of it:





And if you overclocked AMD Athlon 64 to at least 4GHz, I think it might even match slowest Pentium Ds or maybe even slowest Core 2 Duos. 

I'm gonna confess. I actually wanted AMD FX-9590 CPU. I think it's fucking cool to have 5GHz AMD CPU. It's still one of the most insane CPUs ever made. Completely unpractical, but nobody cares.


----------



## zynthaxx

The red spirit said:


> AMD FX series were too futuristic for the time with focusing on cores.


That's an early example of the same mistake Apple+AMD made with the current Mac Pro. AMD FX also bet everything on compute loads getting highly parallelized, while what we saw in reality was that coders didn't keep up but instead stuck with single- or at least few-threaded processes for a long time. 



The red spirit said:


> Also a concern is cooling, I don't think it's a good idea to make cylinder computers.


For a general purpose computer, you either want the most cooling available (and accept the noise), or cooling that's designed to take away slightly more heat than what the components in the computer generate. When I built my current computer, I chose the latter to keep things quiet; and I did it knowing that if I ever want a truly beefy set of GPUs or an overclocked CPU, I will need to change the cooling setup too - but since I won't I can live with a relatively silent computer even though it's a regular PC.

Since Apple had full control of the components and wattages in the Mac Pro, they could design it so all parts could run at full whack (within their designed power range) at all times while the cylinder "jet engine" design of the cooling block shroud allowed the computer to be impressively quiet even at load.
Two things that didn't work with the design:
1) if one or two sides got very hot while one side didn't (like when using CPU-intensive tasks while not taxing the GPUs, or when using a program that only really took advantage of one of the GPUs).
2) if you'd ever want to use GPUs or CPUs that drew significantly more power than the case was built for (since it a) couldn't provide the power, and b) couldn't transport away the heat).

In a regular PC case, (1) and (2b) is solved by cooling the individual parts and the case innards sufficiently, and (2a) is solved by switching to a bigger PSU.



The red spirit said:


> That's also why they are perceived as evil. They cut out support too soon than customers desire.


To be fair to them, Windows XP was a one off in the world of Microsoft too. No other operating system from Microsoft has been supported for as long.
Look at Microsoft's own support documents for their later operating systems: (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet). They killed off mainstream support for Windows 7 which was their next most successful OS version after XP 15 months after they stopped selling it. 

Of course with Windows 10 Microsoft did an Apple and started offering upgrades for free, but again: How common is it for consumer hardware producers on the PC or phone side to generally keep offering drivers for current operating systems even for five years after they stopped making the hardware? Remember that the Core Duo mentioned in the video you linked earlier was produced for half a year in 2006, yet was fully supported by Apple for every new OS update until they enforced 64-bit OS adoption in 2014. Admittedly you had to pay like $20 or something for those upgrades, but it's not exactly exorbitant.
(Yes, I have gotten old shit to work or "almost" work in new Windows versions by trying various modern drivers for hardware that contained similar chips, but that's not exactly a supported way of running hardware, is it?) 



The red spirit said:


> and that's very important to be honest.


For data security reasons, I'd much rather see that a lot of the old crap just died and went away. The cryptomalware outbreak a lot of the world saw this spring wouldn't even have happened if Microsoft didn't decide to be overly backwards-compatible. It exploited a naïve protocol that should have been upgraded or retired a long time ago, and if you had a compatible computer in your network, it could enter through that machine and attack modern systems by stealing valid credentials in some circumstances. Not a good thing at all, really.
So sure: I'm aware that some places are dependent even on old DOS versions to keep their production lines working. That's fine, and as long as those computers are isolated from everything else they don't hurt anybody. The same can be said for any old PC or Mac running an unsupported operating system: It won't stop working just because the OS went out of support, but please keep it away from networks.




The red spirit said:


> I don't think, that people gonna like that. Also people like me are pirates and for sure not gonna like that, I pirate not because I want, but because there's no choice. Buying software in my country is almost impossible in physical forms and to buy online you have to be at least 18 years old. I don't even want to start about other reasons, why piracy is good for user besides money saved. The best part is that if you you don't pirate software in business and use it at home, then police and inspectors don't give a damn and in Lithuania we have one of the fastest internet in the world and it's cheap. So piracy is strong here.


Well, for kids who simply don't have the money I don't quite see how software companies would be losing money from copying something from a friend - it's not exactly as if those kids would buy their product anyway. 
The problem is the large-scale pirates who actually earn money from selling bootleg copies to people who are prepared to give their money to them but not to the original content creators. That's immoral, in my opinion, both on the part of the pirates and on the part of their paying customers.

But sure: A big problem with DRM schemes and similar, is that pirates actually get a better experience with the software than paying customers. That sucks. At least for games we have gog.com.


----------



## zynthaxx

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I'm actually curious as to how long a computer could last if kept in good storage and taken care of. I've seen plenty of those old things from the 1980s that still work. Oftentimes things break down in terms of rust, water or dust which is just bad maintenance.


The Commodore 1084 monitor I have at home probably needs new capacitors (they tend to dry out after a few years). I still have a working VIC20 which probably is the oldest computer I have left that occasionally sees some action.

The funny thing is that _not_ using stuff can damage it too. I have a feeling that magnetic storage media may last longer when used than when stowed away, for example, and there are all kinds of gremlins that may appear both in moving parts and in electronics for all kinds of reasons.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> I'm curious too, but I don't want that to happen. I think, that laptops will be first to die as they heat a lot.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Can you upgrade CPU? It's possible to upgrade CPUs in some laptops. I upgraded mobile Sempron to Turion. Too bad 9400m is not discrete. If it was, you could have upgraded that too.
> 
> 
> 4.8 GHz on Pentium 4?! That's sick, considering you had to use LN2 to get 5GHz out of it:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> And if you overclocked AMD Athlon 64 to at least 4GHz, I think it might even match slowest Pentium Ds or maybe even slowest Core 2 Duos.
> 
> I'm gonna confess. I actually wanted AMD FX-9590 CPU. I think it's fucking cool to have 5GHz AMD CPU. It's still one of the most insane CPUs ever made. Completely unpractical, but nobody cares.


My CPU is soldered. It's actually theoretically possible to upgrade though but that would require skills and equipment. My skills were take a magic eraser and clean it to become completely white again. When I get home, I will actually take it apart to repaste the heatsink and clean out the fan because I think the fan shouldn't be going on as often as it is. If I sold this one or traded in some of my old phones, I would buy the mid-2010 MacBook. It's the last white one to ever come out so it won't be a dented and scratched piece of aluminum for the price. Plus a lot of people already have them fully upgraded on eBay. One of them was $239.00 for 8GB of DDR3, a 240GB SSD and it has a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo with Nvidia 320m. If you break that down it's probably a better deal than just buying a 240GB SSD and 8GB of DDR2.

The 320m is better than the 9400m but it's still integrated. I might buy a smaller SSD like 64GB or 120GB and call it a day though because I like having the actual clicking portion of the touchpad to be separate. Like if I'm playing a game of Halo, tapping the touchpad is just an annoying way of shooting.

That's basically a Pentium D extreme edition because it's 2 cores with hyperthreading. There were older pentium extreme editions from the early 2000s too. My computer when I was young had a 700mhz processor AMD Duron (apparently budget CPU series.) I think it could be upgraded to Athlon but I'm not modifying that computer. So then in 2006 or 2007, we got windows vista. It had a 1.6GHz processor and it must have either been a celeron or a core 2 duo I have no idea because the computer is now lost to history. But anyway, we were passed down a pentium 4 computer with 3.0GHz and all games at the time checked to see what your clock rate was. So I saw my game needed 350mhz and the computer was 3,000mhz so I thought it was the fastest computer I ever used. Ha I didn't understand much back then.

That's what I don't like about those overclocking challenges. People get things to like 7GHz just to show that they did it. But they don't actually use it. Overclocking the pentium extreme to ridiculously high clock rate made it play Doom 2016. That's amazing.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

zynthaxx said:


> The Commodore 1084 monitor I have at home probably needs new capacitors (they tend to dry out after a few years). I still have a working VIC20 which probably is the oldest computer I have left that occasionally sees some action.
> 
> The funny thing is that _not_ using stuff can damage it too. I have a feeling that magnetic storage media may last longer when used than when stowed away, for example, and there are all kinds of gremlins that may appear both in moving parts and in electronics for all kinds of reasons.


Such as my printer which decided to break down when I wasn't using it for months.

I know that hard disk drives are supposed to be able to retain data storage longer on the shelf than flash storage.

I like watching old computers get restored despite the lack of sentimental value I have for them. My brother's white Xbox 360's DVD drive can't open by itself; you need a butter knife to help it out. Meanwhile I just see people lubricating floppy drives from decades ago and they work again. It's nice to have an answer to a problem every once in a while instead of something vague.


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> That's an early example of the same mistake Apple+AMD made with the current Mac Pro. AMD FX also bet everything on compute loads getting highly parallelized, while what we saw in reality was that coders didn't keep up but instead stuck with single- or at least few-threaded processes for a long time.


To be honest, there's nothing too wrong with FX in most things. Only if you compare it so something else. Also I think, that Ryzen might turn out same as FX. Maybe Ryzen is overhyped after all. In single core stuff Intel still wins, just that margin isn't big. 



zynthaxx said:


> For a general purpose computer, you either want the most cooling available (and accept the noise), or cooling that's designed to take away slightly more heat than what the components in the computer generate. When I built my current computer, I chose the latter to keep things quiet; and I did it knowing that if I ever want a truly beefy set of GPUs or an overclocked CPU, I will need to change the cooling setup too - but since I won't I can live with a relatively silent computer even though it's a regular PC.


Or you can go completely fanless. Nightjar PSU, no case fans, huge passive heatsink, passive cooled GPU and it's possible. I personally find 800 rpm fans being optimal for quietness and thermals. Also I prefer Scythe.



zynthaxx said:


> Since Apple had full control of the components and wattages in the Mac Pro, they could design it so all parts could run at full whack (within their designed power range) at all times while the cylinder "jet engine" design of the cooling block shroud allowed the computer to be impressively quiet even at load.
> Two things that didn't work with the design:
> 1) if one or two sides got very hot while one side didn't (like when using CPU-intensive tasks while not taxing the GPUs, or when using a program that only really took advantage of one of the GPUs).
> 2) if you'd ever want to use GPUs or CPUs that drew significantly more power than the case was built for (since it a) couldn't provide the power, and b) couldn't transport away the heat).


I remember Linus testing iMac 5k and it overheated. Same with Macbook. Apple doesn't offer good cooling, just enough to not burn down.



zynthaxx said:


> In a regular PC case, (1) and (2b) is solved by cooling the individual parts and the case innards sufficiently, and (2a) is solved by switching to a bigger PSU.


PCs are awesome.



zynthaxx said:


> To be fair to them, Windows XP was a one off in the world of Microsoft too. No other operating system from Microsoft has been supported for as long.
> Look at Microsoft's own support documents for their later operating systems: (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet). They killed off mainstream support for Windows 7 which was their next most successful OS version after XP 15 months after they stopped selling it.


But you still can upgrade many old PCs to their latest OS. Apple doesn't offer that. Only sometimes Apple offer some timeless devices. Those are:
iPhone 4s
iPad 2
Mac Pros with Xeons
Maybe some others

Heck, even Athlonium 64 probably could install Win10 and run it at somewhat decent speed if I could find drivers.

Windows 7 or any other Windows release lives longer than single Mac OS release. BTW mainstream support doesn't matter too much, what matters is extended support. After it's end, you will have to upgrade.




zynthaxx said:


> Of course with Windows 10 Microsoft did an Apple and started offering upgrades for free, but again: How common is it for consumer hardware producers on the PC or phone side to generally keep offering drivers for current operating systems even for five years after they stopped making the hardware? Remember that the Core Duo mentioned in the video you linked earlier was produced for half a year in 2006, yet was fully supported by Apple for every new OS update until they enforced 64-bit OS adoption in 2014. Admittedly you had to pay like $20 or something for those upgrades, but it's not exactly exorbitant.
> (Yes, I have gotten old shit to work or "almost" work in new Windows versions by trying various modern drivers for hardware that contained similar chips, but that's not exactly a supported way of running hardware, is it?)


My main rig's mobo is probably 5 years old and has good driver support. On Athlonium 64 it's possible to find drivers and it's not too hard, too bad DFI pretty much disappeared from market, so no surprise their website is shit and it's amazing, that it's still not shut down.



zynthaxx said:


> For data security reasons, I'd much rather see that a lot of the old crap just died and went away. The cryptomalware outbreak a lot of the world saw this spring wouldn't even have happened if Microsoft didn't decide to be overly backwards-compatible. It exploited a naïve protocol that should have been upgraded or retired a long time ago, and if you had a compatible computer in your network, it could enter through that machine and attack modern systems by stealing valid credentials in some circumstances. Not a good thing at all, really.


I guess I don't care about security that much. I used Win XP to download some torrents lmao. If I used this machine seriously as my main, I would upgrade OS to something newer.



zynthaxx said:


> So sure: I'm aware that some places are dependent even on old DOS versions to keep their production lines working. That's fine, and as long as those computers are isolated from everything else they don't hurt anybody. The same can be said for any old PC or Mac running an unsupported operating system: It won't stop working just because the OS went out of support, but please keep it away from networks.


You are too paranoid.



zynthaxx said:


> Well, for kids who simply don't have the money I don't quite see how software companies would be losing money from copying something from a friend - it's not exactly as if those kids would buy their product anyway.


Maybe they would buy, but they effectively doesn't let to do that. 



zynthaxx said:


> The problem is the large-scale pirates who actually earn money from selling bootleg copies to people who are prepared to give their money to them but not to the original content creators. That's immoral, in my opinion, both on the part of the pirates and on the part of their paying customers.


I doesn't hear about this stupid shit lately. Why would anyone pay for something, that's free lol. 

BTW my friend used to sell pirated PS2 games, but the price was only to cover the expenses of disc itself most of the time.



zynthaxx said:


> But sure: A big problem with DRM schemes and similar, is that pirates actually get a better experience with the software than paying customers. That sucks. At least for games we have gog.com.


Also Mr.DJ; noSTEAM; RGMechanics. Steam by itself is like a big fat virus and to me doesn't offer good experience. My account was stolen numerous times, it has problems with password detecting, it's way too slow. Overall it was a disaster for me and hey I can't get into my account now, because that fucker has problems again. Piracy is by far a better choice. I personally wouldn't mind buying physical copies of games, just not the Steam. Steam is by far one of the worst piece of software I have ever tried and people seem to like that trash.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> My CPU is soldered. It's actually theoretically possible to upgrade though but that would require skills and equipment. My skills were take a magic eraser and clean it to become completely white again. When I get home, I will actually take it apart to repaste the heatsink and clean out the fan because I think the fan shouldn't be going on as often as it is. If I sold this one or traded in some of my old phones, I would buy the mid-2010 MacBook. It's the last white one to ever come out so it won't be a dented and scratched piece of aluminum for the price. Plus a lot of people already have them fully upgraded on eBay. One of them was $239.00 for 8GB of DDR3, a 240GB SSD and it has a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo with Nvidia 320m. If you break that down it's probably a better deal than just buying a 240GB SSD and 8GB of DDR2.


You are unlucky then.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The 320m is better than the 9400m but it's still integrated. I might buy a smaller SSD like 64GB or 120GB and call it a day though because I like having the actual clicking portion of the touchpad to be separate. Like if I'm playing a game of Halo, tapping the touchpad is just an annoying way of shooting.


sigh...mouse



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> That's basically a Pentium D extreme edition because it's 2 cores with hyperthreading. There were older pentium extreme editions from the early 2000s too.


Shit, I thought, that overclocked Pentium was single core. So after all it's not that amazing then.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> My computer when I was young had a 700mhz processor AMD Duron (apparently budget CPU series.) I think it could be upgraded to Athlon but I'm not modifying that computer.


Is it's still alive? 



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> So then in 2006 or 2007, we got windows vista. It had a 1.6GHz processor and it must have either been a celeron or a core 2 duo I have no idea because the computer is now lost to history. But anyway, we were passed down a pentium 4 computer with 3.0GHz and all games at the time checked to see what your clock rate was. So I saw my game needed 350mhz and the computer was 3,000mhz so I thought it was the fastest computer I ever used. Ha I didn't understand much back then.


lol yeah



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> That's what I don't like about those overclocking challenges. People get things to like 7GHz just to show that they did it. But they don't actually use it. Overclocking the pentium extreme to ridiculously high clock rate made it play Doom 2016. That's amazing.


Yeah, it's amazing. Another thing about extreme overclocking I don't like is disabling cores to reach higher clocks. That video i showed you is from 2003 and it was the first OCing video I have ever seen. It's gold.


----------



## The red spirit

Apparently my version of AMD Athlon 64 3200+ is a bit rare. I found some info about it: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ - ADA3200AEP4AX (ADA3200AXBOX)

Edit: Some music to get back into time:


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> You are unlucky then.
> 
> 
> sigh...mouse
> 
> 
> Shit, I thought, that overclocked Pentium was single core. So after all it's not that amazing then.
> 
> 
> Is it's still alive?
> 
> 
> lol yeah
> 
> 
> Yeah, it's amazing. Another thing about extreme overclocking I don't like is disabling cores to reach higher clocks. That video i showed you is from 2003 and it was the first OCing video I have ever seen. It's gold.


Honestly, I couldn't sit on it so I bought the MacBook with 8 gigs. The SSD is actually 128GB, but there's no real need for much storage space. This is going to be more of a casual computer. I'll be taking it to class though because it's much more portable. I have a wireless mouse which I'm probably going to be using often if I don't get used to the touchpad. It's DDR3 so it is actually going to be quite a performance boost with the 320m. The main thing though is it is the mid-2010 model and this is really where they started ramping up the battery life. The claimed figure is 10 hours of "wireless productivity." I'm smart enough not to believe that in real use, but it's a big jump over a claimed 4.5 hours. So this might be the first laptop I've ever used to have a good battery life. That remains to be seen since it hasn't even been shipped yet.

I haven't decided on whether I will sell the old MacBook by myself on eBay or through their program where I send it to an experienced seller via usps. The latter case would mean I would get a portion of the sale based on how much it is sold for. For example between $50 and $99 I would get 50% and as higher ranges go I could get 60% or 70%.

This laptop with 4GB of RAM, a case, keyboard cover, new battery and charger. Could probably sell for over $100 but you know the whole auction process won't guarantee that, but it also might go way over that too because usually people sell them for repairs with bad batteries or no batteries. This is a really good deal if I sold it for $100 and it is already estimated that this is extremely likely to be bid upon and bought by someone even if just for the lowest price. I cleaned it off with a magic eraser so you don't really get cleaner than that. It was sold to me in fairly dirty condition with stickers on it, no battery, no charger. Overall, between the upgrade and case the whole thing cost only $120. If I sell it over that point I would be pretty happy. But I'd probably have to sell it myself. I don't know how legal that is doing it using the college's network and I don't really want to bother people at home to help run my little MacBook start-up business. Though it would be cool to say the first thing I sold was an apple product. If I needed more money I could do an Amazon trade-in for my iPhone 5s which would still reel-in $60 automatically. That phone is basically useless to me now that's it's past iOS 8.

The amazing thing about our old computer is that the disc tray makes noise but it's the same noise it always used to make. It isn't stuck or anything. Still running Windows ME, 320MB of RAM and all. An 8MB Nvidia card. Those were fun times. But it only has a CD-Drive and many newer things used DVD which is why it was never good enough and the processor was too slow for newer games.


----------



## zynthaxx

The red spirit said:


> To be honest, there's nothing too wrong with FX in most things. Only if you compare it so something else. Also I think, that Ryzen might turn out same as FX. Maybe Ryzen is overhyped after all. In single core stuff Intel still wins, just that margin isn't big.


That's the thing, really. If I were a startup today and needed to set up hosts for virtual machines, an Epyc-based configuration would be high on my list for the sheer amount of cores for my money.
Yes, single core speed is still relevant, but is the corresponding Intel CPU as many percent faster in single core speed as it is more expensive than an Epyc or Ryzen CPU? And how many people actually do need the absolute ultimate in single core CPU power no matter the cost?



The red spirit said:


> Or you can go completely fanless. Nightjar PSU, no case fans, huge passive heatsink, passive cooled GPU and it's possible. I personally find 800 rpm fans being optimal for quietness and thermals. Also I prefer Scythe.


I went for an ugly-but-quiet Noctua setup, but my thinking is similar to yours. 



The red spirit said:


> I remember Linus testing iMac 5k and it overheated. Same with Macbook. Apple doesn't offer good cooling, just enough to not burn down.


They allow their consumer products to throttle down. It's not a choice I would have made, but they really-really-really like thin things, obviously. That said, except for when I tried playing the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider on my late 2013 MacBook Pro with too-high graphics settings, I've never had it throttle down for me; and it has never happened in regular use, even when I've been running a three-VM lab environment.



The red spirit said:


> PCs are awesome.


I fully agree.



The red spirit said:


> But you still can upgrade many old PCs to their latest OS. Apple doesn't offer that. Only sometimes Apple offer some timeless devices. Those are:
> iPhone 4s
> iPad 2
> Mac Pros with Xeons
> Maybe some others


You're entirely correct about upgrading. That's an area where I feel Apple hasn't really moved with the times.
If you think back to before the Internet became as full of threats as it is today; say that you wanted a home studio that could record four simultaneous track while playing back a total of 12. You went and bought a Mac that fulfilled your needs, and then you kept it until it broke down. Same with video editing: You bought a Mac that could do what you required from it, and you didn't upgrade until you could save money on the sheer amount of time you saved by investing in new hardware.
In those examples, buying a Mac is no different from buying any other tool or appliance: You get one that does what it needs to do, and it keeps on doing it virtually forever.

For a company, you always counted 3-5 years of life out of regular computers and anything above that was a nice bonus. Now, however, there is a relevant need even for regular computer users to always be on a relatively new patch level. This means that the old way of just getting something that does what you need it to and not change it at all until it no longer does isn't viable anymore. And since features keep adding on year over year, always staying on the latest operating system means your computer will get slower and slower until it either no longer is supported, or until it's too slow for the system. If you want to see the Windows equivalent in action, try installing XP SP2 on your Athlon machine and then see what happens to its performance once you install SP3.

This of course is the problem with the iPhone - any model, really - and the iPad. My son has my old iPad2, so I can tell you exactly how frustrating it is to use on the latest iOS version that supports it. 



The red spirit said:


> Heck, even Athlonium 64 probably could install Win10 and run it at somewhat decent speed if I could find drivers.


And the latter part of this sentence is what matters: If you can find drivers. Unless you've got a _very_ generous hardware producer you won't; and you very likely couldn't even find drivers that worked across Windows versions if Microsoft had bothered to do more than release service packs for XP during its lifetime. 
Linux is slightly different because most drivers for the Linux kernel are plain source code that simply gets onboarded in the process until it no longer makes sense to keep it in there.



The red spirit said:


> Windows 7 or any other Windows release lives longer than single Mac OS release. BTW mainstream support doesn't matter too much, what matters is extended support. After it's end, you will have to upgrade.


True enough, but as I said, since Apple makes both the hardware and the operating system their situation is a bit different. Hell, Microsoft in most cases doesn't write its hardware drivers and doesn't care one bit whether your particular piece of hardware still works five minutes after you've bought it. They are preoccupied with software. 
Apple sells a complete experience, and makes sure their stuff keeps working for a reasonable time (~5 years for iPhones and iPads, and usually several years more for computers). Actually, similar to with Windows, you can surprisingly often get a new version of macOS to work on unsupported computers, only you won't have drivers for some of the hardware in them.

But yes, the two business models have significant differences, and they do cater to different groups of users' needs.



The red spirit said:


> You are too paranoid.


Nope. 
You just think a bit differently about these things if you get paid to keep literally thousands of computers working with as little unnecessary downtime and data loss as possible.




The red spirit said:


> Maybe they would buy, but they effectively doesn't let to do that.


Last time I checked many operators seem to either allow kids to purchase their stuff, or allow parents to purchase stuff for their kids. I suspect it mostly has to do with whether you're allowed to have a credit card or not.



The red spirit said:


> Steam by itself is like a big fat virus and to me doesn't offer good experience. My account was stolen numerous times, it has problems with password detecting


See? I'm not too paranoid. You're not paranoid enough. Crap like you describe doesn't happen to people who don't use the same password in multiple places (and who don't have key logging malware installed on their computers).


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Honestly, I couldn't sit on it so I bought the MacBook with 8 gigs. The SSD is actually 128GB, but there's no real need for much storage space. This is going to be more of a casual computer. I'll be taking it to class though because it's much more portable. I have a wireless mouse which I'm probably going to be using often if I don't get used to the touchpad. It's DDR3 so it is actually going to be quite a performance boost with the 320m. The main thing though is it is the mid-2010 model and this is really where they started ramping up the battery life. The claimed figure is 10 hours of "wireless productivity." I'm smart enough not to believe that in real use, but it's a big jump over a claimed 4.5 hours. So this might be the first laptop I've ever used to have a good battery life. That remains to be seen since it hasn't even been shipped yet.


If it's fine for you then it's okay. I personally wouldn't like non-upgradable used hardware. It's pity, that you just can't put better components.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I haven't decided on whether I will sell the old MacBook by myself on eBay or through their program where I send it to an experienced seller via usps. The latter case would mean I would get a portion of the sale based on how much it is sold for. For example between $50 and $99 I would get 50% and as higher ranges go I could get 60% or 70%.


interesting



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> This laptop with 4GB of RAM, a case, keyboard cover, new battery and charger. Could probably sell for over $100 but you know the whole auction process won't guarantee that, but it also might go way over that too because usually people sell them for repairs with bad batteries or no batteries. This is a really good deal if I sold it for $100 and it is already estimated that this is extremely likely to be bid upon and bought by someone even if just for the lowest price. I cleaned it off with a magic eraser so you don't really get cleaner than that. It was sold to me in fairly dirty condition with stickers on it, no battery, no charger. Overall, between the upgrade and case the whole thing cost only $120. If I sell it over that point I would be pretty happy. But I'd probably have to sell it myself. I don't know how legal that is doing it using the college's network and I don't really want to bother people at home to help run my little MacBook start-up business. Though it would be cool to say the first thing I sold was an apple product. If I needed more money I could do an Amazon trade-in for my iPhone 5s which would still reel-in $60 automatically. That phone is basically useless to me now that's it's past iOS 8.


And you sell it for 100. That's way too low. For 70 people are selling beat-up G4s without anything. Imo you should sell it for at least 150.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The amazing thing about our old computer is that the disc tray makes noise but it's the same noise it always used to make. It isn't stuck or anything. Still running Windows ME, 320MB of RAM and all. An 8MB Nvidia card. Those were fun times. But it only has a CD-Drive and many newer things used DVD which is why it was never good enough and the processor was too slow for newer games.


I think it has more sentimental value for you.


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> That's the thing, really. If I were a startup today and needed to set up hosts for virtual machines, an Epyc-based configuration would be high on my list for the sheer amount of cores for my money.
> Yes, single core speed is still relevant, but is the corresponding Intel CPU as many percent faster in single core speed as it is more expensive than an Epyc or Ryzen CPU? And how many people actually do need the absolute ultimate in single core CPU power no matter the cost?


There's a better option for your money. Cheap dual or quad socket Xeon mobo and two or four Xeons with it. Too bad it doesn't work out that well irl:








zynthaxx said:


> I went for an ugly-but-quiet Noctua setup, but my thinking is similar to yours.


There are better options than Noctua, that are cheaper and less ugly. The general rule for quietness and thermals is to go as big as you can. Bigger fans spin at lower rpms and with less rpms move more air. 




zynthaxx said:


> They allow their consumer products to throttle down. It's not a choice I would have made, but they really-really-really like thin things, obviously. That said, except for when I tried playing the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider on my late 2013 MacBook Pro with too-high graphics settings, I've never had it throttle down for me; and it has never happened in regular use, even when I've been running a three-VM lab environment.


Good for you then. I personally don't get that thinness mania of Apple. Better cooling and more battery life would be much more valuable.




zynthaxx said:


> For a company, you always counted 3-5 years of life out of regular computers and anything above that was a nice bonus. Now, however, there is a relevant need even for regular computer users to always be on a relatively new patch level. This means that the old way of just getting something that does what you need it to and not change it at all until it no longer does isn't viable anymore. And since features keep adding on year over year, always staying on the latest operating system means your computer will get slower and slower until it either no longer is supported, or until it's too slow for the system.


many computers with Intel core series CPUs are still fine. They aged like fine wine. I think it's not 7 years since first core series CPU launch.




zynthaxx said:


> If you want to see the Windows equivalent in action, try installing XP SP2 on your Athlon machine and then see what happens to its performance once you install SP3.


I was always running Windows XP Professional 32-bit SP3. It works as I said, really well. I keep XP updated.



zynthaxx said:


> This of course is the problem with the iPhone - any model, really - and the iPad. My son has my old iPad2, so I can tell you exactly how frustrating it is to use on the latest iOS version that supports it.


I guess it is, but it's amazing how long it has lived up to date. Compare it to Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the winner is clear. Tab is horribly slow with Android 4.0.4. My parents have it and it was hell to use it for anything. It often crashes, locks-up and so much lag everywhere, all that with outdated OS now. At least your son has not very obsolete device. No other iPad was so lucky to get updates so long.




zynthaxx said:


> And the latter part of this sentence is what matters: If you can find drivers. Unless you've got a _very_ generous hardware producer you won't; and you very likely couldn't even find drivers that worked across Windows versions if Microsoft had bothered to do more than release service packs for XP during its lifetime.


My HP DV6000 runs Windows 8.1 mostly with WinXP/WinVista drivers. I guess it's because it's more or less same kernel version. For Windows 10 I couldn't find driver for Nvidia GPU. It was the last thing I expected to not find driver as Nvidia has good driver support. You can find even Riva TNTs drivers on their website.



zynthaxx said:


> Linux is slightly different because most drivers for the Linux kernel are plain source code that simply gets onboarded in the process until it no longer makes sense to keep it in there.


That's nice.




zynthaxx said:


> True enough, but as I said, since Apple makes both the hardware and the operating system their situation is a bit different. Hell, Microsoft in most cases doesn't write its hardware drivers and doesn't care one bit whether your particular piece of hardware still works five minutes after you've bought it. They are preoccupied with software.


Due to that I would expect Mac to be supported longer as it can be optimized better, but reality is different.



zynthaxx said:


> Apple sells a complete experience, and makes sure their stuff keeps working for a reasonable time (~5 years for iPhones and iPads, and usually several years more for computers). Actually, similar to with Windows, you can surprisingly often get a new version of macOS to work on unsupported computers, only you won't have drivers for some of the hardware in them.


As I remember Apple didn't support iPad 3 long and maybe some other unlucky devices. It's all about their speed.



zynthaxx said:


> But yes, the two business models have significant differences, and they do cater to different groups of users' needs.


Nah, they are targeting pretty much the same people, but approaches are different. MS just targets wider audience than Apple, but both are trying to attract same mass.




zynthaxx said:


> Nope.
> You just think a bit differently about these things if you get paid to keep literally thousands of computers working with as little unnecessary downtime and data loss as possible.


That's different mentality, which I don't have.



zynthaxx said:


> Last time I checked many operators seem to either allow kids to purchase their stuff, or allow parents to purchase stuff for their kids. I suspect it mostly has to do with whether you're allowed to have a credit card or not.


I have cut-down debit card only. I can't have paypal or do almost any internet purchases. Only when I turn 18, I can get fully working debit card. 




zynthaxx said:


> See? I'm not too paranoid. You're not paranoid enough. Crap like you describe doesn't happen to people who don't use the same password in multiple places (and who don't have key logging malware installed on their computers).


I checked PC for viruses, malware, adware and other malicious stuff with lots of software. PC is clean as fuck and I didn't use same password for Steam. Steam is just atrocious. Ever heard of PSN's huge account thefts? I think, that in Steam same happens, but in smaller amounts. 

For long time I use:
Avast free
Malwarebytes Anti-malware free
Glasswire firewall

This combo shouldn't be very bad.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> If it's fine for you then it's okay. I personally wouldn't like non-upgradable used hardware. It's pity, that you just can't put better components.
> 
> 
> interesting
> 
> 
> And you sell it for 100. That's way too low. For 70 people are selling beat-up G4s without anything. Imo you should sell it for at least 150.
> 
> 
> 
> I think it has more sentimental value for you.


A good deal for the buyer that is which almost guarantees a sale. I think it's a lot more likely to sell in an auction style thing. The recommended starting bid based on how similar (albeit lower speced ones with no accessories) is $41. Then obviously if more than one person bids then it will increase in price like any other auction. If it was me personally I would probably start it at $75 minimum. I do want to try that program though because it seems interesting. It also takes a lot less effort to ship it out now and then have whatever happens happen to it. If I just straight up listed it at say $199, it would probably sit there for a while. Even the one I bought said it was sitting there for a month, that's not really what I'm looking for. I'm not even necessarily interested in breaking even, it's just a money issue which I have not been a great money manager recently anyway.

The only sense in which it amazes me is how over my lifetime I don't recall the computer functioning any differently. Unlike Xbox 360s which just breaks down after months of disuse.

My initial sentiment with this stuff was flipping stuff like some people on YouTube do. Like a sleeper build, turning an old school computer into a gaming-capable machine. Plus it was cheap. Remember I didn't really care a lot about hardware until I started working with that thing over the summer and it is completely OEM. As I said this was primarily a learning experience. At the beginning it was actually me looking to extend my laptop's life by using some other computer to play games, but it turned out as usual I veered off course and ended up not playing games much at all at the end. When I used to edit config files in PC games, I used to end up spending more time with the configs than with the actual games. I was learning and was interested a lot during the process, but afterwards I started to lose the fun factor. I still would not buy a case, leds and components to build my own PC. I would say I'm qualified to do that, but it's not what first attracted me to computers. 

I was first interested in Operating Systems and software experience. I did a class in databases which involved designing and building them and I enjoyed that planning and development process. But I don't like programming so I didn't go down that track. Then I discovered networking and stuff and it's really just intriguing to me. There's a lot more to take into consideration and to implement and that's not even including the troubleshooting. I feel like learning how things like how wifi works is something I could actually use to help people. So anyway, hardware isn't my spiel despite the surge in interest.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> A good deal for the buyer that is which almost guarantees a sale. I think it's a lot more likely to sell in an auction style thing. The recommended starting bid based on how similar (albeit lower speced ones with no accessories) is $41. Then obviously if more than one person bids then it will increase in price like any other auction. If it was me personally I would probably start it at $75 minimum. I do want to try that program though because it seems interesting. It also takes a lot less effort to ship it out now and then have whatever happens happen to it. If I just straight up listed it at say $199, it would probably sit there for a while. Even the one I bought said it was sitting there for a month, that's not really what I'm looking for. I'm not even necessarily interested in breaking even, it's just a money issue which I have not been a great money manager recently anyway.


I can see why.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The only sense in which it amazes me is how over my lifetime I don't recall the computer functioning any differently. Unlike Xbox 360s which just breaks down after months of disuse.


Hey don't talk shit about X360, later models are really reliable. I have working 360 from 2011 and I bought it used. My very own 360 is 2010 model and it has problems with disk tray. It keeps opening and closing, thus rendering the whole thing useless as it can't play games, but that's something with DVD drive's PCB. The mainboard is perfectly fine and I have taken the whole thing apart few times in the past (before DVD drive's PCB issues). It's technically the first computer I have taken apart and not due to break downs or something bad.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> My initial sentiment with this stuff was flipping stuff like some people on YouTube do. Like a sleeper build, turning an old school computer into a gaming-capable machine.


That is already getting boring to be honest, when so many of them keep repeating same shit. I have a Dell, I have graphics card ugh... a gaming PC.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Plus it was cheap. Remember I didn't really care a lot about hardware until I started working with that thing over the summer and it is completely OEM. As I said this was primarily a learning experience. At the beginning it was actually me looking to extend my laptop's life by using some other computer to play games, but it turned out as usual I veered off course and ended up not playing games much at all at the end.


Once person gets a dream, it stops being a dream.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> When I used to edit config files in PC games, I used to end up spending more time with the configs than with the actual games. I was learning and was interested a lot during the process, but afterwards I started to lose the fun factor.


I' a believer, that only some games are perfect for a human. I can play many games, but only some are satisfying.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I still would not buy a case, leds and components to build my own PC.


I can agree with LEDs, but why case and components? Are you dreaming of going commando (PC version of course)?



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I would say I'm qualified to do that, but it's not what first attracted me to computers.


I'm often more satisfied by reading specs, how stuff works, achievements, overclocking than actually using PC. Only if you know what's inside, you can fully enjoy it to the fullest.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I was first interested in Operating Systems and software experience. I did a class in databases which involved designing and building them and I enjoyed that planning and development process.


Honestly it looks interesting.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> But I don't like programming so I didn't go down that track.


I can feel the pain of sitting and writing code in class. It was very boring and repetitive. I got good grades, but I really disliked those lessons. F that shit!




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Then I discovered networking and stuff and it's really just intriguing to me. There's a lot more to take into consideration and to implement and that's not even including the troubleshooting. I feel like learning how things like how wifi works is something I could actually use to help people. So anyway, hardware isn't my spiel despite the surge in interest.


I relate, except hardware part.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> I can see why.
> 
> 
> Hey don't talk shit about X360, later models are really reliable. I have working 360 from 2011 and I bought it used. My very own 360 is 2010 model and it has problems with disk tray. It keeps opening and closing, thus rendering the whole thing useless as it can't play games, but that's something with DVD drive's PCB. The mainboard is perfectly fine and I have taken the whole thing apart few times in the past (before DVD drive's PCB issues). It's technically the first computer I have taken apart and not due to break downs or something bad.
> 
> 
> 
> That is already getting boring to be honest, when so many of them keep repeating same shit. I have a Dell, I have graphics card ugh... a gaming PC.
> 
> 
> 
> Once person gets a dream, it stops being a dream.
> 
> 
> I' a believer, that only some games are perfect for a human. I can play many games, but only some are satisfying.
> 
> 
> I can agree with LEDs, but why case and components? Are you dreaming of going commando (PC version of course)?
> 
> 
> I'm often more satisfied by reading specs, how stuff works, achievements, overclocking than actually using PC. Only if you know what's inside, you can fully enjoy it to the fullest.
> 
> 
> Honestly it looks interesting.
> 
> 
> I can feel the pain of sitting and writing code in class. It was very boring and repetitive. I got good grades, but I really disliked those lessons. F that shit!
> 
> 
> 
> I relate, except hardware part.


The old one that we stopped using for the most part due has the jammed disc tray. My brother also had the newest model which got a red ring of death. I don't know how that happened but that's completely useless now. In my room is the intermediate generation which is the black glossy one and it has served me well. I only use it for minecraft but I don't really play games on it often anymore. I used to like Xbox for the halo series. I don't play a lot in general, so it kind of follows that I don't play much halo anymore either. Halo Reach I liked to play for mp and firefight. I played through halo 4 once, maybe twice. I didn't enjoy it much at all. Halo 5, I managed to play the campaign and I wasn't interested in that either. So I wouldn't buy an Xbox One for any reason. I play Xbox one with my friend in his room a lot but I would not personally buy it. 

At least when it started out, the ps4 was designed only to play games. If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to use the cloud services from Sony. I bought it around the time it came out with battlefield 4 and some other games, plus whatever came out for free on PS Plus. I liked battlefield 4 a lot, fun and beautiful game. But it bothered me a lot that I distinctly recalled being able to simply plug in my iPod and downloading all of the regular music files that weren't protected files and playing them on the PS3. When I got the ps4 you couldn't insert a DVD and expect to watch a movie. I'm 99% sure that you can now, but I don't think you could back then. If I made that up then maybe I just don't remember. But it was extremely lacking as a media center. While the Xbox one went too far with it. But the ps4 interface is fairly usable with some gripes like I could never turn off vibration without looking up steps to find that menu if it even existed. Then the current Xbox One UI is just designed in such a way that I'm just glad that I don't have to use it. From what I can tell MS Edge is nice on Xbox one though.

I do still enjoy watching the guy who does the spray paint and mods even though I wouldn't do them myself. If you're talking about the videos where a guy is like, "hey everyone I got this for $25, let's put a low profile gpu in it and see how it does." Those are boring. Those were instructional videos for me when I was grinding down for certain information. Like the Hard Drive caddy thing. I like the modding guy mainly because he has bad editing and he knows it, but it's okay because you know he's doing it for fun. I like seeing how well old stuff holds up which is interesting. I generally don't look up the latest greatest stuff.

I'm not creative in the sense of how minecraft works. I mentally couldn't sit there and just start building the redstone powered city for fun. With building and designing a database, it's fun to see the plan come together and have all of the considerations in place. Knowing the weaknesses and such. But minecraft, you get blocks and hammer, you just start building. No specific goal in mind, it's just for fun. I wouldn't really do it for fun. Programming is like one more layer of abstraction away too. Database design you do have to brainstorm the requirements and such which is a lot of thinking and planning beforehand. But the actual implementation was cake. I just knew what do and it came together simply. Hand me a blank programming canvas and give me a general direction like, "build a project" and I'm screwed. Last semester we had to do a final programming project so I chose tic tac toe because it sounded easy enough. Opened up the coding studio and I had no idea where to start. With programming and coding, the "How do I solve this problem" is solved in the moment. Designing a website or database structure was like, "okay we have these basic tools, like drop down boxes and buttons. We know why to use them and when." So the "How do I solve this problem" is really just establishing the design. You determine the entities and relationships, etc. then transferring that conceptual work into an actual database is plain. With programming it's kind of like, "Here's what you're supposed to do, now figure how to do it." With database design it's, "Here's the problem, how do you solve it and you probably already know how to do the "doing" part." The actual implantation is straightforward but the thinking about how to implement is the complex and interesting part. Figuring out how to do something isn't much fun. A lot of time you can also just look it up so its pointless. Then if you can't look it up, you have to think intensely. How do you write a program that will take these two words and reverse the order of their letters? I don't know. I could also just look it up though. So the tic tac toe thing I literally watched a YouTube video and modified it a little bit. Starting from scratch is impossible there, it's just like minecraft. 

For the computer building thing, I suppose I might do it for cost-savings. But I don't know about that. At this point there has to be a reason for me to do it. If I wanted to do some intensive application then yes, I would buy something like an i5 or i7 or ryzen or whatever people talk about these days. Gaming is more of a spectrum. There are certain games that I like, the majority of which are older because I don't stay up to date with games or spend money frequently. So for that I don't need 32GB of RAM and dual processors. I'm using hyperbole btw I mean nobody does. But I could live with 30fps locked except in certain circumstances. Like CoD I'm used to 60fps so it looks like crap any other way. But like if I was playing something like Crysis could I do 30fps locked? Yeah, I don't even have the slightest problem with it. It's just normal to me. I don't even need 1080p. If my tv is on the other side of the room I can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p so I will rather play on 720p with higher settings and better performance and than lowering my settings because resolution doesn't make much of a difference there. So for gaming purposes I would not put together a PC. I just don't need it. When my CPU goes to 99°C about to throttle and the inside of my computer is a toaster oven then yes I need something changed. If I bought an i3 today for example with a stock cooler, I probably would not upgrade the cooler. I don't need to idle at room temperature. I never did that in my life, I don't need it now. Overclocking was fun to bring old stuff up to speed but it's brand new and does exceptionally to begin with I wouldn't see the purpose, I wouldn't do it. A lot of people have projects that they do and since I'm less of a "doer" I don't have those kinds of urges. Someone in my school for example starting programming Minecraft so that he could play it in virtual reality. That's cool stuff and you need advanced GPUs for that. Me? I want to play old games, plug in the budget card. You know just depends on the need for me more than the fun or the desire because I'm not a typical hobbyist at heart in that sense. I like iPhones, I don't like androids. I like a lot of apple products, that's not what a lot of power users like but I do for various reasons that don't have to do with being a creator of builder.

I bought my MacBook in the first place for two reasons. My 15.6 inch laptop is kind of annoyingly big to carry around all day. So I wanted something more compact. Then I wanted to play around with MacOS because I don't really have it and hackintosh in a virtual machine isn't really fun. Plus it's an apple product, I could have bought a crappy HP Stream if all I wanted was simple computer. But no, I wanted some more spice. I could have even bought a used and higher speced common laptop that may have costed less per unit of performance but it doesn't fulfill the brand needs and stupid considerations that I wanted. It's not like, "Dude I'm going to upgrade this old piece of garbage and make it better than my existing laptop yo." Pretty much no, that's not the idea. But anyway these MacBooks are supposed to be little beasts with the specs I chose anyway. Battery life I mentioned. An SSD which I haven't used on one of my own systems is another thing. The processor is probably not going to fulfill some of the things my school might be wanting me to use a laptop for but we aren't there yet. Web design could be done in notepad. It takes nothing. So yeah there's another barrage of random things.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The old one that we stopped using for the most part due has the jammed disc tray. My brother also had the newest model which got a red ring of death. I don't know how that happened but that's completely useless now. In my room is the intermediate generation which is the black glossy one and it has served me well. I only use it for minecraft but I don't really play games on it often anymore. I used to like Xbox for the halo series. I don't play a lot in general, so it kind of follows that I don't play much halo anymore either. Halo Reach I liked to play for mp and firefight. I played through halo 4 once, maybe twice. I didn't enjoy it much at all. Halo 5, I managed to play the campaign and I wasn't interested in that either. So I wouldn't buy an Xbox One for any reason. I play Xbox one with my friend in his room a lot but I would not personally buy it.


You should try Forza 3. To me it's easily one of the best X360 video game ever made.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> At least when it started out, the ps4 was designed only to play games. If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to use the cloud services from Sony. I bought it around the time it came out with battlefield 4 and some other games, plus whatever came out for free on PS Plus. I liked battlefield 4 a lot, fun and beautiful game. But it bothered me a lot that I distinctly recalled being able to simply plug in my iPod and downloading all of the regular music files that weren't protected files and playing them on the PS3. When I got the ps4 you couldn't insert a DVD and expect to watch a movie. I'm 99% sure that you can now, but I don't think you could back then. If I made that up then maybe I just don't remember. But it was extremely lacking as a media center. While the Xbox one went too far with it. But the ps4 interface is fairly usable with some gripes like I could never turn off vibration without looking up steps to find that menu if it even existed. Then the current Xbox One UI is just designed in such a way that I'm just glad that I don't have to use it. From what I can tell MS Edge is nice on Xbox one though.


PC is the best media center. Also, why another console?




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I do still enjoy watching the guy who does the spray paint and mods even though I wouldn't do them myself. If you're talking about the videos where a guy is like, "hey everyone I got this for $25, let's put a low profile gpu in it and see how it does." Those are boring. Those were instructional videos for me when I was grinding down for certain information. Like the Hard Drive caddy thing. I like the modding guy mainly because he has bad editing and he knows it, but it's okay because you know he's doing it for fun. I like seeing how well old stuff holds up which is interesting. I generally don't look up the latest greatest stuff.


How is that channel named? Maybe I know him.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I'm not creative in the sense of how minecraft works. I mentally couldn't sit there and just start building the redstone powered city for fun. With building and designing a database, it's fun to see the plan come together and have all of the considerations in place. Knowing the weaknesses and such. But minecraft, you get blocks and hammer, you just start building. No specific goal in mind, it's just for fun. I wouldn't really do it for fun. Programming is like one more layer of abstraction away too. Database design you do have to brainstorm the requirements and such which is a lot of thinking and planning beforehand. But the actual implementation was cake. I just knew what do and it came together simply. Hand me a blank programming canvas and give me a general direction like, "build a project" and I'm screwed. Last semester we had to do a final programming project so I chose tic tac toe because it sounded easy enough. Opened up the coding studio and I had no idea where to start. With programming and coding, the "How do I solve this problem" is solved in the moment. Designing a website or database structure was like, "okay we have these basic tools, like drop down boxes and buttons. We know why to use them and when." So the "How do I solve this problem" is really just establishing the design. You determine the entities and relationships, etc. then transferring that conceptual work into an actual database is plain. With programming it's kind of like, "Here's what you're supposed to do, now figure how to do it." With database design it's, "Here's the problem, how do you solve it and you probably already know how to do the "doing" part." The actual implantation is straightforward but the thinking about how to implement is the complex and interesting part. Figuring out how to do something isn't much fun. A lot of time you can also just look it up so its pointless. Then if you can't look it up, you have to think intensely. How do you write a program that will take these two words and reverse the order of their letters? I don't know. I could also just look it up though. So the tic tac toe thing I literally watched a YouTube video and modified it a little bit. Starting from scratch is impossible there, it's just like minecraft.


True



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> For the computer building thing, I suppose I might do it for cost-savings. But I don't know about that. At this point there has to be a reason for me to do it. If I wanted to do some intensive application then yes, I would buy something like an i5 or i7 or ryzen or whatever people talk about these days. Gaming is more of a spectrum. There are certain games that I like, the majority of which are older because I don't stay up to date with games or spend money frequently. So for that I don't need 32GB of RAM and dual processors. I'm using hyperbole btw I mean nobody does. But I could live with 30fps locked except in certain circumstances. Like CoD I'm used to 60fps so it looks like crap any other way. But like if I was playing something like Crysis could I do 30fps locked? Yeah, I don't even have the slightest problem with it. It's just normal to me. I don't even need 1080p. If my tv is on the other side of the room I can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p so I will rather play on 720p with higher settings and better performance and than lowering my settings because resolution doesn't make much of a difference there. So for gaming purposes I would not put together a PC. I just don't need it. When my CPU goes to 99°C about to throttle and the inside of my computer is a toaster oven then yes I need something changed. If I bought an i3 today for example with a stock cooler, I probably would not upgrade the cooler. I don't need to idle at room temperature. I never did that in my life, I don't need it now. Overclocking was fun to bring old stuff up to speed but it's brand new and does exceptionally to begin with I wouldn't see the purpose, I wouldn't do it. A lot of people have projects that they do and since I'm less of a "doer" I don't have those kinds of urges. Someone in my school for example starting programming Minecraft so that he could play it in virtual reality. That's cool stuff and you need advanced GPUs for that. Me? I want to play old games, plug in the budget card. You know just depends on the need for me more than the fun or the desire because I'm not a typical hobbyist at heart in that sense. I like iPhones, I don't like androids. I like a lot of apple products, that's not what a lot of power users like but I do for various reasons that don't have to do with being a creator of builder.


Interesting perspective and also pretty similar to mine. 




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I bought my MacBook in the first place for two reasons. My 15.6 inch laptop is kind of annoyingly big to carry around all day. So I wanted something more compact. Then I wanted to play around with MacOS because I don't really have it and hackintosh in a virtual machine isn't really fun. Plus it's an apple product, I could have bought a crappy HP Stream if all I wanted was simple computer. But no, I wanted some more spice. I could have even bought a used and higher speced common laptop that may have costed less per unit of performance but it doesn't fulfill the brand needs and stupid considerations that I wanted. It's not like, "Dude I'm going to upgrade this old piece of garbage and make it better than my existing laptop yo." Pretty much no, that's not the idea. But anyway these MacBooks are supposed to be little beasts with the specs I chose anyway. Battery life I mentioned. An SSD which I haven't used on one of my own systems is another thing. The processor is probably not going to fulfill some of the things my school might be wanting me to use a laptop for but we aren't there yet. Web design could be done in notepad. It takes nothing. So yeah there's another barrage of random things.


Good choice then. I personally now would want Lenovo T61, if I had to buy used laptop. It's rigid, it's interesting machine to me, except aging specs and TN screen. 

About HP you did the right thing. Their internal stuff rigidity is trash and then I was working on DV6000, there was always easy to break parts, once unscrewed, never screwed again, very thin metals, poor connector design, sharp edges, low quality materials... It's really horrible inside. Outside is fine, but not everywhere and it's at best average. I learned the hard way, that build quality matters a lot, also screen (TN due to bad viewing angles is bad choice for laptop) is probably the most important thing in laptop. On top of that it heated a lot. Horrible design everywhere renders it into turd, even if specs are somewhat decent.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> You should try Forza 3. To me it's easily one of the best X360 video game ever made.
> 
> 
> PC is the best media center. Also, why another console?
> 
> 
> 
> How is that channel named? Maybe I know him.
> 
> 
> True
> 
> 
> Interesting perspective and also pretty similar to mine.
> 
> 
> 
> Good choice then. I personally now would want Lenovo T61, if I had to buy used laptop. It's rigid, it's interesting machine to me, except aging specs and TN screen.
> 
> About HP you did the right thing. Their internal stuff rigidity is trash and then I was working on DV6000, there was always easy to break parts, once unscrewed, never screwed again, very thin metals, poor connector design, sharp edges, low quality materials... It's really horrible inside. Outside is fine, but not everywhere and it's at best average. I learned the hard way, that build quality matters a lot, also screen (TN due to bad viewing angles is bad choice for laptop) is probably the most important thing in laptop. On top of that it heated a lot. Horrible design everywhere renders it into turd, even if specs are somewhat decent.


I might have showed the YouTube thing before. It's called modstek. He does some stuff of this nature. He's by no means like a professional but I like that it's nice and lighthearted. It usually gets a lot of comments saying that the channel deserves more subscribers. I think it's a nice little thing to watch.

I used to play the competing exclusive title which is Gran Turismo. But I only enjoyed it on ps2 so Gran Turismo 4. There's no car destruction in it though which makes it seem pretty absurd. When I was a kid I used to play at very low difficulty and felt good about winning. I tried playing Forza on the Xbox One game and I just suck at it. There was a NASCAR game on ps2 where I would just deliberately go the wrong direction and bash into the other cars because everything was so destructive. I probably never actually raced in that game.

My laptop has a decent TN panel with calibrated color and to be honest my brightness settings are always at 5% or up to 35% in a lit room to show other people so I don't mind the black levels since they are dimmer at lower brightness. I can't look at a fully lit up LCD screen it just hurts my eyes. I lower the backlight on every computer at school.

A small advantage with macs is they are like phones. So people sell hard cover cases for them which I'm automatically buying. My main laptop has actually suffered some abuse because I have hit corners of it on doors as I walked out of rooms quickly. So there are slight areas of paint peeling and it looks like it experiences a lot of pressure being stored in my backpack which why I took out a lot of unnecessary books. That just adds to the reason for me to get a backup laptop so I don't destroy this one. Lenovo there looks like it's designed to take a beating which is a nice feature. My phones, iPad, and iPod are all pretty strongly encased even though it is arguably unnecessary. I use griffin survivor cases for most things because it gives me a good grip on the phone and the screen protector built into feels nice. I also vaguely recall putting shatterproof screen protectors on both of my phones underneath that which is overkill in theory but in practice I will not be testing.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I might have showed the YouTube thing before. It's called modstek. He does some stuff of this nature. He's by no means like a professional but I like that it's nice and lighthearted. It usually gets a lot of comments saying that the channel deserves more subscribers. I think it's a nice little thing to watch.


His editing is fine. I just looked at the channel and he is rather decent youtuber. I personally watch Green Ham Gaming, RGinHD, Phil's computer lab often. I watch lots of others too, but there is a short list of which fit into similar category and I watch them often.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I used to play the competing exclusive title which is Gran Turismo. But I only enjoyed it on ps2 so Gran Turismo 4. There's no car destruction in it though which makes it seem pretty absurd.


It's all about the physics




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I tried playing Forza on the Xbox One game and I just suck at it.


I dunno why. I always play Forza 3 on hardest without any assists (the only easier thing for me is that I use manual transmission without clutch. Clutch button position is bad and it makes you to mess up more than learn and may not be helpful at all)(they actually slow you down a lot and makes racing harder) and I win almost everytime, the only scenario when I don't win is when I have a worse car than bots, that's it. Not hard at all and I can drift, mess with AI drivers sometimes and still win. Sometimes AI drivers are so incompetent, that I have to wait for them to make race interesting. Same in Forza 4. In Forza 2 it's harder, due to there not being rewind and tires wear out quickly. I actually tried Forza 6 on PC a bit and physics looked very familiar, so it played the same. General rule is to understand body roll and know how car will react. I also learned to adjust tune setup correctly and it can give an advantage, but it gets boring with the time. If you still have X360, I would suggest you to try Forza 3, not 4, but 3. It's the game, that grows on you. If you are trying to be fast, you will learn that, just do it. It's really fun to master driving and then to feel the pleasure of knowing everything. My advice for starter would be to set AI difficulty to easy, turn off all assist, including racing line. The only assist you can leave is ABS. Then race a lot. if you get frustrated, then there are guides about how to drive in races. I actually learned everything I know from books, articles and learning the construction of the car. That was interesting. Not only you learn to drive in Forza 3, but in pretty much any racing game with somewhat decent physics. Simulators like Assetto Corsa at the beginning will be hard, but if you learnt to drive in Forza 3, then adjustments to real simulator won't be huge. Forza Horizon series don't offer same physics and can be better for noobs, but I wouldn't suggest to start there. With this learning formula and lots of experience you can even try to achieve world records in racing games. I once achieved something. I am the fastest driver in F class at Fujimi Kaido stage D of year 2016. After lots of learning I finally understood, that the car with which I achieved that had horrendously bad tune. It was my first attempt to tune car myself, so no surprise. Also my car choice is unique, it's Mazda 2. Why it is unique? Because in tha tclass dominated VW Rabbit, VW Golf 2 GTi, Porsche 550. Defo no Mazdas there. And many of the best cars are AWD swapped, while I ran with FWD drivetrain. You should buy used Forza 3, it's cheap and it's amazing game. I love it.





Grandmaster Yoda said:


> There was a NASCAR game on ps2 where I would just deliberately go the wrong direction and bash into the other cars because everything was so destructive. I probably never actually raced in that game.


Probably any gamer did something like that at some point :kitteh:




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> My laptop has a decent TN panel with calibrated color and to be honest my brightness settings are always at 5% or up to 35% in a lit room to show other people so I don't mind the black levels since they are dimmer at lower brightness. I can't look at a fully lit up LCD screen it just hurts my eyes. I lower the backlight on every computer at school.


I have my monitor always at 85%. TV is calibrated for best picture quality. Honestly if you wanna see the best quality, then you can't go that low as too low brightness cuts out some shades of greys and whites, directly affecting quality of what you see.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> A small advantage with macs is they are like phones. So people sell hard cover cases for them which I'm automatically buying. My main laptop has actually suffered some abuse because I have hit corners of it on doors as I walked out of rooms quickly. So there are slight areas of paint peeling and it looks like it experiences a lot of pressure being stored in my backpack which why I took out a lot of unnecessary books. That just adds to the reason for me to get a backup laptop so I don't destroy this one. Lenovo there looks like it's designed to take a beating which is a nice feature. My phones, iPad, and iPod are all pretty strongly encased even though it is arguably unnecessary. I use griffin survivor cases for most things because it gives me a good grip on the phone and the screen protector built into feels nice. I also vaguely recall putting shatterproof screen protectors on both of my phones underneath that which is overkill in theory but in practice I will not be testing.


On my phone I have cheap transparent silicon case. It looks good, it protects fine, it gives lots of grip and due to additional grip can work as stand by gripping to two surfaces well. It's probably the best case for me. What I hate are those folder cases, they make device harder to use for no good reason and they cost decent chunk of money. I see no reason go for worse.


----------



## The red spirit

Today I decided to test out is there a difference between Realtek onboard sound and Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. For testing I used Athlonium 64 and my main PC. Speakers are AIWA 2.0 SX-FNV70L. Testing songs were:
1)Forever Young - Initial D OST (Youtube 144p)
2)Still D.R.E. - Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg (The weed) (320kbps mp3)
3)Forgot about Dre - Dr. Dre feat. Eminem (320kbps mp3)
4)Still D.R.E. - Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg (1999-2001 24-96 vinyl) (flac)
5)Deep Cover - Dr. Dre introducing Snoop Doggy Dogg (single) (flac)
6)I need a doctor - Dr. Dre feat. Eminem and Skylar Grey (single) (flac)
7)Straight Outta Compton - NWA (Straight Outta Compton) (263 kbps mp3) 
8)Boyz N da hood (remix) - Eazy E feat. NWA (Eternal E) (256 kbps mp3)
9)8 ball (remix) - Eazy E (Eternal E) (256kbps)
10)Real Muthaphukkin' G's - Eazy E feat. Dresta and B.G. Knocc Out (It's On Dr Dre 187um Killa) (160kbps mp3)
11)It's On - Eazy E (It's On Dr Dre 187um Killa) (160kbps mp3)
12)Nuthin but a G thang - Dr.Dre feat. Snoop Dogg (The Chronic Re-Lit and from The Vault) (flac)
13)Welcome to the jungle - Guns and Roses (Greatest hits 2004) (flac)
14)Ain't it fun - Guns and Roses (Greatest hits 2004) (flac)
15)November Rain - Guns and Roses (Greatest hits 2004) (flac)


Difference of discrete soundcard (comparing to remembered sounds):
1)Slight, but noticeable difference in clarity and bass thump is clear
2)It sounds so damn clean, difference is massive. I feel like I can hear perfectly again. 
3)Everything is clearer and more accurate, voices and everything feel sharper (in a good way)
4)Not a big difference between 320 kbps mp3. Maybe slightly clearer, but that can be placebo. Anyway it sounds really good. 
5)Not a big difference, slightly sharper and less noisy
6)Hardly any difference, less noise and a bit sharper, details are slightly better produced. The big difference in Dre's voice, it sounds so good. Clear and extremely realistic, much better than onboard audio.
7)Less noise, I started to hear something I couldn't before (more details). Beats, voices, scratches are better with Sound Blaster. Difference is big. The biggest difference in Eazy E's voice, it's much more detailed. Bass is with better pronounced thumps.
8)Difference is huge. So much more detailed, less noisy. So many things I haven't heard before, much less sound reproduction mistakes caused by sound card. Almost feeling like I'm not deaf again. Everything sounds more alive and I can feel the depth of sound. Drums are massively better.
9)Slightly more detailed and cleaner sound. Bass control is noticeably better. I can feel depth of drums better. Scratches feels a bit sharper. Overall slight-moderate difference.
10)Slightly more depth at the start, bit less noise. Details are better produced and are sharper. Dresta's voice is slightly better. Somewhat sharper overall. Overall difference is minimal.
11)From the beginning better reproduced details are felt and considerably less noise. Overall sharper. Much better detailed voices. Music feels much more alive. Beats don't lack depth. Difference is big.
12)Holy shit, it's so much better. I hear stuff I never heard before, everything is much better. Difference is huge. Snoop's voice sounds really differently. I feel like I can hear perfectly again.
13)Slightly better depth and more powerful bass. Guitars are bit clearer. Overall bit cleaner sound. I expected something better. Not too big of a difference. In the end difference between two sound cards becomes greater. 
14)Holy shit I never truly heard this song. Drums are hugely better. Everything is so detailed and crisp. Depth is miles better. Intense parts are the clearest indicators of quality sound hardware. Creative doesn't disappoint. Difference is huge.
15)Drums feel perfect. Voices aren't very different. Guitars are noticeably more detailed and better sounding. Bass thump was perfect. The feeling of space is much better. Music is considerably more alive. Matrix part is much better. Piano parts are far more detailed. Difference is big.

Then I relistened some tracks and I calmed down a bit. The difference exists, truly exists. One observation of onboard sound is that it always makes mid range tones louder, probably to compensate something not so good. 

Discrete sound card is defo better, especially at reducing noise, depth, drums, bass thumps. It's a moderate upgrade in sound detailedness, liveliness, sharp sound elements and feeling of space. Also you don't have to strain ears to hear all that goodness with discrete sound card, while with onboard audio you have, even at higher volume. The difference between those two audio devices truly exists and it's not a myth. Sound card is a good purchase for those who at least love music. Onboard sound is like integrated graphics. It does basic stuff fine, but beyond that it's not so good. It does basic stuff fine, but doesn't bring enjoyment. To me sound on onboard feels somewhat grey most of the time, while with sound card it becomes colorful. If you work with audio, then imo sound card is a must have. Also it's good to use lossless files instead of lossy ones, but that can't fix the inferior sound card. I can only recommend Creative Sound Baster Audigy 2 ZS, it's a great product and to think, that I spent like 30 euros of that and it brought a big improvement, means that it was worth it.

BTW I'm still benchmarking Athlonium 64


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> His editing is fine. I just looked at the channel and he is rather decent youtuber. I personally watch Green Ham Gaming, RGinHD, Phil's computer lab often. I watch lots of others too, but there is a short list of which fit into similar category and I watch them often.
> 
> 
> 
> It's all about the physics
> 
> 
> 
> I dunno why. I always play Forza 3 on hardest without any assists (the only easier thing for me is that I use manual transmission without clutch. Clutch button position is bad and it makes you to mess up more than learn and may not be helpful at all)(they actually slow you down a lot and makes racing harder) and I win almost everytime, the only scenario when I don't win is when I have a worse car than bots, that's it. Not hard at all and I can drift, mess with AI drivers sometimes and still win. Sometimes AI drivers are so incompetent, that I have to wait for them to make race interesting. Same in Forza 4. In Forza 2 it's harder, due to there not being rewind and tires wear out quickly. I actually tried Forza 6 on PC a bit and physics looked very familiar, so it played the same. General rule is to understand body roll and know how car will react. I also learned to adjust tune setup correctly and it can give an advantage, but it gets boring with the time. If you still have X360, I would suggest you to try Forza 3, not 4, but 3. It's the game, that grows on you. If you are trying to be fast, you will learn that, just do it. It's really fun to master driving and then to feel the pleasure of knowing everything. My advice for starter would be to set AI difficulty to easy, turn off all assist, including racing line. The only assist you can leave is ABS. Then race a lot. if you get frustrated, then there are guides about how to drive in races. I actually learned everything I know from books, articles and learning the construction of the car. That was interesting. Not only you learn to drive in Forza 3, but in pretty much any racing game with somewhat decent physics. Simulators like Assetto Corsa at the beginning will be hard, but if you learnt to drive in Forza 3, then adjustments to real simulator won't be huge. Forza Horizon series don't offer same physics and can be better for noobs, but I wouldn't suggest to start there. With this learning formula and lots of experience you can even try to achieve world records in racing games. I once achieved something. I am the fastest driver in F class at Fujimi Kaido stage D of year 2016. After lots of learning I finally understood, that the car with which I achieved that had horrendously bad tune. It was my first attempt to tune car myself, so no surprise. Also my car choice is unique, it's Mazda 2. Why it is unique? Because in tha tclass dominated VW Rabbit, VW Golf 2 GTi, Porsche 550. Defo no Mazdas there. And many of the best cars are AWD swapped, while I ran with FWD drivetrain. You should buy used Forza 3, it's cheap and it's amazing game. I love it.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Probably any gamer did something like that at some point :kitteh:
> 
> 
> 
> I have my monitor always at 85%. TV is calibrated for best picture quality. Honestly if you wanna see the best quality, then you can't go that low as too low brightness cuts out some shades of greys and whites, directly affecting quality of what you see.
> 
> 
> 
> On my phone I have cheap transparent silicon case. It looks good, it protects fine, it gives lots of grip and due to additional grip can work as stand by gripping to two surfaces well. It's probably the best case for me. What I hate are those folder cases, they make device harder to use for no good reason and they cost decent chunk of money. I see no reason go for worse.


I think it's in the library of games for Xbox 360 that I have. I might play it one day. I don't consider myself particularly good at racing games in general but the Xbox one game I was playing was ridiculous. I was turning left and the car was going right. Then it just spins out. I'd rather play an Xbox arcade game. I don't know if it's because the driving assist was on though because that should have been making it easier not harder.

I always have my phone brightness set to 0% unless I'm in a very brightly lit area or outside during the daytime. Saves so much battery. I get an actual 7 hours out of my iPhone SE which is unprecedented. That's of almost continuous web browsing. I didn't do any serious testing, but usually my battery on the iPhone 5s would fade out at three and a half hours (in its current condition) I think 5 hours max. The Motorola Droid Turbo "48 hours of battery life" only survived 5 hours and 45 minutes at best and my processor was always underclocked. It had a giant capacity battery but apparently everything else was disgustingly consumptive. That's why I don't trust these laptops claiming day long battery life. I haven't actually tried one, but I have never seen a laptop last me more than 3 hours. I know it's this inflated set of "tests." That's why I go with the numbers I get using something.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I think it's in the library of games for Xbox 360 that I have. I might play it one day. I don't consider myself particularly good at racing games in general but the Xbox one game I was playing was ridiculous. I was turning left and the car was going right. Then it just spins out. I'd rather play an Xbox arcade game. I don't know if it's because the driving assist was on though because that should have been making it easier not harder.


Maybe you really don't know nothing about body roll then or inertia or some other stuff.





Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I always have my phone brightness set to 0% unless I'm in a very brightly lit area or outside during the daytime. Saves so much battery. I get an actual 7 hours out of my iPhone SE which is unprecedented. That's of almost continuous web browsing. I didn't do any serious testing, but usually my battery on the iPhone 5s would fade out at three and a half hours (in its current condition) I think 5 hours max. The Motorola Droid Turbo "48 hours of battery life" only survived 5 hours and 45 minutes at best and my processor was always underclocked. It had a giant capacity battery but apparently everything else was disgustingly consumptive. That's why I don't trust these laptops claiming day long battery life. I haven't actually tried one, but I have never seen a laptop last me more than 3 hours. I know it's this inflated set of "tests." That's why I go with the numbers I get using something.


But setting brightness to 0% is just ridiculous. I wouldn't do that, except in dark environments. Of course those tests are inflated and shouldn't be taken seriously.


----------



## The red spirit

Listened more with sound card and I'm hooked. Now I find it hard to come back to onboard. Sucks.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> Maybe you really don't know nothing about body roll then or inertia or some other stuff.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But setting brightness to 0% is just ridiculous. I wouldn't do that, except in dark environments. Of course those tests are inflated and shouldn't be taken seriously.


Well, I never was a car person in the slightest. I know more about airplanes than I do cars and not ironically either.

Most situations for me it works fine with 0% brightness. At some point it becomes unreadable which results in having to turn up the brightness a little bit. Of course not when 0% brightness actually means turning off the display. But I often do that was well when I might be downloading something that takes a long time on a laptop.

My new MacBook arrived today and it is smooth as butter unlike the other one which kind of stuttered and what have you. But anyway fun fact, macOS epitomizes the principle that gaining physical access to a computer allows anyone to bypass any security measures. I found out yesterday that you could into recovery mode and change a password without it asking for an old password. Then I found another way to break in.

So there's this great glitch which is essentially if you change the name to the user account that you logged into currently, it will automatically revert to a standard account and you will not admin rights again. It's like iOS. So what you can do is going into this other terminal environment before the OS boots and it gives you root commands. You simply mount a folder that contains the initial setup application and essentially what happens is you make it so that they setup app starts up again the next time you reboot. So then it acts like its the first time you've used the Mac and then you can add a brand new admin account and get around it or steal someone else's computer. Yeah the good isolation from viruses and malware due to less popularity has some truth to it. But if someone gets their hands on your computer and you didn't take really extra steps that you shouldn't have to take them they can just access your data. Oh boy.

Compared to using a hard drive, yes the boot is a lot faster. But there's nothing instantaneous about it. It still takes time. Installing the OS took quite a while, I hope people bragging about this because sitting through that was not pleasing. Apps do launch faster, but I'm personally not "wowed." It's a 128GB so it's not a high end SSD. This does say SATA 3Gb, so it's SATA II. Maybe SATA III is like the real deal, but after having used this for a couple of hours I'm not inclined to say, "Never do a hard drive again" or at least SSD boot. I think a well maintained and modern hard drive (not a 10 year old one) can do fine for me. Also Mac OS is the slowest thing you will come across during boot time so it helps there. But otherwise, do I need this? Not really. I'm not feeling it.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Well, I never was a car person in the slightest. I know more about airplanes than I do cars and not ironically either.


ok



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Most situations for me it works fine with 0% brightness. At some point it becomes unreadable which results in having to turn up the brightness a little bit. Of course not when 0% brightness actually means turning off the display. But I often do that was well when I might be downloading something that takes a long time on a laptop.


I couldn't bear that.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> My new MacBook arrived today and it is smooth as butter unlike the other one which kind of stuttered and what have you.


What do you mean here with "what have you"?




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> But anyway fun fact, macOS epitomizes the principle that gaining physical access to a computer allows anyone to bypass any security measures. I found out yesterday that you could into recovery mode and change a password without it asking for an old password. Then I found another way to break in.
> 
> So there's this great glitch which is essentially if you change the name to the user account that you logged into currently, it will automatically revert to a standard account and you will not admin rights again. It's like iOS. So what you can do is going into this other terminal environment before the OS boots and it gives you root commands. You simply mount a folder that contains the initial setup application and essentially what happens is you make it so that they setup app starts up again the next time you reboot. So then it acts like its the first time you've used the Mac and then you can add a brand new admin account and get around it or steal someone else's computer. Yeah the good isolation from viruses and malware due to less popularity has some truth to it. But if someone gets their hands on your computer and you didn't take really extra steps that you shouldn't have to take them they can just access your data. Oh boy.


Mac fail lol



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Compared to using a hard drive, yes the boot is a lot faster. But there's nothing instantaneous about it. It still takes time. Installing the OS took quite a while, I hope people bragging about this because sitting through that was not pleasing. Apps do launch faster, but I'm personally not "wowed." It's a 128GB so it's not a high end SSD.


Capacity doesn't dictate class in many cases.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> This does say SATA 3Gb, so it's SATA II.


That's a pretty old one. Is it in good condition?



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Maybe SATA III is like the real deal, but after having used this for a couple of hours I'm not inclined to say, "Never do a hard drive again" or at least SSD boot.


Booting isn't that much important with SSDs. What counts is that you can use PC almost instantly after boot up, everything becomes really instant, apps load faster, windows open faster, file read is faster, small file reading and writing is times faster, much lower access times and lots more stuff. Generally making system much snappier, if it's not bottlenecked by CPU or GPU or RAM. Even with bottlenecks, it helps, just not as much. Laptop 5400 rpms HDDs can be hell to use. They are slow as fuck and often have tiny cache. Those horrendous things...




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I think a well maintained and modern hard drive (not a 10 year old one) can do fine for me. Also Mac OS is the slowest thing you will come across during boot time so it helps there. But otherwise, do I need this? Not really. I'm not feeling it.


Well maintained hard drive, even 10k rpm one can't beat even el cheapo SSD. Not even close to that. SSHDs may be closer, but still not entirely a SSD experience. Not to mention, that SSDs are by far better storage for laptops, due to not having moving parts. If space doesn't matter much, then SSDs are even cheaper than hard drives.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> ok
> 
> 
> I couldn't bear that.
> 
> 
> 
> What do you mean here with "what have you"?
> 
> 
> 
> Mac fail lol
> 
> 
> Capacity doesn't dictate class in many cases.
> 
> 
> 
> That's a pretty old one. Is it in good condition?
> 
> 
> Booting isn't that much important with SSDs. What counts is that you can use PC almost instantly after boot up, everything becomes really instant, apps load faster, windows open faster, file read is faster, small file reading and writing is times faster, much lower access times and lots more stuff. Generally making system much snappier, if it's not bottlenecked by CPU or GPU or RAM. Even with bottlenecks, it helps, just not as much. Laptop 5400 rpms HDDs can be hell to use. They are slow as fuck and often have tiny cache. Those horrendous things...
> 
> 
> 
> Well maintained hard drive, even 10k rpm one can't beat even el cheapo SSD. Not even close to that. SSHDs may be closer, but still not entirely a SSD experience. Not to mention, that SSDs are by far better storage for laptops, due to not having moving parts. If space doesn't matter much, then SSDs are even cheaper than hard drives.


The old MacBook had a choppy animations even in the older Mac OS X Snow Leopard. On El Capitan sometimes it reminded me of my iPod touch with 256MB of RAM running iOS 6. Nothing crashed but the experience was delayed. It was much worse with 2GB of RAM. Many people recommend 8GB of RAM with 4GB minimum for macOS. 4GB was acceptable but I wasn't happy enough. Also probably had the original hard drive in it which was terribly slow.

It appears to be some kind of Samsung SSD. I don't know which model because I'm not looking at it right now.

Make no mistake, it provides a faster and more fluid experience than any hard drive I've ever used, but it's not that amazing to me. It definitely gets points at initial boot and initial running of apps of course. But after the whole expenditure and things start getting cached up, it isn't that enthralling. I used to have a 5400rpm 500GB Hard drive on a more modern machine that had SATA III. It had an extremely weak CPU too. But if I double clicked google chrome, it would pop up. There was no delay. Now on my garbage 8 year old 250GB 7200rpm laptop hard drive, no I can't expected Google chrome to work fast. It's also been used only with DDR2 and has always had an old installation on it to be fair. So my question is how much of that is bloated operating system and unmaintained stuff going on? 

One person was showing this video where it took a hard drive to boot in a 1 minute and 30 seconds and an SSD to boot in 30 seconds. So I was sitting there like my hard drive can boot in under 45 seconds, what are you loading up? If you have a ton of bs programs loading up on boot that don't matter and you decide "hey an SSD will make this faster." It sounds like a bandage solution to me. It could be malware creating bad activity, if you are a troubleshooter look at that first. If it takes you 3 minutes to get to a usable state after turning your computer on, it's not only because you have a hard drive.

If you go back to bandwidth, we had "slow machines" 30 years ago but they could boot up almost instantly because there was little to boot up. The ratio between how much had to go through the highway and the number of lanes was really good.

I actually had Windows XP installed on the SSD because I already had it burned to a DVD and the previous owner wiped the system. So I had to use internet recovery which is actually a cool feature if you ask me. I wiped my installation partition so now I can just go on the Internet and download the OS again hands free as opposed to having to be deliberate with Windows and making sure you have a system recovery drive and not deleting it. But anyway, you have to log in at school when a new NIC is being used because the school bases access on MAC addresses in your network card. So I had to load up some OS and get a web browser to login in before I could redownload Mac. After all the drivers were installed, the computer booted up into Windows XP in a matter of seconds. Remember that old loading bar. Imagine it going through one time and then the next thing you see is welcome and your desktop. That was pretty cool. Mac is the slowest thing I've ever seen try to boot up so the SSD just made it acceptable. I could then imagine Windows 8 or 10 with their hibernation shutdown stuff working. Maybe that's what I'm missing here because then I might be getting some better results. But it's goddamn macOS, the OS where people recommend at least 8GB of RAM at this point as opposed to 4GB (for good fluid experience minimum.)


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The old MacBook had a choppy animations even in the older Mac OS X Snow Leopard. On El Capitan sometimes it reminded me of my iPod touch with 256MB of RAM running iOS 6. Nothing crashed but the experience was delayed. It was much worse with 2GB of RAM. Many people recommend 8GB of RAM with 4GB minimum for macOS. 4GB was acceptable but I wasn't happy enough. Also probably had the original hard drive in it which was terribly slow.


I don't want to think that it's RAM's problem, because Windows machines with 2GB are perfectly fine for lots of light stuff and running out of RAM is nothing like stuttering animations. It's more like crashing, closing programs. I have lived with 1GB and Windows 7. Often crashed, when I browsed web. One tab is max and even then it often crashed. Interfaced showed artifacts after crash and most of the time recovered. It felt like reset. On top of that 1GB RAM was also responsible as VRAM. Your stuttering is more like weak GPU. GeForce FX5200, ATI 3000 IGP and GTX 650 Ti without drivers are exactly like that. Most likely weak 2D performance. I don't know if Macs have BIOS or UEFI, but if it has, then allocating more RAM to GPU may help. Give it a shot, if it's possible.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> It appears to be some kind of Samsung SSD. I don't know which model because I'm not looking at it right now.


You might have stepped in shit. Seriously Samsung 840 EVOs had issues with performance and premature death. I have EVO myself and disabling write caching made it much faster and Samsung offered software to fix issues with 840 EVOs. It appears to be bad firmware on the SSD itself. I ran it myself, but it didn't do anything tangible, but I believe, I'm safe now from premature death. From the same era there was Kingston SSDs, that were complete crap, maybe V300 series. Not sure if those Kingstons were fixed or not. To check model of SSD you can use this guide: https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-ping-on-a-mac-computer 




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Make no mistake, it provides a faster and more fluid experience than any hard drive I've ever used, but it's not that amazing to me. It definitely gets points at initial boot and initial running of apps of course. But after the whole expenditure and things start getting cached up, it isn't that enthralling. I used to have a 5400rpm 500GB Hard drive on a more modern machine that had SATA III. It had an extremely weak CPU too. But if I double clicked google chrome, it would pop up. There was no delay. Now on my garbage 8 year old 250GB 7200rpm laptop hard drive, no I can't expected Google chrome to work fast. It's also been used only with DDR2 and has always had an old installation on it to be fair. So my question is how much of that is bloated operating system and unmaintained stuff going on?


I never found HDDs being fast with Windows, no matter how perfectly defragged they are, no matter how tidy they are. The yare always gonna lose to SSD and by a lot. Even two 10k rpm Raptors aren't close to SSDs. Maybe quad modern Velociraptor RAID 0 is close to SSD, but that is very expensive and overall inferior choice. SSHDs are interesting creatures. In laptops they are much better than normal HDDs. I have used 5400 rpm HDD with perfectly clean Windows 7 and almost no programs and no files on it. After that computer was used longer it became horribly slow. Defrag can't solve that and there is literally nothing to clean of it. Only 8MB of cache doesn't help either. Installing SSD on that laptop made huge difference. It is very fast now. It has Pentium P6200 CPU, and 2GB RAM, integrated graphics. That's my grandpa's laptop. SSD made a huge impact on performance, not a small or something moderate, but huge. With good hands, that lappy can be upgraded to i7, 8GB RAM (maybe 16GB). It could be much faster than that. Still Pentium even today is perfectly fine for many tasks. Even old desktop Sandy Bridge dual core Celerons are fine today. SSDs are the future, no need to hold onto HDDs if you have SSD. Solid state storage is just superior to mechanical. SSDs are awesome, HDDs are good for storing lots of data. The combination of both is most cost effective choice.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> One person was showing this video where it took a hard drive to boot in a 1 minute and 30 seconds and an SSD to boot in 30 seconds. So I was sitting there like my hard drive can boot in under 45 seconds, what are you loading up? If you have a ton of bs programs loading up on boot that don't matter and you decide "hey an SSD will make this faster." It sounds like a bandage solution to me. It could be malware creating bad activity, if you are a troubleshooter look at that first. If it takes you 3 minutes to get to a usable state after turning your computer on, it's not only because you have a hard drive.


Well my hard drive experience was never fast, 1 minute and half seems normal for HDD. I used Win 7 on HDD and it wasn't fast. No BS apps either, regular defrags. They are just not fast. After boot, you still have to wait for things to load. SSD does fix that and this is not a bandage solution. It's the solution to inferior storage option, just a simple upgrade. It's still amazing to see that HDDs aren't that slow, considering, that SATA SSDs are like 4-5 times faster in sequential read/write and even faster in IOPS and small file operations. 




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> If you go back to bandwidth, we had "slow machines" 30 years ago but they could boot up almost instantly because there was little to boot up. The ratio between how much had to go through the highway and the number of lanes was really good.


That's true, but don't worry, we might see that again with NVMe SSDs one day, when we can afford those and machines for them.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I actually had Windows XP installed on the SSD because I already had it burned to a DVD and the previous owner wiped the system. So I had to use internet recovery which is actually a cool feature if you ask me. I wiped my installation partition so now I can just go on the Internet and download the OS again hands free as opposed to having to be deliberate with Windows and making sure you have a system recovery drive and not deleting it. But anyway, you have to log in at school when a new NIC is being used because the school bases access on MAC addresses in your network card. So I had to load up some OS and get a web browser to login in before I could redownload Mac. After all the drivers were installed, the computer booted up into Windows XP in a matter of seconds. Remember that old loading bar. Imagine it going through one time and then the next thing you see is welcome and your desktop. That was pretty cool.


My Raptors do that too. First time that bar didn't even reach other side.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Mac is the slowest thing I've ever seen try to boot up so the SSD just made it acceptable. I could then imagine Windows 8 or 10 with their hibernation shutdown stuff working. Maybe that's what I'm missing here because then I might be getting some better results. But it's goddamn macOS, the OS where people recommend at least 8GB of RAM at this point as opposed to 4GB (for good fluid experience minimum.)


lol Windows work fine with 2GB RAM and I run Windows 10 without hibernation. It doesn't make sense to have it turned on as hibernation file is rather big and on small SSDs it's really unpractical. Hibernation doesn't make a big impact on booting with SSDs. Really, nothing dramatic here.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> I don't want to think that it's RAM's problem, because Windows machines with 2GB are perfectly fine for lots of light stuff and running out of RAM is nothing like stuttering animations. It's more like crashing, closing programs. I have lived with 1GB and Windows 7. Often crashed, when I browsed web. One tab is max and even then it often crashed. Interfaced showed artifacts after crash and most of the time recovered. It felt like reset. On top of that 1GB RAM was also responsible as VRAM. Your stuttering is more like weak GPU. GeForce FX5200, ATI 3000 IGP and GTX 650 Ti without drivers are exactly like that. Most likely weak 2D performance. I don't know if Macs have BIOS or UEFI, but if it has, then allocating more RAM to GPU may help. Give it a shot, if it's possible.
> 
> 
> 
> You might have stepped in shit. Seriously Samsung 840 EVOs had issues with performance and premature death. I have EVO myself and disabling write caching made it much faster and Samsung offered software to fix issues with 840 EVOs. It appears to be bad firmware on the SSD itself. I ran it myself, but it didn't do anything tangible, but I believe, I'm safe now from premature death. From the same era there was Kingston SSDs, that were complete crap, maybe V300 series. Not sure if those Kingstons were fixed or not. To check model of SSD you can use this guide: https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-ping-on-a-mac-computer
> 
> 
> 
> I never found HDDs being fast with Windows, no matter how perfectly defragged they are, no matter how tidy they are. The yare always gonna lose to SSD and by a lot. Even two 10k rpm Raptors aren't close to SSDs. Maybe quad modern Velociraptor RAID 0 is close to SSD, but that is very expensive and overall inferior choice. SSHDs are interesting creatures. In laptops they are much better than normal HDDs. I have used 5400 rpm HDD with perfectly clean Windows 7 and almost no programs and no files on it. After that computer was used longer it became horribly slow. Defrag can't solve that and there is literally nothing to clean of it. Only 8MB of cache doesn't help either. Installing SSD on that laptop made huge difference. It is very fast now. It has Pentium P6200 CPU, and 2GB RAM, integrated graphics. That's my grandpa's laptop. SSD made a huge impact on performance, not a small or something moderate, but huge. With good hands, that lappy can be upgraded to i7, 8GB RAM (maybe 16GB). It could be much faster than that. Still Pentium even today is perfectly fine for many tasks. Even old desktop Sandy Bridge dual core Celerons are fine today. SSDs are the future, no need to hold onto HDDs if you have SSD. Solid state storage is just superior to mechanical. SSDs are awesome, HDDs are good for storing lots of data. The combination of both is most cost effective choice.
> 
> 
> 
> Well my hard drive experience was never fast, 1 minute and half seems normal for HDD. I used Win 7 on HDD and it wasn't fast. No BS apps either, regular defrags. They are just not fast. After boot, you still have to wait for things to load. SSD does fix that and this is not a bandage solution. It's the solution to inferior storage option, just a simple upgrade. It's still amazing to see that HDDs aren't that slow, considering, that SATA SSDs are like 4-5 times faster in sequential read/write and even faster in IOPS and small file operations.
> 
> 
> 
> That's true, but don't worry, we might see that again with NVMe SSDs one day, when we can afford those and machines for them.
> 
> 
> 
> My Raptors do that too. First time that bar didn't even reach other side.
> 
> 
> 
> lol Windows work fine with 2GB RAM and I run Windows 10 without hibernation. It doesn't make sense to have it turned on as hibernation file is rather big and on small SSDs it's really unpractical. Hibernation doesn't make a big impact on booting with SSDs. Really, nothing dramatic here.


Hibernation is the saving grace to using Windows on my laptop. I have Windows 7 so it does the full hibernation. Basically logging back you have the same memory contents as you were as if you were just logged off and logged back in, so I don't have to wait extra time for the slow boot. The problem with me though is I turn off my laptop every time I'm done using it. I mean it would just hibernate anyway if I just left it alone.

To be honest, I've mainly experienced old DDR2 RAM. But with 2GB Windows is usuable but I would experience extreme delays. Keystrokes would lag if a lot of stuff was loading. Terrible. Same thing with Mac. There would be an delay after input before something changed. I don't really do anything with clean installations because I have done more clean installations on my laptop than any other computer. I think you'd want more than 2GB for a good experience. On Mac 4GB was fine. But obviously 8GB of newer RAM with an SSD runs circles around that. At some point it might not even be the RAM's fault of course. I don't even think RAM speed matters as much as the capacity because once the capacity runs out you are going into paging which is going to slow everything done. But yeah, even 6GB of ddr2-800mhz is trash with bad old hard drive. It was integrated graphics with 256MB of ddr2-667mhz so that would explain why the graphics were so slow.

My school recommended 16GB of RAM for my laptop and I didn't know why at the time. Probably because of virtual machines and starting up servers. So slowness on my laptop is most likely attributable to HDDs. I have not yet used more than 5GB of RAM in any situation and I'm not the kind of person who puts up 50 tabs in a browser and leaves them there. Speaking of which, firefox and chrome use a lot of memory. Opera uses like nothing. I'll open a page on Firefox with all of my extensions and it will use 300MB of RAM with one page open and then Opera will use less than 100MB.

I do want to try using a lightweight version of Linux some time on an old computer or something to see how much faster it would be. The only problem is I have to learn Linux better which can be a pain because sometimes different flavors of Linux will have different terminal commands.
One of them I learned was apt-get update -y. That updates your listing of packages. I don't know what the heck the -y means but it made it work on that flavor that I was using. Linux is also a lot less compatible than they say it is. Ubuntu cannot boot on my MacBook because it uses weird Nvidia graphics. I followed the instructions to fix it and it didn't work. Then you go on a laptop like mine which has the Nvidia dedicated card along with Intel HD graphics. You have to disable certain kernel parameters before you can boot in or the OS won't work. If you're using a plain old desktop it will generally work fine, unless you have Nvidia which means you'll have to download some Nvidia driver pack. I think AMD GPU drivers are built-in though so that's kind of nice. I kind of like Mac though now. I figure out how to show the path in Finder so that isn't an issue now. I've already worked with jailbroken iOS and iFile, somewhat the terminal so overall it's kind of familiar. The coolest thing I found today was that they have all of the original text to speech voices all the way back from like the 1980s which is really fun. I probably wouldn't buy an iMac. A Mac mini though I might buy. But in the future I might switch over to a modern MacBook as my main laptop because I think it's got a great battery life, unlike anything I've seen on a laptop and I kind of do like the operating system in spite of the earlier security flaws I mentioned which are outrageously stupid yet helpful. This guy right here lasted 5 hours and it half of the battery life I was watching continuous YouTube videos. It's like equal to using an iPhone's battery life. My regular laptop had to be plugged in all the time because it would last 2 or 3 hours at most. Call me a fanboy but I kind of like it.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Hibernation is the saving grace to using Windows on my laptop. I have Windows 7 so it does the full hibernation. Basically logging back you have the same memory contents as you were as if you were just logged off and logged back in, so I don't have to wait extra time for the slow boot. The problem with me though is I turn off my laptop every time I'm done using it. I mean it would just hibernate anyway if I just left it alone.


For HDD users hibernation is well worth it.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> To be honest, I've mainly experienced old DDR2 RAM. But with 2GB Windows is usuable but I would experience extreme delays. Keystrokes would lag if a lot of stuff was loading. Terrible. Same thing with Mac. There would be an delay after input before something changed.


Strange. I have ran Windows 8.1 on 2GB RAM. It was fine, yet RAM demanding stuff didn't work well. Things like browsing, gaming (something older and less demanding), office tasks were totally fine. I don't think its RAM's problem from what you are describing, unless there's some software eating it. Grandpa's lappy has 2GB RAM too, everything works fine. Never really felt limited with 2GB.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I don't really do anything with clean installations because I have done more clean installations on my laptop than any other computer. I think you'd want more than 2GB for a good experience. On Mac 4GB was fine. But obviously 8GB of newer RAM with an SSD runs circles around that. At some point it might not even be the RAM's fault of course. I don't even think RAM speed matters as much as the capacity because once the capacity runs out you are going into paging which is going to slow everything done. But yeah, even 6GB of ddr2-800mhz is trash with bad old hard drive. It was integrated graphics with 256MB of ddr2-667mhz so that would explain why the graphics were so slow.


I still don't think it should be that bad. You should investigate that graphics problem.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> My school recommended 16GB of RAM for my laptop and I didn't know why at the time. Probably because of virtual machines and starting up servers. So slowness on my laptop is most likely attributable to HDDs. I have not yet used more than 5GB of RAM in any situation and I'm not the kind of person who puts up 50 tabs in a browser and leaves them there. Speaking of which, firefox and chrome use a lot of memory. Opera uses like nothing. I'll open a page on Firefox with all of my extensions and it will use 300MB of RAM with one page open and then Opera will use less than 100MB.


For me it's simple. You have nice computer, use Chrome. you have old or crappy computer, use Opera. Firefox isn't there, because it sucks. On every piece of hardware I used it, it always had small freezing, was slow and I don't like its interface. Then after some time I read that it also uses the most resources and it was the moment, when I was done with it. 



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I do want to try using a lightweight version of Linux some time on an old computer or something to see how much faster it would be. The only problem is I have to learn Linux better which can be a pain because sometimes different flavors of Linux will have different terminal commands.


I can only say, that it won't be massively faster as they say. It won't magically make your PC run much better. It may save some space, may reduce RAM usage and interface may be somewhat lighter on GPU (yet not always, Ubuntu rather sucked here). So it's not much. I found 'linux being faster" being more myth, than true.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> One of them I learned was apt-get update -y. That updates your listing of packages. I don't know what the heck the -y means but it made it work on that flavor that I was using. Linux is also a lot less compatible than they say it is.


I have never heard anything good about linux compatibility. Even my teacher said, that linux had problems with drivers and still has them, just amount decreased. Windows are superior here.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Ubuntu cannot boot on my MacBook because it uses weird Nvidia graphics. I followed the instructions to fix it and it didn't work. Then you go on a laptop like mine which has the Nvidia dedicated card along with Intel HD graphics. You have to disable certain kernel parameters before you can boot in or the OS won't work. If you're using a plain old desktop it will generally work fine, unless you have Nvidia which means you'll have to download some Nvidia driver pack.


My GeForce FX 5200 worked fine without any additional driver packs lol.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I think AMD GPU drivers are built-in though so that's kind of nice.


From what I have read, ATI drivers for older cards are often missing and there's Nouveau drivers that were reverse engineered Windows drivers or something like that. Doesn't sound too good. With newer card situation is better, but not brilliant. Issues are not rare. 




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I kind of like Mac though now. I figure out how to show the path in Finder so that isn't an issue now. I've already worked with jailbroken iOS and iFile, somewhat the terminal so overall it's kind of familiar. The coolest thing I found today was that they have all of the original text to speech voices all the way back from like the 1980s which is really fun. I probably wouldn't buy an iMac. A Mac mini though I might buy. But in the future I might switch over to a modern MacBook as my main laptop because I think it's got a great battery life, unlike anything I've seen on a laptop and I kind of do like the operating system in spite of the earlier security flaws I mentioned which are outrageously stupid yet helpful. This guy right here lasted 5 hours and it half of the battery life I was watching continuous YouTube videos. It's like equal to using an iPhone's battery life. My regular laptop had to be plugged in all the time because it would last 2 or 3 hours at most. Call me a fanboy but I kind of like it.


That's not being fanboy, just being objective.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> For HDD users hibernation is well worth it.
> 
> 
> Strange. I have ran Windows 8.1 on 2GB RAM. It was fine, yet RAM demanding stuff didn't work well. Things like browsing, gaming (something older and less demanding), office tasks were totally fine. I don't think its RAM's problem from what you are describing, unless there's some software eating it. Grandpa's lappy has 2GB RAM too, everything works fine. Never really felt limited with 2GB.
> 
> 
> 
> I still don't think it should be that bad. You should investigate that graphics problem.
> 
> 
> 
> For me it's simple. You have nice computer, use Chrome. you have old or crappy computer, use Opera. Firefox isn't there, because it sucks. On every piece of hardware I used it, it always had small freezing, was slow and I don't like its interface. Then after some time I read that it also uses the most resources and it was the moment, when I was done with it.
> 
> 
> I can only say, that it won't be massively faster as they say. It won't magically make your PC run much better. It may save some space, may reduce RAM usage and interface may be somewhat lighter on GPU (yet not always, Ubuntu rather sucked here). So it's not much. I found 'linux being faster" being more myth, than true.
> 
> 
> 
> I have never heard anything good about linux compatibility. Even my teacher said, that linux had problems with drivers and still has them, just amount decreased. Windows are superior here.
> 
> 
> 
> My GeForce FX 5200 worked fine without any additional driver packs lol.
> 
> 
> 
> From what I have read, ATI drivers for older cards are often missing and there's Nouveau drivers that were reverse engineered Windows drivers or something like that. Doesn't sound too good. With newer card situation is better, but not brilliant. Issues are not rare.
> 
> 
> 
> That's not being fanboy, just being objective.


The intricacies of what works with different browsers are actually pretty intricate. I think Opera, Chrome and Edge will all score very high on HTML5 support. But in web class the other day, only Firefox and Edge could support the method of adding captions to videos that we used. Ironically, the teacher noted many times that Safari was displaying the pages most closely to the book even though the book uses a now older version of Chrome.

I think we're all gonna get different experiences with no baseline or scientific comparison going on. Maybe Firefox was eating all of that RAM because I do choose to use Firefox. I switched over to Firefox after they stopped supporting chrome on Windows XP when I was still using XP. So I wanted to be uniform and Firefox was the way to go. Firefox can also be modified to act more like a classic browser which is why I like using on my personal computer. Like I have menu bars and tabs on the bottom toolbar instead of at the top. It works well into my old Windows XP skin. Other than that most other computers I would just use Chrome because I know it is somewhat better at complying with HTML5. Edge was the best at one point actually though because it was designed to comply from the start. Back in the day Internet Explorer dominated the market via monopolism. So Microsoft basically said that they don't have to comply with anything as long as the page shows up and works. See how well that works today. Try making your own page to support internet explorer properly, they don't even teach it.

Yeah I was getting a Nouveau fault. So I did the "nomodeset" startup option which is supposed make Ubuntu use the basic display driver but it still didn't work. Essentially they integrated the driver into the Kernel so it was different from the old way and it ended up breaking support for some cards. But as you can tell disabling it doesn't fix anything. Have you ever really heard of the Nvidia GeForce 320m. If I search it up part of me thinks it might only appear on MacBooks. I don't think the 9400m appeared on anything but MacBooks either. But some hardware incomparability can be expected from Macs because they are normal computers. The other claim is that Linux uses generic drivers that might things work but not necessarily with as much functionality as expected. Which is kind of like saying you don't need to install drivers on Windows because there's a generic touchpad drivers that doesn't like you use gestures on Windows.

One of my teachers hates Mac because you are paying for software that is free. Presumably Mac is essentially UNIX which is similar to Linux. But if you haven't noticed, Apple integrated their hardware and software very strongly in some cases which is antithetical to the way Linux operates. You aren't a smarter user because you have to go into your USB wifi-dongle's configuration settings to increase the power input so that it could function normally. That's just a waste of effort. I also learned how to uninstall things on Mac which is actually just a matter of moving the app file to the trash which is different from moving an .exe file to the recycle bin. But you might also have to remove some preferences separately. I didn't know how to do that before so I thought it was going to be an absurd process of manually finding all of the files and folders.

I think Linux as a standard desktop OS isn't that appealing. There are certain distros that are focused like Kali Linux or the similar BSD softwares that have unique attributes. Like NetBSD can probably run on a toaster. It has such a way variety of supported hardware. OpenBSD is focused on security by correctness. Which means the developers try to plug up as many security holes as they find by applying proper technique into the development process. Not a perfect solution but it still leads to some benefits. Like OpenBSD is very well protected against buffer overflows compared to some other OS because the developers already check for vulnerabilities and risks. FreeBSD is free. There's Tails or Whonix if you want some concept of anonymity on the internet even though that doesn't really exist it's just pushing mirrors around. There's also sort of a conceptual advantage that UNIX-based OSes were designed for multi-user environments in the first place and Windows being based on MS-DOS was designed for single users and had little in terms of security to start with. When you start using Windows, you get an administrator account when you should really be starting with a standard account. The temporary privilege escalation of being a standard account then calling in the privileges of the admin account is usually safer. If you have a computer you should be using a standard account unless you are trying to install something or fix a problem. Security concerns. As my teacher once said, "Windows has a lot of great security features, you just have to turn them on."


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The intricacies of what works with different browsers are actually pretty intricate. I think Opera, Chrome and Edge will all score very high on HTML5 support. But in web class the other day, only Firefox and Edge could support the method of adding captions to videos that we used. Ironically, the teacher noted many times that Safari was displaying the pages most closely to the book even though the book uses a now older version of Chrome.


That can make sense in some cases




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I think we're all gonna get different experiences with no baseline or scientific comparison going on. Maybe Firefox was eating all of that RAM because I do choose to use Firefox. I switched over to Firefox after they stopped supporting chrome on Windows XP when I was still using XP. So I wanted to be uniform and Firefox was the way to go. Firefox can also be modified to act more like a classic browser which is why I like using on my personal computer. Like I have menu bars and tabs on the bottom toolbar instead of at the top. It works well into my old Windows XP skin. Other than that most other computers I would just use Chrome because I know it is somewhat better at complying with HTML5. Edge was the best at one point actually though because it was designed to comply from the start. Back in the day Internet Explorer dominated the market via monopolism. So Microsoft basically said that they don't have to comply with anything as long as the page shows up and works. See how well that works today. Try making your own page to support internet explorer properly, they don't even teach it.


I use Opera on Athlonium 64. As I know, it was longer supported and it is basically a Chrome, because they use Chromium engine.





Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Yeah I was getting a Nouveau fault. So I did the "nomodeset" startup option which is supposed make Ubuntu use the basic display driver but it still didn't work. Essentially they integrated the driver into the Kernel so it was different from the old way and it ended up breaking support for some cards. But as you can tell disabling it doesn't fix anything. Have you ever really heard of the Nvidia GeForce 320m. If I search it up part of me thinks it might only appear on MacBooks. I don't think the 9400m appeared on anything but MacBooks either.


I have seen 320ms in some old laptops aside Macs, but not 9400m.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> But some hardware incomparability can be expected from Macs because they are normal computers. The other claim is that Linux uses generic drivers that might things work but not necessarily with as much functionality as expected. Which is kind of like saying you don't need to install drivers on Windows because there's a generic touchpad drivers that doesn't like you use gestures on Windows.


What I was missing in linux the most was Control panel. Linux version of settings really sucks compared to Windows. 




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> One of my teachers hates Mac because you are paying for software that is free. Presumably Mac is essentially UNIX which is similar to Linux. But if you haven't noticed, Apple integrated their hardware and software very strongly in some cases which is antithetical to the way Linux operates. You aren't a smarter user because you have to go into your USB wifi-dongle's configuration settings to increase the power input so that it could function normally. That's just a waste of effort. I also learned how to uninstall things on Mac which is actually just a matter of moving the app file to the trash which is different from moving an .exe file to the recycle bin. But you might also have to remove some preferences separately. I didn't know how to do that before so I thought it was going to be an absurd process of manually finding all of the files and folders.


lol



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I think Linux as a standard desktop OS isn't that appealing.


Of course it's not. There must be somewhere written, that it's the best suited OS for nerds, not for your average consumer.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> There are certain distros that are focused like Kali Linux or the similar BSD softwares that have unique attributes. Like NetBSD can probably run on a toaster. It has such a way variety of supported hardware. OpenBSD is focused on security by correctness. Which means the developers try to plug up as many security holes as they find by applying proper technique into the development process. Not a perfect solution but it still leads to some benefits. Like OpenBSD is very well protected against buffer overflows compared to some other OS because the developers already check for vulnerabilities and risks. FreeBSD is free. There's Tails or Whonix if you want some concept of anonymity on the internet even though that doesn't really exist it's just pushing mirrors around. There's also sort of a conceptual advantage that UNIX-based OSes were designed for multi-user environments in the first place and Windows being based on MS-DOS was designed for single users and had little in terms of security to start with. When you start using Windows, you get an administrator account when you should really be starting with a standard account. The temporary privilege escalation of being a standard account then calling in the privileges of the admin account is usually safer. If you have a computer you should be using a standard account unless you are trying to install something or fix a problem. Security concerns. As my teacher once said, "Windows has a lot of great security features, you just have to turn them on."


I disagree. There's nothing wrong if you are single user of PC and you are admin of it too. Admin rights makes life easier for me.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> That can make sense in some cases
> 
> 
> 
> I use Opera on Athlonium 64. As I know, it was longer supported and it is basically a Chrome, because they use Chromium engine.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I have seen 320ms in some old laptops aside Macs, but not 9400m.
> 
> 
> 
> What I was missing in linux the most was Control panel. Linux version of settings really sucks compared to Windows.
> 
> 
> 
> lol
> 
> 
> Of course it's not. There must be somewhere written, that it's the best suited OS for nerds, not for your average consumer.
> 
> 
> 
> I disagree. There's nothing wrong if you are single user of PC and you are admin of it too. Admin rights makes life easier for me.


I think the admin thing is also dependent on how you system copes with you being an admin. In Windows Vista, they introduced UAC which was an improvement. Windows XP has the concept of admin and standard accounts in there but it's protection is very weak. If you are logged in as an admin then there's little to nothing that says, "Are you sure?" I think in some cases by just by being the admin makes every Run as Admin which is extremely bad if there is something shady about a program. So the benefit of being a standard user is that it can't by default Run as Admin. There's a policy in Windows that says you can require a password after you make a change even if you are an admin, normally it just asks you to continue but as an admin that's just psychological for you. For someone else was using your computer then they'd still have to know your password if you were logged in and they somehow got in there. In security measures there always going to be part of it that is like stupid-proofness. People on Reddit using the Windows XP community, they think you only get viruses or malware by doing something stupid like clicking on those ads. You know, we're smart users so we don't get viruses. Something that is only partially true because there are other ways to get attacked. Once again if you don't even touch important data on your system then you don't need security. It's up to you. 

I watched the presentation on the 9400m. Nvidia said they were planning to build a new chip or something. Then of course Apple said, okay cool make it for mobile. Then the 9400m came out as integrated graphics that blew the previous Intel graphics out of the water and it was considered one of the fastest integrated solutions at the time.

Yeah Opera is interesting because it had a much longer lifecycle caring for Windows 9x. Basically if you have Windows 98 for some reason, Opera is the best browser. Especially with KernelEx. I like Opera for that and it's resource usage, but I don't like Speed Dial or how the whole interface is implemented.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I think the admin thing is also dependent on how you system copes with you being an admin. In Windows Vista, they introduced UAC which was an improvement. Windows XP has the concept of admin and standard accounts in there but it's protection is very weak. If you are logged in as an admin then there's little to nothing that says, "Are you sure?" I think in some cases by just by being the admin makes every Run as Admin which is extremely bad if there is something shady about a program. So the benefit of being a standard user is that it can't by default Run as Admin. There's a policy in Windows that says you can require a password after you make a change even if you are an admin, normally it just asks you to continue but as an admin that's just psychological for you. For someone else was using your computer then they'd still have to know your password if you were logged in and they somehow got in there. In security measures there always going to be part of it that is like stupid-proofness. People on Reddit using the Windows XP community, they think you only get viruses or malware by doing something stupid like clicking on those ads. You know, we're smart users so we don't get viruses. Something that is only partially true because there are other ways to get attacked. Once again if you don't even touch important data on your system then you don't need security. It's up to you.


As I saw it, everything works rather similarly to Vista. Before software installs, it asks me if I want to do X. There probably are more settings for security.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I watched the presentation on the 9400m. Nvidia said they were planning to build a new chip or something. Then of course Apple said, okay cool make it for mobile. Then the 9400m came out as integrated graphics that blew the previous Intel graphics out of the water and it was considered one of the fastest integrated solutions at the time.


lol 9400m doesn't even sound good. Something like 9800m would sound good. Oh wait there was 9800m GTX: https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9800M-GTX.9919.0.html

Holy shit, it can play Crysis on high!

9400m at best is something like xx50 Ti now.

And my god 9800m is twice as fast as my ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256MB. And at the time, there was even SLI setups in latops, but of weaker 9800m GTs. 

To put 9400m into some perspective, my ATI beats it by 2 or 3 times, even if it's 4 ear newer. 320m only beats my ATI by 20-50 percents. That's not a lot, but it's low end compared to high end, so not too bad.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Yeah Opera is interesting because it had a much longer lifecycle caring for Windows 9x. Basically if you have Windows 98 for some reason, Opera is the best browser. Especially with KernelEx. I like Opera for that and it's resource usage, but I don't like Speed Dial or how the whole interface is implemented.


Also one of its killer features is that it can save lots of data with Turbo mode. To be honest Opera works on pretty much anything. Even my old Siemens C75 has Opera browser. It can run S40 software. In the end Opera has some unique features, but for some reason has always been an underdog of browsers. Maybe I should switch on main rig...


----------



## The red spirit

*Benchmark results part 1*
After upgrades + AGP aperture changed to 512M 

3dmark 2001SE 19145 3dmarks
3dmark 2003 10225 3dmarks
3dmark 2005 5068 3dmarks
PCmark 2002 CPU score 7312; Memory score 7285; HDD score 1074
PCmark 2004 Memory score 3018; Graphics score 6056; HDD score 7382
PCmark 2005 CPU score 3226; Memory score 2820; Graphics score 3945; HDD score 7156
Peacekeeper 1359
Cinebench 9.5 Rendering (1 CPU) 332 CB-CPU; C4D Shading 341 CB-GFX; OpenGL SW-L 1453 CB-GFX; OpenGL HW-L 3241 CB-GFX; OpenGL Speedup 9.51x
Cinebench 10 rendering (1 CPU) 1833 CB-CPU; OpenGL Standard 2972 CB-GFX
Cinebench 11.5 CPU 0.51
Geekbench 2.4.3 1668; Integer 1674; Floating point 2257; Memory 1060; Stream 809 
HyperPi 0.99b 1M digits, normal priority 45.266s; 32M digits, normal priority 38m 15.437s
SiSoft Sandra 2013 Sp2 lite processor arithmetic 7.41 GOPS; Processor Multi-Media 6.19 MPix/s; Cryptography 0.065 GB/s; .NET Arithmetic 1.79 GOPs; .NET Multi-Media 2.65 MPix/s; Memory Bandwidth 2.054 GB/s; Cache and memory latency 72.3 ns; File system bandwidth 86.622 MB/s; File system I/O 592.5 IOPS; Processor Multi-Media 6.22 MPix/s; Cryptography 0.065 GB/s; Memory Bandwidth 2.045 GB/s; Overall score 0.58 kPT
Passmark 9.0 Passmark rating 341; CPU mark 548 (Integer math 736 MOps/s; Prime numbers 0 Million primes/s; Compression 844 KBytes/s; Physics 35 Frames/s; CPU single threaded 736 MOps/s; Floating point math 681 MOps/s; Multimedia instructions 3 Mill. Matrices/s; Encryption 111 MBytes/s; Sorting 579 Thousand strings/s); 2D graphics mark 166 (Simple vectors 14 Thousand vectors/s; Fonts and text 58 Ops/s; Image filters 174 Filters/s; Complex vectors 181 Complex vectors/s; Windows interface 247 Ops/s; Image rendering 43 Images/s); 3D graphics mark 73 (DirectX 9 3 Frames/s); Memory mark 297 (Database operations 12 KOps/s; Memory read uncached 1836 MBytes/s; Available RAM 1141 Megabytes; Memory threaded 1852 MBytes/s; Memory read cached 2435 MBytes/s; Memory write 829 MBytes/s; Memory latency 71 ns); Disk mark 725 (Disk sequential read 105 MBytes/s; Disk random seek + RW 8 MBytes/s; Disk sequential write 86 MBytes/s)
CPU-M 1.6 12086; Benchmark score 13180 points
Furmark 400x300 preset 296 points 5FPS, 60000ms
CPU-Z 1.81.1 Single thread 0.4; Multi thread 0.4; Multi thread ratio 1.02
Qwickmark 0.4 CPU Flops 6 Gigaflops; Mem Banwidth 705 MB/s; Disk Transfer 123 MB/s
Winrar 643 KB/s
wPrime (4 threads) 32M 83.718 seconds; 1024M 2691.484 seconds; (1 thread) 32M 84.516 seconds; 1024M 2698.172 seconds

Geekbench 2.4.3
Integer Performance
Integer	1674	
Blowfish 
single-core scalar	1432 
62.9 MB/sec	

Blowfish 
multi-core scalar	1533 
62.8 MB/sec	

Text Compress 
single-core scalar	1598 
5.11 MB/sec	

Text Compress 
multi-core scalar	1555 
5.10 MB/sec	

Text Decompress 
single-core scalar	1801 
7.40 MB/sec	

Text Decompress 
multi-core scalar	1837 
7.32 MB/sec	

Image Compress 
single-core scalar	1637 
13.5 Mpixels/sec	

Image Compress 
multi-core scalar	1595 
13.4 Mpixels/sec	

Image Decompress 
single-core scalar	1391 
23.4 Mpixels/sec	

Image Decompress 
multi-core scalar	1418 
23.1 Mpixels/sec	

Lua 
single-core scalar	2141 
824 Knodes/sec	

Lua 
multi-core scalar	2153 
828 Knodes/sec	

Floating Point Performance
Floating Point	2257	
Mandelbrot 
single-core scalar	1658 
1.10 Gflops	

Mandelbrot 
multi-core scalar	1683 
1.10 Gflops	

Dot Product 
single-core scalar	759 
367 Mflops	

Dot Product 
multi-core scalar	817 
372 Mflops	

Dot Product 
single-core vector	3816 
4.57 Gflops	

Dot Product 
multi-core vector	4388 
4.56 Gflops	

LU Decomposition 
single-core scalar	376 
335 Mflops	

LU Decomposition 
multi-core scalar	398 
349 Mflops	

Primality Test 
single-core scalar	1963 
293 Mflops	

Primality Test 
multi-core scalar	1564 
290 Mflops	

Sharpen Image 
single-core scalar	2428 
5.67 Mpixels/sec	

Sharpen Image 
multi-core scalar	2456 
5.66 Mpixels/sec	

Blur Image 
single-core scalar	4638 
3.67 Mpixels/sec	

Blur Image 
multi-core scalar	4665 
3.67 Mpixels/sec	

Memory Performance
Memory	1060	
Read Sequential 
single-core scalar	1732 
2.12 GB/sec	

Write Sequential 
single-core scalar	1244 
871 MB/sec	

Stdlib Allocate 
single-core scalar	1351 
5.04 Mallocs/sec	

Stdlib Write 
single-core scalar	432 
916 MB/sec	

Stdlib Copy 
single-core scalar	544 
575 MB/sec	

Stream Performance
Stream	809	
Stream Copy 
single-core scalar	817 
1.12 GB/sec	

Stream Copy 
single-core vector	876 
1.14 GB/sec	

Stream Scale 
single-core scalar	839 
1.09 GB/sec	

Stream Scale 
single-core vector	829 
1.12 GB/sec	

Stream Add 
single-core scalar	770 
1.16 GB/sec	

Stream Add 
single-core vector	879 
1.22 GB/sec	

Stream Triad 
single-core scalar	820 
1.13 GB/sec	

Stream Triad 
single-core vector	648 
1.21 GB/sec	

Dacris Benchmarks 8.1
CPU 5995 MIPS
Memory 1200 MB/s
Hard Drive 47.2 MB/s (wrong HDD was tested, Samsung Spinpoint)
2D Video 7.50 MP/s
3D Video 19.1 TTP/s

Category	Grade	Weakest Component	Grade Description
Overall	6.44	CPU (5.67)	Web browsing, watching videos, playing music, file sharing.
Software Development	6.74	Amount of RAM (6.64)	Using Visual Studio to develop software.
Gaming	5.84	Video Card (5.93)	Playing the latest 3D games such as Crysis.
Web Hosting	6.39	Hard Drive (6.49)	Running IIS or Apache, hosting web applications.
Database Hosting	6.00	CPU (4.63)	Running SQL Server, hosting a large SQL database.
Multimedia	5.29	CPU (4.63)	Producing professional, studio-quality music or video.
Graphic Design	5.40	CPU (4.63)	Creating complex artwork with Photoshop.


For Overall usage, please upgrade the CPU to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Software Development usage, you may wish to upgrade the Amount of RAM to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Gaming usage, please upgrade the Video Card to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Web Hosting usage, you may wish to upgrade the Hard Drive to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Database Hosting usage, please upgrade the CPU to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Multimedia usage, please upgrade the CPU to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Graphic Design usage, please upgrade the CPU to reach an acceptable level of performance.

Prime95:
[Mon Nov 13 02:16:06 2017]
Compare your results to other computers at http://www.mersenne.org/report_benchmarks
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
CPU speed: 2309.61 MHz
CPU features: 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2
L1 cache size: 64 KB
L2 cache size: 512 KB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 64 bytes
L1 TLBS: 32
L2 TLBS: 512
Prime95 32-bit version 28.10, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 1024K FFT length: 42.676 ms., avg: 43.738 ms.
Best time for 1280K FFT length: 59.162 ms., avg: 59.617 ms.
Best time for 1536K FFT length: 69.200 ms., avg: 69.551 ms.
Best time for 1792K FFT length: 85.013 ms., avg: 85.520 ms.
Best time for 2048K FFT length: 92.104 ms., avg: 92.702 ms.
Best time for 2560K FFT length: 117.626 ms., avg: 118.070 ms.
Best time for 3072K FFT length: 141.266 ms., avg: 142.450 ms.
Best time for 3584K FFT length: 173.937 ms., avg: 179.690 ms.
Best time for 4096K FFT length: 190.227 ms., avg: 191.074 ms.
Best time for 5120K FFT length: 291.183 ms., avg: 293.168 ms.
Best time for 6144K FFT length: 395.525 ms., avg: 397.081 ms.
Best time for 7168K FFT length: 553.695 ms., avg: 556.303 ms.
Best time for 8192K FFT length: 559.942 ms., avg: 562.494 ms.

XtremeMark:
BENCHMARK RESULTS:

Test started at: 2017.11.13 02:52:50
Test ended at: 2017.11.13 04:23:10
Threads executed: 1
Thread priority: Maximum
Quantity of operations: 100000000000
Average operations per second: 18449439,887

Time taken by Thread 1: 5414,922 seconds.

Total time spent: 5414,922 seconds;
Global time spent: 5420,219 seconds.


SYSTEM INFORMATION:

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (32 bit)
Available RAM: 1330,12 MB (1,30 GB)
Total RAM: 2047 MB (2,00 GB)
------------------------------------
Strange thing is that everything seems to be improved, even CPU scores. I didn't mess with clock speed or anything in BIOS that could have affected it, but maybe it's effect of clean install (or sound card). Even RAM performance seems to be improved a bit. HDDs are like 3 times faster compared to not upgraded Athlonium 64. GPU is from 4 times to more than 20 times faster than Sparkle GeForce FX 5200 128 MB, greatly depends on type of benchmark. In latest 3D Mark Radeon was lots of times faster, but in 2001 3D mark only almost 4 times faster. Interesting thing is that in some 2D tasks Radeon can slay lots of modern GPUs and score surprisingly high (passmark). Somewhere in 96% percentile, that's truly amazing. I guess that it may have beaten GTX Titan or 1080 Ti. Usually Intel integrated graphics score high in 2D tasks, maybe some professional graphics cards too. Truly amazing for something so old and obsolete.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> As I saw it, everything works rather similarly to Vista. Before software installs, it asks me if I want to do X. There probably are more settings for security.
> 
> 
> lol 9400m doesn't even sound good. Something like 9800m would sound good. Oh wait there was 9800m GTX: https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9800M-GTX.9919.0.html
> 
> Holy shit, it can play Crysis on high!
> 
> 9400m at best is something like xx50 Ti now.
> 
> And my god 9800m is twice as fast as my ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256MB. And at the time, there was even SLI setups in latops, but of weaker 9800m GTs.
> 
> To put 9400m into some perspective, my ATI beats it by 2 or 3 times, even if it's 4 ear newer. 320m only beats my ATI by 20-50 percents. That's not a lot, but it's low end compared to high end, so not too bad.
> 
> 
> 
> Also one of its killer features is that it can save lots of data with Turbo mode. To be honest Opera works on pretty much anything. Even my old Siemens C75 has Opera browser. It can run S40 software. In the end Opera has some unique features, but for some reason has always been an underdog of browsers. Maybe I should switch on main rig...


I'm sure the 9800m was a dedicated card though which puts it in a different ballpark. The whole selling point was that it was 55% as powerful as the old 8600m that they used in high performance laptops as opposed to 10% as powerful.

Userbenchmark puts it around the GT 710 so I believe the benchmarks that you could play at 1024x768 on high. The problem is that probably isn't without any AA on at all, and that game needs it. I don't know if they had FXAA back then either. But another difference is try going from High to Very High and the performance drops a lot because it starts adding in new features like sunshafts and color grading and all of that stuff. When I played on the GT 710, I put all settings to high and shadows to medium or low where low was basically not much of any shadows. The shaders are the most taxing part of that game either way.

I just happened to be watching a review of Crysis "in 2017 10 years later" and I saw like a benchmark with it was 8800GTX 768MB or something like that which was the only good single card solution. So people would max it out but it was barely playable at that lower resolution. But I think that if they didn't insist upon 8x AA for whatever reason people do and lowered the shadows a little bit then the game would have been totally playable at 720p and would look just as good with just some lower resolution shadows maybe they would have to lower the shaders down to high too. So at that time you couldn't literally max it out. I can "max it out" at 1080p with 8x AA and the game won't play very well at all with my laptop but what's the benefit of 8x AA if you can't play? That's a very taxing thing that doesn't really make it look much better after a certain point. But Crysis was demanding, I don't think 1024x768 was the standard gaming resolution at the time either. I think if they shaved off the AA they wouldn't have to play at 1024x768. Probably not 1080p or 900p but at least a typical widescreen resolution.


----------



## The red spirit

*Benchmark results part 2*
After upgrades

Note: With FX 5200 Nvidia control panel settings were set to performance and pretty much anything was turned off, but most of the settings are application controlled. With ATI X800 Pro Catalyst control center settings are mostly set to best quality and most of them are application controlled. This might affect performance in some games. Also please consider that AGP aperture size from default 128M was changed to 512M. All other settings in BIOS related to AGP or other performance affecting components left the same. All games 
were benchmarked at the same settings as they were before upgrades, just for comparison.

Results:
Colin McRae rally 2005:
2017-11-15 02:33:10 - cmr5
Frames: 22675 - Time: 235813ms - Avg: 96.157 - Min: 61 - Max: 142

Call of Duty 2:
2017-11-14 01:42:15 - CODSP_S
Frames:41137 - Time: 518094ms - Avg: 79.401 - Min: 6 - Max: 197

Grand Theft Auto 3:
2017-11-14 01:52:47 - gta3
Frames: 54313 - Time: 514141ms - Avg: 105.638 - Min: 39 - Max: 197

Quake 3:
2017-11-15 02:42:53 - ioquake3
Frames: 22130 - Time: 245063ms - Avg: 90.303 - Min: 84 - Max: 92 (looks like FPS is capped at 90)

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl (ini files and flags were unedited in this benchmark, so it's not apples to apples comparison):
2017-11-04 03:17:06 - XR_3DA
Frames: 46868 - Time: 390657ms - Avg: 119.972 - Min: 10 - Max: 207

Unreal Tournament GOTY (Direct3D renderer doesn't work, displays black screen, audio seems to be playing, computer in unresponsive to anything. Needs to be killed in task manager, benchmarked in software renderer mode):
2017-11-15 02:51:04 - UnrealTournament
Frames: 12666 - Time: 321063ms - Avg: 39.450 - Min: 10 - Max: 52

Unreal Tournament 2004:
2017-11-04 03:03:14 - UT2004
Frames: 13228 - Time: 160797ms - Avg: 82.265 - Min: 41 - Max: 163

Unreal Tournament 2004 maxed out (because why the F not):
2017-11-04 03:08:35 - UT2004
Frames: 8634 - Time: 134953ms - Avg: 63.978 - Min: 32 - Max: 128

Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed crashes after intro videos.


----------



## The red spirit

@Crimson Ash @Skeletalz @Pifanjr @Judson Joist

Most of the benchmarks are completed, there will be part 3, but it's pretty clear now how much has Athlonium 64 improved


----------



## The red spirit

I have been a bit out of time to use Athlonium 64, so I messed with refresh rate settings. I managed to achieve a laughable 75 Hz overclock from that TV. Well at least it's not 60 Hz.


----------



## The red spirit

I accidentally found out why my ATI X800 Pro worked so loudly. It's because fans speed has only 3 states. They are like that:
0% at 0 degrees (it never works like that)
67% at 60 degrees (basically a default mode)
100% at 75 degrees, maybe a bit more. 

Thanks to ATI Tool, I lowered speeds and also found out that I can adjust more than 3 states, somewhere like 10 and to be honest I will see how far can I overclock this card. It's just for fun, I don't think I will runs it at above stock speeds all time.

Edit 1: I already reached ATI X800 XT core clock speed. The 500 MHz.


----------



## The red spirit

Finally first crash with 555 MHz core clock. Not bad. My guess is that I will reach 550 MHz stably. That would be around 14% increase. Pretty good. As I have been reading, X800 XT PE overclockers reach around 560, so I'm pretty close to them and they have cards without handicapped pipelines. 

@Crimson Ash I have a weird issue. When I start any DirectX game there's no video signal. Even without overclock nothing with DirectX work correctly. The only game that I have without DirectX is Quake 3. It works fine with and without overclock. Do you have any idea why something like that happens? Is this driver related?

Edit 1: Core clock becomes unstable with anything above 546 MHz. So it seems to be the highest it can go without changing voltage (if that's even possible). Still it's 14% improvement, so not too bad.


----------



## Crimson Ash

The red spirit said:


> Finally first crash with 555 MHz core clock. Not bad. My guess is that I will reach 550 MHz stably. That would be around 14% increase. Pretty good. As I have been reading, X800 XT PE overclockers reach around 560, so I'm pretty close to them and they have cards without handicapped pipelines.
> 
> @*Crimson Ash* I have a weird issue. When I start any DirectX game there's no video signal. Even without overclock nothing with DirectX work correctly. The only game that I have without DirectX is Quake 3. It works fine with and without overclock. Do you have any idea why something like that happens? Is this driver related?
> 
> Edit 1: Core clock becomes unstable with anything above 546 MHz. So it seems to be the highest it can go without changing voltage (if that's even possible). Still it's 14% improvement, so not too bad.


The only issue I remember having with direct x was the incorrect version being in use. A lot of the old games especially can only use the older versions of direct x or run only through them. If you have a newer game that has installed a newer version perhaps that might be causing a conflict?


----------



## The red spirit

Crimson Ash said:


> The only issue I remember having with direct x was the incorrect version being in use. A lot of the old games especially can only use the older versions of direct x or run only through them. If you have a newer game that has installed a newer version perhaps that might be causing a conflict?


Too bad reinstalling DirectX did nothing. Only after ATI driver re-install everything worked. Anyway, thanks for help.

So I finished overclocking GPU, this is what I achieved:
Core clock 540 MHz
Memory clock 570 MHz

This is what stock were:
Core clock 475 MHz
Memory clock 450 MHz

So increases are:
Core clock ~12%
Memory clock ~22%

Further research revealed that those cards are bad overclockers and generally don't overclock well. While gains in core clock weren't magical, they are just a little bit better than average. A massive gains in memory clock were achieved, but that's just rather normal overclock for these cards, I just managed to clock to clock it 10 MHz higher than one person. I could push 1 or 2 MHz more out of it, but I decided to leave some breathing room. Without volt mods this is as far as I can go. I have been thinking a bit and I'm coming to conclusion that this specific card may be a lucky in silicon lottery and potentially is a good overclocker, but as there's not much data about overclocking results on this graphics card, I shall not say that. What I can say that this card overclocked much better than my GTX 650 Ti. I will post results of 3D mark 2001SE scores here a bit later.

Edit 1: 3DMark 2001SE scores
Stock: 18370
OC: 19020

I'm not impressed. Not sure if OC is stable now. With ATI tool's stability test it survived 15 minutes, after that one round in UT2004, one round in UT99 and one mission in CoD2. No artifacting, no graphical problems. Maybe CPU is bottlenecking this card. Certainly there's a problem. I found 3DMark score of one person:
AMD Athlon FX-55 @ 3Ghz
1GB Corsair 3200XLPT
MSI NEO2 Platinum
ATI X800 PRO

3Dmark 2001 SE score :31,000

It gets 10000 points more. Can it be CPU being much slower than that FX-55?

Okay another score:
Dual P4 2.2ghz OCed to 2.8ghz each
3 gigs of PC2700 DDR Ram
GeForce4 ti 4600
Raid type 0 100gig hard drives.
3dmark2001 score: 22,250

Still faster than Athlonium 64 with freaking Pentium 4s and Geforce 4 series card. Something is truly wrong with my PC. Maybe RAM? For some reason it can't reach 400 MHz, yet it should. That could be linked to raised FSB.

Yet another score:
3DMark01 17,154
3DMark03 5,754

ATHLON XP 3200+
Radeon 9700NP (396 core, 305 memory)

Still way too close to Athlonium 64, yet it shouldn't be this way.

Okay I found some more or less equal setups with more or less same cards (all are same models and run at stock speeds). Benchmark results are from reputable sources.

1:
Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro
P4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
3DMark 2001SE score: 23602

2:
HIS X800 Pro ICEQ II
ABIT IC7 MAX 3
3.5 GHz overclocked P4 3.2 GHz CPU and a FSB of 233 MHz
The used memory is a PC 3700 Enhanced Latency Memory of OCZ which we operate 2 - 3 - 3 - 7 Settings
Zalman CNPS7000
Western Digital WD800BB
3DMark 2001SE score stock clocks: 20758
3DMark 2001SE score 520/560 MHz: 20917

The last rig is scored the closest to what I have, but still there's almost 2000 3dmarks difference. In review gains from overclocking were much worse than mine, so that's something. Anyway I'm suspecting RAM and CPU in such a case. As I read those old Radeons could benefit from faster CPU. Also pretty much no one ran such a high end card as X800 Pro 256MB with Athlon 64 3200+. The slowest CPU I found paired with such card at the time was Athlon 64 3400+ (socket 939). There also was dual channel RAM too and stick ran at 400 MHz. So in Athlonium 64 RAM is at least two times slower than that. As I had been researching. Stock Athlon 64 3200+ is only around 20% slower than AMD 64 FX-53, which was basically the best AMD CPU of the 2004. So, maybe CPU isn't a bottleneck here, but RAM may be. If not that picky motherboard with crappy settings for OC, where voltage control for CPU doesn't work I may have overclocked it higher. Also RAM would run at 400MHz. Finding BIOS for such an old and unsupported mobo would be nearly impossible and if I gonna find it, it would be too risky to risk ruining RAID array and losing current settings. FFFFUUUUUU!!!


----------



## The red spirit

*Benchmark results part 3, The finale*

Everest Pro trial:









HD Tune Pro:









































CrystalDiskMark:

























Comments:
Notice how even CPU cache speeds have improved for no reason. HDD upgrade gains are very visible and doesn't require much of commentary, except one detail, CPU load. They can use 10% of CPU power, that's a lot tbh. I rebenched all drive to see if improved results magic will continue here too and it does. Look at WD drive, it's a bit faster than before, while Samsung Spinpoint is a bit slower, but that's a very slight change. So this is the last part of benchmarks after upgrades. This PC has improved a lot and that's nice.


----------



## The red spirit

So I decided to push CPU to the limits or just to the limits of that mobo. I had it at 210 MHz bus and locked multiplier X11. I upped bus clock to 218 (by 2 MHz increments and short stability testing). Now CPU almost reaches 2.3 GHz. Out of curiosity I ran 3DMark 2001SE with stock GPU clocks. Surprising my score is a bit higher and benefited more than from OCed GPU. Now I got 19636 3dmarks. That's an increase of 1266 3dmarks just by raising CPU bus speed a little. Wonderful! Please remember that one bus not only controls CPU's frequency, but RAM's too. RAM is at 168 MHz (maybe), now you have to double that and you get the real speed. Even if CPU bus speed increments increase multiple frequencies, it's amazing to see such a big gains just from such a little increase.


----------



## The red spirit

*shit, I meant almost 2.4 GHz

perC doesn't let me to edit post


----------



## The red spirit

I has been overclocking a bit and reached 224 CPU bus speed, which should translate to 2.464 GHz (222 was stable with first voltage bump) and got this screen at booting:









Sucks and I don't actually know what to do, still searching for solution. WinXP recovery is alien to me, because it uses command line only, no GUI.


----------



## The red spirit

So I wanted to fix my problems with that file with WinXP recovery today and after reboot I got very bad message:









I don't even know if it's BIOS or Windows XP here. Seems like BIOS, but I don't know what to do. Of course I didn't press C. I unplugged one drive and didn't got that message, just RAID broken in RAID setup. I tested unplugging method on another HDD and got that message from doom. I instantly suspected that HDD was dead, so I plugged it into my main PC and did Minitool's drive check. Seems like HDD is fine, CrystalDiskInfo also confirms that drive is fine. I hoped for miracle and put HDD back into Athlonium 64. Same message and I have no idea what happened and what to do. Motherboards SATA connectors are fine, they work (I tested by switching cables of HDDs). I looked on net and found almost no info about such error. Only a bit here: Rebuilding a RAID 1 array on the P4P800 Deluxe - Tech Support Forum

Too bad, person deleted stuff. So it's still a mystery. @Crimson Ash @zynthaxx
Do you have any idea of what happened and how to fix that?

(If it's important I did CPU overclocking without changing multiplier (mobo doesn't let to change it), I'm not sure if it touches clock speed of RAID controller, but it shouldn't)


----------



## zynthaxx

l’espirit rouge;39497162 said:


> So I wanted to fix my problems with that file with WinXP recovery today and after reboot I got very bad message:
> 
> 
> I don't even know if it's BIOS or Windows XP here. Seems like BIOS, but I don't know what to do. Of course I didn't press C. I unplugged one drive and didn't got that message, just RAID broken in RAID setup. I tested unplugging method on another HDD and got that message from doom. I instantly suspected that HDD was dead, so I plugged it into my main PC and did Minitool's drive check. Seems like HDD is fine, CrystalDiskInfo also confirms that drive is fine. I hoped for miracle and put HDD back into Athlonium 64. Same message and I have no idea what happened and what to do. Motherboards SATA connectors are fine, they work (I tested by switching cables of HDDs). I looked on net and found almost no info about such error. Only a bit here: Rebuilding a RAID 1 array on the P4P800 Deluxe - Tech Support Forum
> 
> Too bad, person deleted stuff. So it's still a mystery. @*Crimson Ash* @*zynthaxx*
> Do you have any idea of what happened and how to fix that?
> 
> (If it's important I did CPU overclocking without changing multiplier (mobo doesn't let to change it), I'm not sure if it touches clock speed of RAID controller, but it shouldn't)


Restoration possibilities of a motherboard based “fakeraid” set is entirely up to the controller. Windows has very little to do with it, more than recognizing the driver that allows it to see a single volume where there actually are two. I haven’t dabbled with this aspect of Windows in years, but if it’s possible to do an in-place reinstallation of Windows with the controller driver loaded (historically you always got a question for loading additional drivers when starting the Windows installer), that may be the best way to hopefully keep the data. 
Otherwise consider the data gone and perform a regular installation.


----------



## zynthaxx

zynthaxx said:


> Restoration possibilities of a motherboard based “fakeraid” set is entirely up to the controller. Windows has very little to do with it, more than recognizing the driver that allows it to see a single volume where there actually are two. I haven’t dabbled with this aspect of Windows in years, but if it’s possible to do an in-place reinstallation of Windows with the controller driver loaded (historically you always got a question for loading additional drivers when starting the Windows installer), that may be the best way to hopefully keep the data.
> Otherwise consider the data gone and perform a regular installation.


@l’espirit rouge: I trust you did try starting Windows in safe mode and last known good configuration and that it failed?


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> @l’espirit rouge: I trust you did try starting Windows in safe mode and last known good configuration and that it failed?


Nah, I didn't start it in safe mode. Can I do that?


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> Restoration possibilities of a motherboard based “fakeraid” set is entirely up to the controller. Windows has very little to do with it, more than recognizing the driver that allows it to see a single volume where there actually are two. I haven’t dabbled with this aspect of Windows in years, but if it’s possible to do an in-place reinstallation of Windows with the controller driver loaded (historically you always got a question for loading additional drivers when starting the Windows installer), that may be the best way to hopefully keep the data.
> Otherwise consider the data gone and perform a regular installation.


But what actually happened here? Where is the problem exactly? Maybe resetting CMOS battery would help?


----------



## zynthaxx

l’espirit rouge;39499154 said:


> Nah, I didn't start it in safe mode. Can I do that?


Possibly; you should at least try.


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> Possibly; you should at least try.


I have no idea how. As I said, it's a BIOS that doesn't let me boot any further. BIOS does the checks, then another screen when it checks RAID and boom I get this message, I can't do anything further only press C. With only one drive of RAID I can try to boot further, but there's no use from that. I can't even try to boot from CD without getting error message, so Windows recovery isn't an option too. The worst thing is that all hardware seems to be fine. HDDs and RAID controller are alive, so I have no idea how something like this happened. Overclocking shouldn't have caused that.


----------



## zynthaxx

l’espirit rouge;39499210 said:


> But what actually happened here? Where is the problem exactly? Maybe resetting CMOS battery would help?


I would be very surprised if the CMOS has anything to do with this. Most likely your computer crashed at a point where it happened to corrupt some important system file, or crashed due to corruption of the file. Since motherboard based raid happens in the CPU and the CPU effectively malfunctions when you overclock it to the point of crashing, there’s definitely an added risk to your data involved in doing both at the same time.


----------



## zynthaxx

l’espirit rouge;39499810 said:


> I have no idea how. As I said, it's a BIOS that doesn't let me boot any further. BIOS does the checks, then another screen when it checks RAID and boom I get this message, I can't do anything further only press C. With only one drive of RAID I can try to boot further, but there's no use from that. I can't even try to boot from CD without getting error message, so Windows recovery isn't an option too. The worst thing is that all hardware seems to be fine. HDDs and RAID controller are alive, so I have no idea how something like this happened. Overclocking shouldn't have caused that.


Oh, right, I somehow failed to catch that it happened prior to attempting to load Windows. Well, in that case I guess breaking and recreating the raid (or continuing with single drive volumes) is the way forward unless you find some motherboard specific information somewhere.


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> I would be very surprised if the CMOS has anything to do with this. Most likely your computer crashed at a point where it happened to corrupt some important system file, or crashed due to corruption of the file. Since motherboard based raid happens in the CPU and the CPU effectively malfunctions when you overclock it to the point of crashing, there’s definitely an added risk to your data involved in doing both at the same time.


I got one BSOD and once hard restarted. But that's Windows, right? So what happened to BIOS? I only reached 224 bus speed, really pathetic overclock. Only 2.464 GHz from 2.31GHz original overclock. Even if this motherboard lacks many overclocking settings, I'm hoping to reach at least 2.5GHz. People often reach more than that: The Official Socket 754 Overclocker's Thread - Page 68

I love that thread, some love for 754. They often have some random motherboards too.


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> Oh, right, I somehow failed to catch that it happened prior to attempting to load Windows. Well, in that case I guess breaking and recreating the raid (or continuing with single drive volumes) is the way forward unless you find some motherboard specific information somewhere.


Finding anything about it super hard. It's old and wasn't popular back then. Also how breaking the RAID looks like, I can only boot with one HDD, but not with another.


----------



## zynthaxx

l’espirit rouge;39500178 said:


> Finding anything about it super hard. It's old and wasn't popular back then. Also how breaking the RAID looks like, I can only boot with one HDD, but not with another.


If you were running a raid0 through your mobo controller, your data is gone anyway unless you manage to convince your controller there’s really nothing wrong. In that case, just “continue” and set things up from scratch.


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> If you were running a raid0 through your mobo controller, your data is gone anyway


No, it's not. It says it will be destroyed, but currently is not.




zynthaxx said:


> unless you manage to convince your controller there’s really nothing wrong. In that case, just “continue” and set things up from scratch.


but pressing Continue means destroying the data


----------



## zynthaxx

l’espirit rouge;39501770 said:


> No, it's not. It says it will be destroyed, but currently is not.
> 
> 
> 
> but pressing Continue means destroying the data


No guarantee that it’ll work, but you could try to apply the information in this thread: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?52699-Lost-Raid-0-array-after-setting-BIOS-to-default
Anyway, I thought you said you had no important data and no need for backups on this RAID0. Now at the very least you’ve seen another use for backups: to save time in case of a malfunction. :wink:


----------



## Skeletalz

The red spirit said:


> @Skeletalz I knew you waited for some fire, well it finally happened, just that it had smoke and smell effects and on top of that failures to boot (but Raptors are alive).


Aww man that sucks 

This thread is conditioning me to never want to build a computer, I swear 

My next one will probably be some Thinkpad laptop


----------



## The red spirit

Skeletalz said:


> Aww man that sucks
> 
> This thread is conditioning me to never want to build a computer, I swear
> 
> My next one will probably be some Thinkpad laptop


I will scare you more. My main PC decided to go south again. BSOD and no further booting. This time looks like driver problem that was never there for a long time. I suspect some updates and possibly Windows 10. Some of my hardware use Windows 8 drivers and don't have anything newer. So I chose this to to risk with go back to previous version. It said it won't delete any programs, but it deleted them and only left Opera browser for me. I think I will go back to perfectly working 8.1. Windows 10 is only important for me due to DirectX 12. Yesterday was the day with no computer working and today I had English exam, now I can happily fix computers again. That really sucks.

I sort of want to switch to linux, but no games is a big turn off for me and I don't play the latest and the greatest either, so old stuff will not be supported.

I sort of want to get DOS era PC and have full control of all the stuff. Seems much more simple to control than that 10 crap I have been dealing with for a while. It is that bad. Also it's one of the least stable OSes I have ever used. On the least stable list is XP and 7 for me. Yep the best and the greatest to people, but hell for me. 8.1 was the bliss to use. I'm really not sure if I have any courage left to deal with 10 anymore. Switching back to 8.1 doesn't seem too bad.

Probably one day in the future you will find me ditching MS OSes altogether and using something like Commodore 64 and yelling at it why my code doesn't work. That's a real possibility and it's pretty scary.


----------



## The red spirit

I came back to Windows 8.1, seriously. First thing that I noticed is that it's much faster and smoother than 10 and also it feels like a freedom, meanwhile 10 feels like a jail. I don't know why, but 10 feels heavy, too much everywhere. 8.1 feels like lighthearted project of enthusiasts and it's really a nice project, not barely working one. I can say that control panel is much better than 10's settings app. Also 8.1 start menu is work of art, it welcomes user with beautiful colors and I feel now that I really missed it. Short conclusion is that 8.1 is great OS, but 10 is disappointment. On top of that 10 is slow.

Edit: Also aero is back, it's such a nice detail. I'm falling in love with 8.1. I just can't help, but feel that it's superior product. 

Edit 2: One more thing I noticed is that my CPU usage is much lower in 8.1, than in 10. That's really nice. No more clock speed spiking and no more power used than needed. This is heaven.


----------



## The red spirit

If there will ever be next Athlonium 64, then I will be going all out and getting AMD Quad FX platform with two AMD 64 FX-74s. That's a platform that has two sockets for AMD FX and Opteron CPUs. AMD FX CPUs for it were the last CPUs based on AMD Athlon 64 architecture and was the highest end choice for enthusiasts. I know that this monstrosity from 2006 isn't much better than comparable Intel offering of the same time, but I like weird builds too. 

For more information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Quad_FX_platform
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_...ndsor_Core_(90_nm,_dual-core,_dual-processor)


----------



## The red spirit

It's alive! The Athlonium 64 is alive again!!!


----------



## The red spirit

Again traveling in time:


----------



## The red spirit

I have been thinking a bit and I have thoughts that maybe that RAID 0 is a bit too much for Athlon 64 to handle and maybe it causes Athlonium 64 to have weird performance issues. From what I remember RAID 0 in benchmarks used as much as 10% of it and it's not very strong in the first place. Slower storage seemed to have less load on CPU. So maybe de-raiding HDDs might be helpful for general usage of that PC. Even small overclocks of CPU felt like they made a big difference. After-all even a single Raptor as OS drive is pretty fast for a retro machine and people back in the day rarely had them. It was mostly unnecessary and expensive thing. Maybe one of those costed 400$. More than many CPUs and GPUs.


----------



## clem

What monitor does everyone like to use?


----------



## The red spirit

clem said:


> What monitor does everyone like to use?


Mostly whatever I have, but from my own experience the best one I tried was IPS 24 inch with 100% sRGB 1440p monitor. It's stunning.


----------



## The red spirit

Discovery!!! Only now I found out one interesting fact about this ATI X800 Pro. It was fixed by someone and there are some details revealing that. That could be the reason why this card has issues. I'm currently running FX 5200 in Athlonium 64 and it felt good after those issues with ATI. From what I have seen here's a short list of what has been done to this ATI card:
Changed capacitors
Dragon head decal reprinted 
Possibly changed fan
Some connectors soldered
Backplate (card's IO shield) is likely not original, but found from somewhere else
Some things written like test passed or parts marked
So yeah I got not that good card, which was fixed by someone and it still has issues. If we try to imagine what happened to it before fixing, then I think it had blown capacitors after bad overclocking attempt and was put somewhere for a long time, because whole red PCB lacks saturation a bit. Maybe some components rusted a bit. Then good people somehow got that card and did repairs for what they could do. Likely touched graphics card BIOS and tried to make it stock, but subtle details like fan speed revealed that their job wasn't perfect and they likely didn't knew how to fix that, so they hoped that user won't notice that. Also that clay alike mass I have mentioned earlier could be from the previous owner, who didn't use that card after accident, still what that actually is I have no idea. My guess about overclocking is because in that era those ATI cards were overclocking beasts. Overvolting mods, huge clock speed increases, aftermarket cooling and easy BIOS mods. Lots of things could be modded in ATI X800 series cards. Knowing that first owner had to pay decent amount of money for this thing, he likely was a PC enthusiast. Athlonium 64 truly had issues with this card, finally there's a hope to make it good again by digging into ATI's BIOS. This is probably the only way to learn more about this card. 

BTW I looked at some overvolted overclocks and damn... First of all stock specs:
475 MHz core
450 MHz memory
1.31V core (data not from my card, questionable accuracy, but definitely lower than 1.4V)

Highest numbers I saw:
666 MHz core
600 MHz memory
1.9V core (on water, no LN2) (possible limit of 2.25V) 

That's without looking at similar GPUs with same core architecture. I think saw people hitting even 700 MHz on core with mods. Those were some really extreme OCing times.

Great links and videos of that era:




Tech ARP - ATI Radeon X800 Voltage Modding Guide Rev. 2.0
How Overvolting Works, The Dangers of Overvolting, and "Safe" Overvolting Technique | Overclockers Forums
Radeon X800 Pro Pencil Voltage Mod


----------



## The red spirit

Quality of Fractal Design Define R4's fan controller molex. Fixed this already, but makes me wonder if that was the reason why HDD shorted. At this moment there are problems with ATI X800 Pro, no video output at all. I really wonder how I find patience for this computer.


----------



## The red spirit

Maybe that ATI is dead... With FX 5200 PC works perfectly fine (at least outputs video, doesn't have flashing lines when booting and outputs everything correctly when it's POSTing). ATI physically is in perfect condition, I can't find anything bad while looking at it. It worked for some time, so it's a bit mysterious why it doesn't now. Anyway I read how graphics cards die and that ATI had multiple symptoms, so maybe it's truly the end for it. It's really a shame I can't fix it anymore. Hard to say, but after ATI, FX 5200 is a bliss to use.


----------



## zynthaxx

The red spirit said:


> Quality of Fractal Design Define R4's fan controller molex.


You're supposed to tug on the plug, not the wire... :happy:


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> You're supposed to tug on the plug, not the wire... :happy:


I know, but this is what happened. Also some molex cables in connectors had their holding pins bent and that's totally not my fault. I haven't used much force, so there's no way I could have done that, but somehow they became bent and some of them came out of connector. So I guess I found reason why Samsung Spinpoint shorted itself for seemingly no reason. Besides that, I hate molex connector in general. Why couldn't we just use something similar to FDD connectors or 4 pin fan connectors? They are far more durable and have exactly the same power specifications and use less space. I would really want to see molexes gone in the future.


----------



## The red spirit

My maximum overclock of Sparkle Geforce FX 5200. Stock it scored around 6000 and now it's in 7500 category. Nice improvement and good card for OCing. As you can see I maxed out core clock and I feel like this card can go even higher, just MSI afterburner doesn't let me adjust more. On memory clock I maxed out at 420, because Nvidia sells good weed. Even if I maxed out memory clock in afterburner, I only saw some artifacting and locking up, but it never crashed and ran UT 2004. In 3DMark 2001 SE it didn't survive so well, but it didn't crash, neither caused BSOD. In pure clock speeds I already beat FX 5200 ultra, but not in performance. FX 5200 ultra scores at around 9000 in 3DMark 2001 SE. Currently my FX 5200 is at the level of Radeon 9200, which isn't too bad. Overall card feels really agile, even if it doesn't perform very well. I may try to push core clock a bit further if I can find a way to do so. I really don't feel like it's bad card as it was pointed out everywhere. For low end card it runs its era games, better or worse. Now lowest end modern card probably couldn't run GTA 5 at 1080p and 45 fps. FX 5200 that I have runs UT2004 at 1024x768 with low-medium settings at around 45 fps. Overclocking truly helped it to be somewhat smoother, but even without overclocking UT 2004 is very playable. 

Stock clock speeds:
core - 250 MHz
memory - 380 MHz

Overclocked clock speeds: 
core - 325 MHz
memory - 420 MHz

Improvement percentages:
core - 30%
memory - 10.53%

And all that was achieved on stock voltages. That's a truly great improvement.


----------



## The red spirit

Turned out that previous OC was unstable and core clock was a bit too high. Now I wanted to bench again to see if Cool and Quiet has any impact on 3DMark 2001 SE scores, but first I had to fix OC. So I fixed it and overclocked memory a bit more and voila 7900 3DMarks. Amazing score for Geforce FX 5200 128MB. If someone id wondering then I have 128 bit model, not 64 bit one, so it's a bit faster and not ruined by too narrow bus. Now I really want to reach 8000 3Dmarks.


----------



## The red spirit

Going all out, disabled dbi out for agp trans. At the cost of stability I'm trying to get some 3DMarks. Not sure if that setting has any performance effect, but after turning it off I got slightly higher score, so maybe. I haven't noticed any AGP noise and am not sure how that looks like, mostly because there's no information about it.

Going for the second run to check if gains are real or just small deviations in score. Let this be the theme for FX 5200 overclocking:


----------



## The red spirit

Second run results! Still keeps accelerating! Maybe disabling that dbi out for agp trans actually works. Maybe OC is still unstable, so I get unreliable results. Going to try enabling BIOS cacheable then.


----------



## The red spirit

With BIOS cacheable enabled I see no improvement and potential reduction of performance. Maybe size of L2 cache matters, even if many reviewers said opposite back in the day. For sure CPU clock speed matters more, but it seemed like cache was almost useless. Now I'm gonna disable this and try memory hole setting, maybe it will have some effect on PCI cards and could boost performance a bit.


----------



## The red spirit

Meh, no magic today I guess. Going to look into BIOS more.


----------



## The red spirit

That's it, ATI X800 XT PE AGP is bought. It's going to be Asus version of it with anime style cooler and fan which will have some blue LEDs:










While those LEDs aren't something very good looking, I actually find cooler decal good looking. Also card should have dark orange or brown PCB.

My specific card looks like this (pic from ebay, so won't be here for too long):


----------



## The red spirit

I swear getting computer hardware is better than drugs. Finally Athlon 64 3400+ arrived:









That one looked awesome, but first glimpse on other side didn't:









Then slowly moving and seeing the whole chip:









Looks like someone didn't handle it well, so many scratches, but hey if it works, it works and that's gonna be so good.

Now in comparison with 3200+:









No contest, my 3200+ looks perfect compared to that trash can 3400+. 3200+ is in pristine condition, but that doesn't really matter, it's all about that clock speed, the whole whopping 2.4GHz!

And it works, jeez I'm so excited about those 2.4 GHz:









Fired up UT2004, later UT99 and it didn't crash, so stability is alright. Later I moved to 3DMark 2001 SE:









That's the score with maximum OC preset on FX 5200. 

And now Athlonium 64 feels very agile. In UT2004 frame dropping is much lower. General usage in Windows feels really fast. Anyway it's still identified as unknown AMD processor in 3DMark's system info tool. It works and really well, so maybe that tool isn't dependable. I dunno, I'm too excited about 200MHz increase and its effects on general computer performance, seems like marginal improvement, but it feels like a lot. Upgrade was totally worth it. Now I'm going to OC this thing, at least I will try. Would be very disappointing if it didn't reach 2.5GHz. Everything else above that is a bonus.


----------



## The red spirit

Overclocking results were even less than 100 MHz. lol. Motherboard when CPU is loaded drops voltage and that seems to cause instability, so I think that it's motherboards fault. Anyway Athlon 64 3400+ uses 89W and is one of the most power hungry socket 754 processors ever made. Anyway 2.4 GHz seems to be fast enough for anything I try.


----------



## The red spirit

After CPU upgrade that annoying CPU hanging bug disappeared. Honestly I think that CPU may have some of its parts degraded from 13 year daily usage. Another unexpected thing was that some pins of CPU were bent, so I think that happened after heatsink pulled it outta its socket without unlocking socket. Thermal paste had lots of pressure, so much that one would literally need hammer (K8 architecture is called hammer too, I guess I know why) to take CPU of heatsink, if person didn't want to slide it off that heatsink. Locking mechanism barely has any holding power in comparison.


----------



## The red spirit

New ATI arrived (actually that happened two or three days ago, but I didn't have any time for posting anything). The ASUS AX800 XT with ATI X800 XT Platinum Edition VPU (Video Processing Unit). It's fastest graphics card of 2004. I got it in huge box. Box was so big that I thought that graphics card will be with its original box and some extras, but no it was just graphics card in antistatic bag. Pictures taken of card as it is, no cleaning or taking it apart:










































It even has ATI Rage Theater chip, so it means it has VIVO functionality (Video Input Video Output), meaning it can not only output video, but also capture video:









Yellow floppy alike power connector isn't for power. It's for connecting front panel of this video card, which should have some video inputs. I certainly know nothing about it. It doesn't seem like it was packed in original box with every card either, so it's likely a very rare thing. Anyway for VIVO functionality it's not vital, so this cool feature of capturing video can be used if person has cables needed (which I likely have). Anyway video quality is probably very sad for 2018 standards. So It's just a cool feature.

I said something about LEDs. There are four of them if they all work. They are blue. Nothing more to say here. No pictures as my phone's camera really won't handle dark environment shots with four glowing dots well. Those four LEDs are positioned in center fan hub, in form of square. They don't spin, they stay static.

Card itself is surprisingly very clean, so I fail to see a point of cleaning it. Thermal paste may be old, but I'm not too sure if previous owner changed it (probably wrote that in eBay description). Temps are fine and fan has decent auto control. Finally no dodgy BS like with ATI X800 Pro which died not long ago. In next post I will be focusing on overclocking and comparison with FX 5200.


----------



## The red spirit

First of all I will be talking about overclocking here. ATI X800 XT PE doesn't overclock well at all. Measly +20 MHz on core and similar luck with OCing memory. 3DMark 2001 SE score seems to not change at all, so I see no point in overclocking this thing. Meanwhile X800 Pro was great overclocker as from factory it is clocked much lower and has 4 pipelines less, so more thermal headroom. FX 5200 is amazing overclocker. over 30% overclocks on core and memory. That's the best overclocking card I have ever used, despite being such low end one. With time I developed tender spot in my hearth for it. Yet overclocks are great, but 3DMark score jumped from mid 6000s to slightly over 8000 with all OCs. In picture you can see highest score I was able to achieve on that card:









Truly amazing card for what it offers, but it's not really great in practice. In this post I decided to show the difference between FX 5200 and ATI X800 XT PE in some games, that hey both can run at playable framerates, while pushing the best graphics they can handle, but first of all I want to show perC looks like rendered in Opera at 720p, which is the highest 16:9 resolution on FX 5200 (starting page at the top):









All screenshots were captured by Fraps, in past it had no ability to capture shader based filtering, so I'm not sure if this time there's no problem with that.

*Far Cry*

Catacombs map

FX 5200 800x600 lowest settings, textures at high around 30 FPS:

















ATI X800 XT PE 1280x1024 maximum settings, FPS is at around 40:

















Mini conclusion:
Despite there being big difference in settings and resolution FarCry doesn't look very differently. Resolution and textures make the biggest perceivable difference. At higher resolution things are more easy to see, at anything lower than 800x600 its hard to see important stuff, so would say that's unplayable, even if FPS is over 9000.

*Unreal Tournament 2004*

map DE-Osiris2

FX 5200 1024x768 mixed settings (mostly medium settings), average FPS is at around 80, but often dips to 40s:

























ATI X800 XT PE 1280x1024 maximum settings, average FPS is at around 90, but often dips to 40s:

























Mini conclusion:
Again the case of resolution and textures having the biggest importance, just that this time we can see positive effects of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. If you look precisely, you can see that shots done with ATI card contain more environmental details and slightly more polygons. Anyway in such paced game minor differences barely matter, so resolution and textures are most important here.

*Call of Duty 2*:

mission pipeline

FX 5200 640x480 lowest settings possible FPS around 40 (in pipes reaches 90):

















ATI X800 1280x1024 maximum settings, except DirectX is 7 (less drops, more stable), FPS around 70 (in pipes over 120):

































Mini conclusion:
FX 5200 here loses horrible, it is only capable of rendering this game at 'playable' FPS, yet such low resolution totally ruins experience. First time ATI X800 XT PE is beating FX 5200 by huge margin in perceivable graphical differences. Everything on ATI looks much better

Conclusion:
FX 5200 wasn't the fastest thing ever made, but it's not total crap. Certainly isn't video decelerator (S3 ViRGE, I'm looking at you), it's much better than rendering with CPU and is far from such atrocious level. Just like GT 710 now, FX 5200 is capable of running every game of 2004 at playable FPS, which is great as GT 710 totally can't match that now (it even gets beaten by Intel integrated graphics). As low end card it has very bad reputation, but for no good reason. At the time it made more sense to buy Geforce 4 4200 Ti. FX 5200 is pretty good for what it was made and is still not obsolete for multimedia purposes (runs 1080p movie just fine) that's great, but my model is probably as best as FX 5200 could be, there was really horrible version called FX 5200 LE, which has twice as slow memory and can run without any heatsink. As I know it's two times slower than normal FX 5200 and that's totally not acceptable, even in 2003. Another bad version was 64 bit FX 5200 which is also slower than 128 bit version by decent margin. ATI X800 XT PE is the best VPU of 2004 and truly shows that, but it's a bit dissapointing for me that it only reaches over 21000 3DMarks:









That's very close to overclocked ATI X800 Pro which lacks 4 pipelines. Also in many games I can crank up graphical settings much higher than with FX 5200, but not always ATI makes a big difference in perceivable graphics quality, which is a shame. FX 5200 can handle great texture detail, thanks to its 128 MB VRAM. Many times it's enough for high texture settings, but cranking up resolution on FX 5200 is harder as core a bit weak for doing so. ATI comes with 256 MB of VRAM, which was overkill for 2004, yet texture quality rarely can be set higher than on FX 5200, but resolution and various filtering are great additions. Too bad for it's price point it's still barely worth it even now. In 2004 it was doomed card as it came with soon to be obsolete pixel shader model 2 capabilities and supported only maximum version of DirectX 9.0b, both became almost obsolete after year or two. Meanwhile Nvidia in their 6000 series cards put pixel shader 3 and DirectX 9.0c support, which survived at least 5 years if not around 10. After that card became way too slow for anything called "gaming". So ATI was ultimate choice for braindead enthusiasts and PC hardware freaks (also people who understand aesthetics as 6800 series cards were ugly as hell), yet nVidia was for future oriented gamers and latest tech fans, who were willing to purchase dual slot card (at the time that was considered as being huge). Both of them were fast (ATI X800 XT PE and 6800 ultra) just that ATI at the time averaged slightly better in games, but became soon obsolete tech. Imo nVidia won that card battle. Also it's worth to say that AGP slot started to become obsolete in high end card field, 2004 was the last year when both major manufacturers made their ultimate cards for AGP slot. PCI-Express was all rage and very fast replaced AGP.
@Skeletalz finally things are going really well, above is my history lesson lol


----------



## The red spirit

I didn't have any reason, besides desire to clean out that new ATI I have got. In eBay's description it was written that components can be a bit dusty from usage. Most worries were about hardened thermal paste, which I expected to find. While temperatures of graphics card are fine, I thought I could lower them somewhat and slightly extend lifespan this card. And I took pictures of disassembly. I think I like to examine the stuff I get. So here are the photos (different camera, directional LED bulb illumination):









Took off the cooler, thermal paste looks fresh, which I totally didn't expect. Also I thought that under heatsink there would be dust trapped, but there was barely anything.










Thermal paste on copper heatsink










Cleaned thermal paste off the core and here you can see main graphics processing unit










Clean heatsink, but there are some small dents on that part that touches core. It's just a minor flaw










Some visible dust, which is almost invisible. I noticed one difference in plastic cover design compare to reference one. Rounded corner is covered, meanwhile in ATI's reference design there's no cover there. Clear part doesn't have mini cracks, unlike reference card.










Copper heatsink is slightly dusty, but again for what should be expected it's almost perfectly clean.










Removed fan reveals some discolored copper and some scratches.










Beauty










Finally some dust, which is a bit unusual in its shape.










Looks like owner replaced oil too. Damn, that's a nice extra, he should have written that in eBay's description. Respect for him anyway.










After cleaning it looks exactly the same.










Looks very clean now.










Clear part of cooler is still in great shape, which is truly amazing for such an old card. I expected some scratches.










Some Arctic Cooling MX-2 here.










Blades were a bit dusty, but after dry cleaning they look perfect. That's likely the only part of this graphics card that actually benefited from cleaning.


































Closer shots of assembled and clean card










Looks like I did almost nothing, but still this work required some tools 

For the first time I'm disappointed in attempting to clean graphics card. I totally didn't expect to see anyone to clean thing like this so well and thoroughly, but at the same time it's nice to see that some people care about such things. I really had mixed feelings after this cleaning attempt.


----------



## The red spirit

Some words about processor evolution:
After reading more about CPU history it seems to me that single core performance peak was reached with Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 in 2004. No fanboyism here, but book stated so (excepted book doesn't talk much about AMD). With the race of clock speed mostly became dead single core performance gains. Plateau was reached and engineers couldn't push more performance out of single core (or thread). What we are seeing now are mostly minor adjustments to pipeline(s), cache improvements, smaller manufacturing process. In single core stuff things started to move at snail pace and many tasks are relying only on such thing. Adding more cores and threads wasn't a great solution as many tasks couldn't be parallelized and rest cause lots of headache to developers (yep, they didn't became lazy). This is imperfect solution and in the future there are options how to solve that. 1 is to help CPU with deeper GPU or other processor acceleration, 2 could be redesigning CPU with different materials, but that won't lasts very long as new plateau would be reached. People blaming Intel from stagnancy are wrong, people buying AMD are semi-wrong believing that more cores are better.

Some words about AMD K8 and Intel Pentium 4 architectures:
It's not hard to hear how Pentium 4 was a failure and AMD was superior. I finally found reasons for such things. After battle of AMD's K7 and Pentium 3 architecture, both makers needed new architecture to increase speed further. AMD decided build their new architecture with processor having shorter pipeline with having somewhat simpler path of data traveling in CPU itself. They didn't expect Intel to release over 3GHz processors so fast or maybe thought they can make processors better. Anyway decision of shorter pipeline meant that AMD's K8 architecture processors would run relatively lower clock speeds, requiring somewhat less voltage to keep it stable and as consequence making processor cooler. Intel expected that newer software would benefit from longer pipeline, but for longer pipeline to work as good as shorter one, software needed to be written to take advantage of more complex data traveling in CPU. For short pipeline advantageous software clock speed of processor had to be higher to perform as good as slower clocked short pipelined CPU. Both companies had vision of the future, unfortunately after AMD's K8 and Pentium 4 debuts problem became visible. Software was mostly great for short pipeline CPU and almost none of it took advantage of longer one, except some programs. Both CPUs were a technological advancement, but Intel's vision was a miscalculation. To compensate the lack of performance Intel decided to increase clock speed, but more clock speed required more volts and one increase in voltage equals to quadruple increase in heat generation. Intel was stomped hard by conservative tactics of AMD and their clock speed increment tactics were only somewhat good. To reach same performance of AMD's CPU they needed much higher clock speed and much more volts. So Intel couldn't afford to lose time in competition did that. It was desperate situation for Intel as users quickly noticed that their new Pentium 4s were rather slow and very hot. One Pentium 4 release, had sudden Nortwood death syndrome. That was the end for Intel's clock speed increments. This syndrome was first ever mass CPU dying phenomenon caused by electromigration so fast. Some people were so unlucky that their processors died only after 3 moths of usage. Electromigration was mostly unknown at the time and Intel likely didn't expect such things to happen. Syndrome was caused by accelerated electron migration from their usual paths, causing small metal parts inside processor to break down, which means that CPU either dies or starts to malfunction. It was mostly voltage that accelerated electromigration to intolerable levels and many computers with stock processor coolers ran very hot at their stock clock speeds. Heat and voltage combination was deadly for processors, but were effects of reaching higher clock speed, which was needed to stay relevant in processor market. Later revisions were somewhat fixed and outputted less heat. Intel was experiencing very hard times, but that pushed them to rush for new solutions. Then very soon Hyper Threading was introduced. It enabled processor to process information in parallel form, which meant that information on single core could be processed with two logical (virtual or semi-threads) threads. Such improvement if it could be working just fine, then it would mean big increases in some workloads, effectively at the time making Pentium 4s attractive again. Then software was much better optimized for Pentium 4s, but not all of it. So death rate stabilized, clock speeds were pretty high and new HT technology helped Intel to be competitive again, too bad it was a bit too less and too late as CPU market very soon became dual core. Intel literally slapped two Pentium 4s in their first dual core processors, known as Pentium D (Pentium dual or Pentium duo). AMD released their dual core processors slightly sooner, but they had more time to make decent bridge between two cores. AMD's new architecture (which is still K8 just two K8s in one processor, known as X2) was much more elegant in its design to use two processing cores. Later in testing it became clear that new architectures are great, but rush on Intel's side caused them to spend less time on making Pentium D better. Intel rushed and yet again Intel was beaten by AMD in many tests. Later Intel realized that their efforts are mostly desperate and way too chaotic, so they didn't wait and developed new dual core architecture with shorter pipeline. Not only that, but discoveries made in Pentium 4 era were applied and smaller manufacturing process was chosen. Just only after 1 year Intel introduced Core 2 Duo. At the time Core 2 Duo was much more superior to AMD. Ever since then Intel wasn't playing catch up anymore.

Short explanation of what is pipeline. Basically every processor has one. It is hardware level tiny line in which data is spread out in processor. For example:
1. Instruction Fetching (IF)
2. Instruction Decoding (ID)
3. Instruction Execution (EX) 
4. Memory access (MEM) 
5. Register Write back (WB)

From this example it would be hard to take out anything, but generally shorter is better. Let's say each step requires 40 ns to be completed @ 1GHz. More steps = more delay. Rule is that every step must be made, even if no information is processed in some of them. So adding more specialized units to processor's pipeline may slow it down. One full travel through pipeline is one clock. Increasing clock speed helps to get more speed in operations. So increasing clock speed of your processor may mean that each step can be completed in shorter time. Same processor @ 2 GHz will complete each step in 20 ns. Theoretically speaking 2GHz processor would be twice as fast. Anyway speed can be increased with removing steps in pipeline. So even at 1GHz same processor, but shorter pipeline can be much more faster.

Some software was able to take advantage of all steps that Pentium 4 provided and then Pentium 4 processors were faster than similarly priced Athlons, but very rarely such thing happened in practice. Analogy would be acceleration competition:
AMD K8 - 800 kg, 300 bhp car
Pentium 4 - 1600 kg, 650 bhp car 
In straight line Pentium 4 wins (workloads in same conditions that both processor pipelines are fully utilized), but little and nippy Athlon beats Pentium 4 in corners (when Athlon level of pipeline steps are used in both processors). Athlon then is faster. As we all know straight roads are much rarer and it's far more often to have corners. Athlon car was much more practical for majority of people. Pentium 4 car was interesting project, but not so great in most races.

Some words about overclocking:
So now we know what pipelines are and how clock speed works in processors. So many enthusiasts overclock their processors, but what does it actually do? Basically more clock speed is desired and simply speaking, adding more clock speed to your processor makes pipeline steps shorter and we get faster processor. Soon limits of stock voltage will be reached and your motherboard will be requesting electrons to move faster than what voltage lets them to move (I won't talk about electrical resistance here). Too low voltage will cause your processor to not fully complete some calculations or output wrong results, resulting in system instability or crashing. Increasing voltage will help to achieve higher clock speed. Every single step in voltage means 4 step increase in heat output, so there will be plateau of what can be reached. Not only that, but as heat increases it makes it harder for volts to travel. This is resistance. Friction will increase making it further to increase clock speed any more. Each overclocker tries (at least they should) to find optimal ratio between desired performance, temperature, voltage and maybe some other personal criteria. CPU manufacturers clock their CPUs not so aggressively, expecting them to last longer. How long CPU should last is unknown as it depends on manufacturer's philosophy. At the very least their product should survive guarantee period. If it won't, then it's manufacturer's fault that they made a low quality chip. CPU makers offer overclockable processors, but they also say that warranty would be voided if they did so. At first glance it doesn't make sense, but from manufacturer's it does. They don't know your comfortable boundaries of overclocking, it can be only 100 MHz increase without voltage increase, it can be 1GHz increase with 0.4V increase. They don't know that, so they can't know how long your chip is supposed to last. Even if they knew your boundaries with all specific data, then they still couldn't know how long your processor (if it's not defective) should last as every single chip is different and can work differently, depending on how lucky silicon is. CPU manufacturer can only make sure that their processors meet their own designed clock speed stably without any other issues, like overheating or too fast electromigration. So every overclocking attempt and all consequences of it are only overclocker's responsibility, manufacturer won't help in case you may have problems.

Some words about temperature based CPU degradation:
This one is rather simple. electronics do degrade over time as they endure cold - hot cycles. Circuits inside cool down and get all the time. Expansion and returning into original size of components will result in those tiny circuits to break down over time. The bigger amplitude between hot-cold cycles is, the sooner your CPU will fail. This is more visible in laptops, where airflow is limited and CPUs reach higher temperatures. Desktop users can reduce this type of degradation by upgrading cooling of processor.

@Grandmaster Yoda I think that you may like this post about processor design.


----------



## The red spirit

Some words about processor evolution part 2:
I said that biggest improvements in single core performance have stagnated. To put it into some perspective, let's compare Athlonium 64's hearth the AMD Athlon 64 3400+. This CPU reaches a bit over 50 points in Cinebench R15 (score is speculation of how much faster 3400+ is than 3200+ and then score is converted from R11.5 version to R15 scores, this is decently accurate method as Cinebench R15 doesn't run on Windows XP and I'm not familiar with scores of R11.5 with modern processors). Athlon 64 3400+ runs at 2.4 GHz. My AMD FX 6300 at stock 3.5 GHz (turbo boost disabled, but even if it is enable, it doesn't improve score for unknown reasons) in single core run reaches around 83 points. 2011 - 2004 = 7 years and improvement is small. Modern AMD FX 6300 equivalent (or spiritual successor due to same core count) is AMD R5 1600. Its single core score in Cinebench R15 is at around 145. So many years and barely a 3 time increase in single core performance. I use Athlonium 64 as my daily computer as my main one is malfunctioning (I think that mobo is having some weird issues and needs to be replaced. Basically hardware errors and PC is rebooting after working for some time. After taking out lots of components and swapping what I could the only things left are CPU or motherboard) and Athlonium 64 is more stable. I find it being surprisingly usable even now after 14 years.


----------



## The red spirit

I have been using Athlonium 64 as my daily for some time and I was honestly interested into seeing how much can be done on this thing. I have seen in old Tom's Hardware reviews that there were some MS Office benchmarks and I had school project coming soon, so I tried to make Powerpoint presentation. Latest supported Office is 2010. I have used Libre Office on Raspberry Pi and it was very laggy, every transition was choppy as hell. I expected something similar with Athlonium 64. Too bad I really shouldn't have. It handled transitions perfectly fine. In slides I used some photos and some other effects to make presentation heavier and Athlonium 64 is perfectly fine. So Office productivity seems to be fine

Youtube is too heavy for this thing. 144p is mostly fine, but anything higher and sound is often dropped for few hundred miliseconds, so it's really bad experience. In some cases it's fine. This is mostly due to no graphics card acceleration, which is a shame as X800 XT PE could handle that perfectly and even with FX 5200 it can handle 1080p videos via VLC. Generally Athlonium 64 isn't able to handle traditional watching of Youtube well.

I have tried to play some high resolution FLAC files using Foobar 2000. No lag at all, only around 2-6 percent CPU load. It handles any music file just fine. I personally love how Audigy 2 ZS outputs sound, everything is very detailed and powerful. Still I think that Far Cry is probably the best game I played considering sound effects.

Web browsing is possible but often a bit laggy and choppy. Yet again effect of no GPU acceleration. Anyway handles even the most demanding websites, so that pretty good. Changing web browser to Internet Explorer 8 or Netscape navigator makes this machine fly, but lots of sites don't open as those browsers simply can't open them. latest Opera for XP is very supported, opens everything, but is slow. Scores 489 point out of 555 points possible in HTML 5 test, so it's almost at the level of modern version of Chrome or Opera.

Video games are obviously running fine, but I didn't try big variety of them.

Strange things happen with Torrent software. When stuff is downloading CPU load is often reaching 100%. I suspected Athlonium 64 here, but on my FX 6300 PC one core gets 100% loaded too. This is just painful experience as on Athlonium 64 is results in whole system almost locking up, making it useless for anything else. On top of that I think that overloaded CPU greatly reduces download speeds. 

I tried to run some photo editing software with high resolution photos (4K res or even higher than that). Photo Pos Pro ran slowly and had lots of limitation, because you HAVE to buy it. I ditched that crapware and installed GIMP. GIMP works much faster and generally almost never slows down. Whole experience was really great. Here's my creature in GIMP only:









Anyway it's not really surprising that it can handle that as I have read CPU review in older Computer Bild magazine (I have physical versions, yay). They test AMD A4 3300. It was cheap dual core APU from 2009. Basically very low end processor that at time was the cheapest processor that could be bought. That low end A4 chip handled Photoshop CS6 perfectly fine, except with RAW files, which I of course don't have. So it seems that photo editing isn't very heavy task or our technology advanced so far that it became very light.

I have tried to edit audio in Audacity and Athlonium 64 was able to do that perfectly fine without any slow downs at all. Too bad for some reason I couldn't connect microphone, not even to the back panel of PC.

Of course in this time I needed to open some PDF files. I used Adobe's software for that as Foxit didn't install. It opened that and everything works, but scrolling was a bit choppy, yet no input lag was there, so that's alright. 

App loading times and computer boot up times aren't horrible. After loading everything works great. When working with files HDDs feel snappy, but that's something to be expected from those speedy 10k rpm HDDs (I would want to try out 15k rpm drives tho). 

As much as I have tried lots of various software, Athlonium 64 surprised me a bit that it can do so much. Anyway anything internet is a bit too heavy for it, mostly due to no GPU acceleration. Generally usability is great.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> Some words about processor evolution:
> After reading more about CPU history it seems to me that single core performance peak was reached with Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 in 2004. No fanboyism here, but book stated so (excepted book doesn't talk much about AMD). With the race of clock speed mostly became dead single core performance gains. Plateau was reached and engineers couldn't push more performance out of single core (or thread). What we are seeing now are mostly minor adjustments to pipeline(s), cache improvements, smaller manufacturing process. In single core stuff things started to move at snail pace and many tasks are relying only on such thing. Adding more cores and threads wasn't a great solution as many tasks couldn't be parallelized and rest cause lots of headache to developers (yep, they didn't became lazy). This is imperfect solution and in the future there are options how to solve that. 1 is to help CPU with deeper GPU or other processor acceleration, 2 could be redesigning CPU with different materials, but that won't lasts very long as new plateau would be reached. People blaming Intel from stagnancy are wrong, people buying AMD are semi-wrong believing that more cores are better.
> 
> Some words about AMD K8 and Intel Pentium 4 architectures:
> It's not hard to hear how Pentium 4 was a failure and AMD was superior. I finally found reasons for such things. After battle of AMD's K7 and Pentium 3 architecture, both makers needed new architecture to increase speed further. AMD decided build their new architecture with processor having shorter pipeline with having somewhat simpler path of data traveling in CPU itself. They didn't expect Intel to release over 3GHz processors so fast or maybe thought they can make processors better. Anyway decision of shorter pipeline meant that AMD's K8 architecture processors would run relatively lower clock speeds, requiring somewhat less voltage to keep it stable and as consequence making processor cooler. Intel expected that newer software would benefit from longer pipeline, but for longer pipeline to work as good as shorter one, software needed to be written to take advantage of more complex data traveling in CPU. For short pipeline advantageous software clock speed of processor had to be higher to perform as good as slower clocked short pipelined CPU. Both companies had vision of the future, unfortunately after AMD's K8 and Pentium 4 debuts problem became visible. Software was mostly great for short pipeline CPU and almost none of it took advantage of longer one, except some programs. Both CPUs were a technological advancement, but Intel's vision was a miscalculation. To compensate the lack of performance Intel decided to increase clock speed, but more clock speed required more volts and one increase in voltage equals to quadruple increase in heat generation. Intel was stomped hard by conservative tactics of AMD and their clock speed increment tactics were only somewhat good. To reach same performance of AMD's CPU they needed much higher clock speed and much more volts. So Intel couldn't afford to lose time in competition did that. It was desperate situation for Intel as users quickly noticed that their new Pentium 4s were rather slow and very hot. One Pentium 4 release, had sudden Nortwood death syndrome. That was the end for Intel's clock speed increments. This syndrome was first ever mass CPU dying phenomenon caused by electromigration so fast. Some people were so unlucky that their processors died only after 3 moths of usage. Electromigration was mostly unknown at the time and Intel likely didn't expect such things to happen. Syndrome was caused by accelerated electron migration from their usual paths, causing small metal parts inside processor to break down, which means that CPU either dies or starts to malfunction. It was mostly voltage that accelerated electromigration to intolerable levels and many computers with stock processor coolers ran very hot at their stock clock speeds. Heat and voltage combination was deadly for processors, but were effects of reaching higher clock speed, which was needed to stay relevant in processor market. Later revisions were somewhat fixed and outputted less heat. Intel was experiencing very hard times, but that pushed them to rush for new solutions. Then very soon Hyper Threading was introduced. It enabled processor to process information in parallel form, which meant that information on single core could be processed with two logical (virtual or semi-threads) threads. Such improvement if it could be working just fine, then it would mean big increases in some workloads, effectively at the time making Pentium 4s attractive again. Then software was much better optimized for Pentium 4s, but not all of it. So death rate stabilized, clock speeds were pretty high and new HT technology helped Intel to be competitive again, too bad it was a bit too less and too late as CPU market very soon became dual core. Intel literally slapped two Pentium 4s in their first dual core processors, known as Pentium D (Pentium dual or Pentium duo). AMD released their dual core processors slightly sooner, but they had more time to make decent bridge between two cores. AMD's new architecture (which is still K8 just two K8s in one processor, known as X2) was much more elegant in its design to use two processing cores. Later in testing it became clear that new architectures are great, but rush on Intel's side caused them to spend less time on making Pentium D better. Intel rushed and yet again Intel was beaten by AMD in many tests. Later Intel realized that their efforts are mostly desperate and way too chaotic, so they didn't wait and developed new dual core architecture with shorter pipeline. Not only that, but discoveries made in Pentium 4 era were applied and smaller manufacturing process was chosen. Just only after 1 year Intel introduced Core 2 Duo. At the time Core 2 Duo was much more superior to AMD. Ever since then Intel wasn't playing catch up anymore.
> 
> Short explanation of what is pipeline. Basically every processor has one. It is hardware level tiny line in which data is spread out in processor. For example:
> 1. Instruction Fetching (IF)
> 2. Instruction Decoding (ID)
> 3. Instruction Execution (EX)
> 4. Memory access (MEM)
> 5. Register Write back (WB)
> 
> From this example it would be hard to take out anything, but generally shorter is better. Let's say each step requires 40 ns to be completed @ 1GHz. More steps = more delay. Rule is that every step must be made, even if no information is processed in some of them. So adding more specialized units to processor's pipeline may slow it down. One full travel through pipeline is one clock. Increasing clock speed helps to get more speed in operations. So increasing clock speed of your processor may mean that each step can be completed in shorter time. Same processor @ 2 GHz will complete each step in 20 ns. Theoretically speaking 2GHz processor would be twice as fast. Anyway speed can be increased with removing steps in pipeline. So even at 1GHz same processor, but shorter pipeline can be much more faster.
> 
> Some software was able to take advantage of all steps that Pentium 4 provided and then Pentium 4 processors were faster than similarly priced Athlons, but very rarely such thing happened in practice. Analogy would be acceleration competition:
> AMD K8 - 800 kg, 300 bhp car
> Pentium 4 - 1600 kg, 650 bhp car
> In straight line Pentium 4 wins (workloads in same conditions that both processor pipelines are fully utilized), but little and nippy Athlon beats Pentium 4 in corners (when Athlon level of pipeline steps are used in both processors). Athlon then is faster. As we all know straight roads are much rarer and it's far more often to have corners. Athlon car was much more practical for majority of people. Pentium 4 car was interesting project, but not so great in most races.
> 
> Some words about overclocking:
> So now we know what pipelines are and how clock speed works in processors. So many enthusiasts overclock their processors, but what does it actually do? Basically more clock speed is desired and simply speaking, adding more clock speed to your processor makes pipeline steps shorter and we get faster processor. Soon limits of stock voltage will be reached and your motherboard will be requesting electrons to move faster than what voltage lets them to move (I won't talk about electrical resistance here). Too low voltage will cause your processor to not fully complete some calculations or output wrong results, resulting in system instability or crashing. Increasing voltage will help to achieve higher clock speed. Every single step in voltage means 4 step increase in heat output, so there will be plateau of what can be reached. Not only that, but as heat increases it makes it harder for volts to travel. This is resistance. Friction will increase making it further to increase clock speed any more. Each overclocker tries (at least they should) to find optimal ratio between desired performance, temperature, voltage and maybe some other personal criteria. CPU manufacturers clock their CPUs not so aggressively, expecting them to last longer. How long CPU should last is unknown as it depends on manufacturer's philosophy. At the very least their product should survive guarantee period. If it won't, then it's manufacturer's fault that they made a low quality chip. CPU makers offer overclockable processors, but they also say that warranty would be voided if they did so. At first glance it doesn't make sense, but from manufacturer's it does. They don't know your comfortable boundaries of overclocking, it can be only 100 MHz increase without voltage increase, it can be 1GHz increase with 0.4V increase. They don't know that, so they can't know how long your chip is supposed to last. Even if they knew your boundaries with all specific data, then they still couldn't know how long your processor (if it's not defective) should last as every single chip is different and can work differently, depending on how lucky silicon is. CPU manufacturer can only make sure that their processors meet their own designed clock speed stably without any other issues, like overheating or too fast electromigration. So every overclocking attempt and all consequences of it are only overclocker's responsibility, manufacturer won't help in case you may have problems.
> 
> Some words about temperature based CPU degradation:
> This one is rather simple. electronics do degrade over time as they endure cold - hot cycles. Circuits inside cool down and get all the time. Expansion and returning into original size of components will result in those tiny circuits to break down over time. The bigger amplitude between hot-cold cycles is, the sooner your CPU will fail. This is more visible in laptops, where airflow is limited and CPUs reach higher temperatures. Desktop users can reduce this type of degradation by upgrading cooling of processor.
> 
> <!-- BEGIN TEMPLATE: dbtech_usertag_mention -->
> @<b><a href="http://personalitycafe.com/member.php?u=75795" target="_blank">Grandmaster Yoda</a></b>
> <!-- END TEMPLATE: dbtech_usertag_mention --> I think that you may like this post about processor design.


Ah, this reminded me of this old video:





Reading about CPU internals is kind of scratching the surface of a whole new field for me. I've been reading random blips of computer science and engineering here and there, but that will never replace a structured piece of learning material. Going through the fundamentals and learning upward. Interesting nonetheless.

A lot of people are interested in parallel processing these days, good for them.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Ah, this reminded me of this old video


Yet again Pentium 4 is laughtable. Got beaten much worse than in AMD battle. 



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Reading about CPU internals is kind of scratching the surface of a whole new field for me.


Same for me. It certainly makes using Athlonium 64 far more enjoyable for me to use. Or just any piece of hardware. 



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I've been reading random blips of computer science and engineering here and there, but that will never replace a structured piece of learning material. Going through the fundamentals and learning upward. Interesting nonetheless.


Yeah, it is. I started with Anandtech and Tom's hardware explanations why Pentium 4 was slow and etc. Then I started to read book called Structured Computer Organization (6th edition). It's one of the best books if you want to understand how does your computer work. I found it on net for free, so if you want you can find it too. I'm only at the start, mostly talking about processor evolution (from punch card computers all way up to Core i series) and structure.

Lack of such things in general media is becoming a turn off to me. It's almost always "can it run games" completely bypassing the elegance of how processor is made. For example my phone isn't great at games, but I have a really interesting chip right there. A true monstrosity of it's kind. It's a six core Exynos 5260. No only that, but it's not traditional six core processor. It's basically two processors inside two chip. One Cortex A15 dual core chip running at 1.5 GHz and another Cortex A7 quad core running at 1.3 GHz. dual core is fast and power hungry, quad core is slow and power saving. Most interesting thing is how they work. Cortex A15 is used for demanding tasks, meanwhile Cortex A7 is used for low-power tasks. Seems like CPU switching, but no, they are connected and smartly controlled to work perfectly together. Tricks don't end here. Both processors can be used simultaneously in case of heavy tasks. That's probably the most amazing thing I have seen in a mobile devices, dual processors operating on single device, while being clever controlled. Exynos 5260 was monstrosity of it's own. First mobile (not counting laptops, but maybe even then it would be true) processor in industry to have six cores, first to have such an architecture to join two processors into one. technologically it's probably the most advanced mobile technology in processors of 2014. To me it looked far greater than similarly performing Snapdragon, which even overheated. Ever since then Samsung has been making those processors. In 2014 they launched it in non-major devices only, now they can be found in their greatest devices. Now they even try to ditch Cortex CPUs and make their own custom ones. Their greatest one is 9810. Amazing piece of technology, which isn't receiving enough attention, yet it totally should. As you can see the whole magic is in processor's design, those details makes a big difference. It's not just your usual octa core, it's a smartly engineered octa core.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> A lot of people are interested in parallel processing these days, good for them.


Good for them, but it's easy to slap cores. You can do that, but it's very hard for software developers to actually make us of them. CPU companies have very hard time increasing single core performance as it seems, that all tricks are already done. From such standpoint latest Intel processors are more advanced than AMD's. AMD just semi-caught up to Intel and slapped cores, then gave excuses why their chips aren't great at gaming (kinda badly optimized workload for many core CPUs) and people are trying to make excuses with their lower price, on top of that trying to convince that more slower cores is a good investment. Also same people complain about how Intel is holding back innovations by marginal improvements in their processors and dominating in market. Too bad they don't realize that AMD processors are probably holding back market more without doing much improvements in single core performance for over decade. Many people accept AMD as innovator, but I start to think that AMD is the desperate fighter in the field unable to beat Intel and trying to attract consumers in many ways. Sooner or later people will realize that Ryzen is very similar to FX. Trash at single threaded workloads and semi-good at multi threaded workloads only thriving on somewhat lower price point. If my main computer will need new motherboard, I may consider upgrading it to Pentium G4560.


----------



## Grandmaster Yoda

The red spirit said:


> Yet again Pentium 4 is laughtable. Got beaten much worse than in AMD battle.
> 
> 
> Same for me. It certainly makes using Athlonium 64 far more enjoyable for me to use. Or just any piece of hardware.
> 
> 
> Yeah, it is. I started with Anandtech and Tom's hardware explanations why Pentium 4 was slow and etc. Then I started to read book called Structured Computer Organization (6th edition). It's one of the best books if you want to understand how does your computer work. I found it on net for free, so if you want you can find it too. I'm only at the start, mostly talking about processor evolution (from punch card computers all way up to Core i series) and structure.
> 
> Lack of such things in general media is becoming a turn off to me. It's almost always "can it run games" completely bypassing the elegance of how processor is made. For example my phone isn't great at games, but I have a really interesting chip right there. A true monstrosity of it's kind. It's a six core Exynos 5260. No only that, but it's not traditional six core processor. It's basically two processors inside two chip. One Cortex A15 dual core chip running at 1.5 GHz and another Cortex A7 quad core running at 1.3 GHz. dual core is fast and power hungry, quad core is slow and power saving. Most interesting thing is how they work. Cortex A15 is used for demanding tasks, meanwhile Cortex A7 is used for low-power tasks. Seems like CPU switching, but no, they are connected and smartly controlled to work perfectly together. Tricks don't end here. Both processors can be used simultaneously in case of heavy tasks. That's probably the most amazing thing I have seen in a mobile devices, dual processors operating on single device, while being clever controlled. Exynos 5260 was monstrosity of it's own. First mobile (not counting laptops, but maybe even then it would be true) processor in industry to have six cores, first to have such an architecture to join two processors into one. technologically it's probably the most advanced mobile technology in processors of 2014. To me it looked far greater than similarly performing Snapdragon, which even overheated. Ever since then Samsung has been making those processors. In 2014 they launched it in non-major devices only, now they can be found in their greatest devices. Now they even try to ditch Cortex CPUs and make their own custom ones. Their greatest one is 9810. Amazing piece of technology, which isn't receiving enough attention, yet it totally should. As you can see the whole magic is in processor's design, those details makes a big difference. It's not just your usual octa core, it's a smartly engineered octa core.
> 
> 
> 
> Good for them, but it's easy to slap cores. You can do that, but it's very hard for software developers to actually make us of them. CPU companies have very hard time increasing single core performance as it seems, that all tricks are already done. From such standpoint latest Intel processors are more advanced than AMD's. AMD just semi-caught up to Intel and slapped cores, then gave excuses why their chips aren't great at gaming (kinda badly optimized workload for many core CPUs) and people are trying to make excuses with their lower price, on top of that trying to convince that more slower cores is a good investment. Also same people complain about how Intel is holding back innovations by marginal improvements in their processors and dominating in market. Too bad they don't realize that AMD processors are probably holding back market more without doing much improvements in single core performance for over decade. Many people accept AMD as innovator, but I start to think that AMD is the desperate fighter in the field unable to beat Intel and trying to attract consumers in many ways. Sooner or later people will realize that Ryzen is very similar to FX. Trash at single threaded workloads and semi-good at multi threaded workloads only thriving on somewhat lower price point. If my main computer will need new motherboard, I may consider upgrading it to Pentium G4560.


I will take a look at that reading. I was interested earlier. There's a Computer Architecture course in my school, but it is more intended for the computer science/engineering students. I don't know if I will get around to it, but I believe it involves the physical work of soldering and so on. I'd rather read a book on it, because if I'm going to be soldering, I might as well have taken all of the circuit theory classes as well. I feel somewhat disappointed that I didn't take computer engineering because I would have learned more about math and physics in general. It would have been more challenging for sure though. But I would have also gotten my Networking knowledge in there anyway. Eh, whatever.

Back when Meltdown and Spectre were always on the news, I read an article where someone suggested that open source chips should be created so that vulnerabilities could be suppressed. I think the big reason why x86 was so successful is the backward compatibility. It preys upon the businessmen in all of us. It is interesting to learn how it seems administrators would rather forgo a new technique to make life easier, because when they tried to configure it, it broke something even though I found something easy to enable in a lab.

It's always been my sense that Intel chips were faster in general. They are also recommended for virtualization over AMD. I actually thought AMD was recommended for gaming, maybe because it was cheaper. The manycores thing is an interesting thing because that's why we get those GeekBench scores showing that the iPad Pro is faster than the MacBook Pro. It has what 12 cores or 6. Can't remember, but it would certainly beat 2 cores and four threads. The only time I've had AMD in one of my computers was super cheap hand me down computers that use low power APUs. The graphics cards tend to use slightly more power than Nvidia's low-mid end. That's why I went Nvidia. To be honest, I don't know AMD's naming conventions at all.


----------



## The red spirit

Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I will take a look at that reading. I was interested earlier. There's a Computer Architecture course in my school, but it is more intended for the computer science/engineering students. I don't know if I will get around to it, but I believe it involves the physical work of soldering and so on. I'd rather read a book on it, because if I'm going to be soldering, I might as well have taken all of the circuit theory classes as well. I feel somewhat disappointed that I didn't take computer engineering because I would have learned more about math and physics in general. It would have been more challenging for sure though. But I would have also gotten my Networking knowledge in there anyway. Eh, whatever.


If you only feel like reading about that, then read. I see no need to put yourself into yet another academic field. All they want are grades and new workforce. Especially if you think that you will have hard time in science, I don't recommend it at all, unless you are very passionate, then you should go.



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> Back when Meltdown and Spectre were always on the news


You make it sound old, it has only been 2 months, maybe 3 XD.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I read an article where someone suggested that open source chips should be created so that vulnerabilities could be suppressed. I think the big reason why x86 was so successful is the backward compatibility. It preys upon the businessmen in all of us. It is interesting to learn how it seems administrators would rather forgo a new technique to make life easier, because when they tried to configure it, it broke something even though I found something easy to enable in a lab.


In that same book it was stated clearly that backwards compatibility was very important in x86 chips. Pentium can even run 8086 code, yet almost no person would ever need that. You can even run DOS on latest i7, but really no sane person should (LGR has video about that). That's because rewriting code is expensive and waste of money. But ensuring compatibility of it is the hardest part, so yeah.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> It's always been my sense that Intel chips were faster in general.


There have been times, when AMD beat Intel:
8086 battle
80486 very close rivalry
AMD K6-3
AMD Athlon (XP), at least in value
Athlon 64
Athlon FX
Some opterons based on K8 architecture
Athlon 64 X2
Ryzens

There probably were more AMD wins in early 90s and late 80s, but I can't remember them. Basically Intel released chips and AMD made them faster. That happened until first Pentium, when AMD finally had to design their own chips. It's nothing new. What it's clear is that AMD is almost always trying to catch up, while Intel is dominating. 




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> They are also recommended for virtualization over AMD.


I have no idea why to be honest. Even something as low end as FX 6300 makes more sense than i3, which is two times more expensive. Only because AMD offers lots of threads for low price. Then i5 can't compete at all with Ryzen 1600. LGA 1151 i7 can't compete with top of the line Ryzen. Basically AMD is superior or you want to buy even beefier platform than that, but yet again Threadripper and i9 are close and AMD wins in value. The only greater stuff is Epyc and Xeons, preferably in dual socket or even quad socket configurations, but then price of that stuff is enormous and for virtualization I don't think it makes any sense. And that entry level FX 6300 should only compete with Celerons due to its price, not with i3. If we look back at AMD FX era (bulldozers) AMD made more sense for many consumers, but only lost if person needed semi-server level hardware as consumer level socket was limited to 4 cores and 8 threads. AMD FX 8350 offers 8 cores and 8 threads. Quite similar, but AMD costed much less. 




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> I actually thought AMD was recommended for gaming, maybe because it was cheaper.


Actually not really. AMD advertised FX (K8) processors for gamers, yet their Athlon X2 processors were advertised for content creators and media tasks. So maybe you remember that stuff. 



Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The manycores thing is an interesting thing because that's why we get those GeekBench scores showing that the iPad Pro is faster than the MacBook Pro. It has what 12 cores or 6. Can't remember, but it would certainly beat 2 cores and four threads.


Not really interesting if you ask me. Innovations almost stalled and adding cores is easy. What we are having now is remade server processors at lower price and more efficiency. Yet single thread performance is forever alone, at least it seems like that as marginal upgrades are barely felt. That has been happening since Sandy Bridge.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The only time I've had AMD in one of my computers was super cheap hand me down computers that use low power APUs.


RIP your poor soul. Those things are slow, unless you got semi-modern one. Things called AMD E1 have special place in hell.





Grandmaster Yoda said:


> The graphics cards tend to use slightly more power than Nvidia's low-mid end. That's why I went Nvidia.


Not anymore. RX series cards are very efficient. My RX 560 uses 65 watts only and doesn't require additional power cable. It's supposed to compete with GTX 1050, which uses same amount of power. GTX 1050 Ti doesn't have direct competitor, but it eats more power and requires additional power cable. At this point it's hard to complain about card efficiency.




Grandmaster Yoda said:


> To be honest, I don't know AMD's naming conventions at all.


It's pretty easy. The more the better. AMD mainstream graphics cards are now Radeon RX 5xx. Higher number in place of xx, the faster they are. Radeon Pros are workstation cards. FirePros are CAD cards. Vegas are enthusiast grade cards. That's very straightforward. I think there was another ones working as co-processors, but such things don't really matter for most consumers. For us maybe a bit, just to see all that power we can't afford.

With processors it's also easy. Athlons are entry level without integrated graphics. A4, A6 are dual core APUs. A8 and A10 are quad core APUs, A12 is the latest quad core APU made on old architecture. Ryzens with letter G are Ryzen based APUs. Ryzen 1100, 1200 and 1200X are quad cores with 4 threads (higher number means higher clock speed, X means it has XFR). Ryzen 1300 - 1400X are quad cores with 8 threads. All of them have 8MB L3 cache. Ryzen 1500 - 1600X are hexa cores with 12 threads. Ryzen 1700 - 1800X are 8 octa cores with 16 threads. Those all have 16MB L3 cache. All Ryzens are unlocked. Enthusiast grade CPUs are thread rippers. Starting with 10 cores and 20 threads, topping out at 16 cores and 32 threads. They all have 44 PCI-E lanes, support ECC RAM and support quad channel DDR4 configurations. Threadrippers have separate socket from Ryzens as well as Ryzens have separate socket from A series APUs. Ryzens can rarely be found in laptops. Epyc CPUs are server grade chips, replaced Opterons.

Everything is easy to understand in their naming scheme. In some cases Intel i5s are harder to know. Majority are for mainstream socket and minority are for enthusiast-server socket. Also bullshit Pentium Silver, Pentium Gold. Those don't make sense at all. And some of their kaby lake Pentiums have HT, some don't, you have to be aware of specific numbers of CPUs. HT makes a big difference for them, so accidentally purchasing wrong one can result in undesired big performance loss.


----------



## zynthaxx

The red spirit said:


> I have no idea why to be honest. Even something as low end as FX 6300 makes more sense than i3, which is two times more expensive.


AMD had huge initial problems with virtualization on the Ryzen CPUs, with purple screens of death in vSphere and general stability and performance issues in other hypervisors. That should probably have improved with later firmware updates, but it stained the reputation of these processors.
Nowadays if you look at the hardware compatibility list for the latest vSphere version, only EPYC 7xx1 is listed as actually supported by VMware from the latest architecture, while pretty much anything that does VT-x is supported from the Intel camp.


----------



## The red spirit

trooy said:


> Actually not really. AMD advertised FX (K8) processors for gamers, yet their Athlon X2 processors were advertised for content creators and media tasks. So maybe you remember that stuff.


Why are you just copying what I wrote some days ago?


----------



## The red spirit

zynthaxx said:


> AMD had huge initial problems with virtualization on the Ryzen CPUs, with purple screens of death in vSphere and general stability and performance issues in other hypervisors. That should probably have improved with later firmware updates, but it stained the reputation of these processors.


What about AMD FX (bulldozer)?




zynthaxx said:


> Nowadays if you look at the hardware compatibility list for the latest vSphere version, only EPYC 7xx1 is listed as actually supported by VMware from the latest architecture, while pretty much anything that does VT-x is supported from the Intel camp.


Not sure why. My AMD FX 6300 worked perfectly fine with that software. I ran some versions of Windows and tried Mac OS, which didn't work as I didn't do some things I should have done. 

I think that list is bad. Really, Pentium III is there, but almost no AMDs. Any reason why? I don't see it. I smell some crap there as AMD also has been known to offer more instruction sets in lower priced CPUs. Intel cuts some of these out from their Celerons, Pentiums, i3s. Only i7 is a full processor. AMD offers everything in low end FX, Ryzen and maybe even A series processors. I'm curious as to what technical reasons could be for not supporting AMD. It's the Intel that has always been leading in new technologies and soon cutting out support for older stuff. Best example is their integrated graphics. Literally Intel team has no thinking ahead and offer just enough for now. Even HD 4000 doesn't have some must have things, like latest pixel shader. 

Also Intel was sued for making CPU market anti competitive, so maybe something remained to these days. In such discussions we need real data, with very specific things that work and what doesn't work. Else it's just "this isn't recommended so I'm so scared of using AMD, OMG it's so spartan experience, I will buy Intel because team blue is cool and team red (green if legacy AMD) sucks". Not to get offensive, but we better have those details known than just simply look at that 'recommended'. I ran UT 2004 on that AMD FX computer just fine with maxed out settings and 1440p resolution. Hardware is unsupported, Windows 10 is unsupported, yet it ran great. Totally nothing was on recommended hardware list. My dad also tried to work on that PC with AutoCAD 2016, when I took out half ram and only left two cores enabled on CPU. He didn't have any problem at all and rendering was done more or less on nVidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti. He was engineering bio energy power plant. That happened 2 years ago, when that computer was working fine and I experimented with changing clock speed, disabling cores. Even such whack was enough for that professional work. For his work even AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 2GB DDR (at first it was only 512MB) and FX 5200 was enough. For making power plant model. If you ask, me this is pretty decent and totally not recommended. He used that old PC since 2005. Just to scare you more, it ran with stock AMD cooler, only had single hard drive, no ECC memory, case without any other fans, el cheapo 300 W PSU, computer had cheap Logitech mouse, cheap Chicony membrane keyboard and cheap 17 inch 4:3 early LCD TN screen connected with VGA cable. That was enough for such work, which looks serious to me. On top of that graphics card fan broke down 3 times and ran for some time without it working, likely heating a lot, but it handled AutoCAD and even gaming. Not bad, huh?


----------



## The red spirit

@Judson Joist @Skeletalz @Crimson Ash @Pifanjr @Grandmaster Yoda

That was a while, since last time I posted here. My main computer is fixed, it was a mobo failure. I think that CPU in Athlonium 64 shouldn't be suspected for those lock ups. Yet again a motherboard. I have been on eBay and couldn't find any of those legendary DFI Lanparty boards, instead found Abit KV8 MAX-3. Not too bad, but not really high end. Also it's a bit of downgrade, because chipset is slightly worse. Via K8T800, now I have board with Via K8T800 Pro. Main advantage of newer chipset is finally working AGP/PCI frequency lock, making it possible tot achieve higher overclocks. Also I have been thinking that now I have quite a lot of dead or malfunctioning hardware. Dead mobo, stock AMD heasink without fan (I fried it in experiment), dead ATI X800 Pro, malfunctioning Gigabyte 78LMT-S2P rev.5, burned Samsung Spinpoint 80GB hard drive (there's a possibility of fixing it by replacing burned part, it may work afterwards). Not only that, but after purchasing computer hardware for some time, it's becoming a problem with keeping all those boxes. Most of them are filled with something, like fans, cables. Oh and I have lots of working hardware, that is just isn't being used...

Anyway, my next project is summed up in this picture:









It's for Athlonium 64 and it wasn't really expensive...


----------



## The red spirit

Oh, it seems like it's still possible to find brand new socket 754 motherboards, for some reason left not opened. This might be a great option, in terms of durability.

Also I found DFI Lanparty board for Athlon 64 and it was for socket 939...


----------



## The red spirit

I have two new SSDs and none of them show up at BIOS level.


----------



## The red spirit

Got watt meter today. Was very cheap. Turns out my daily computer at full load (daily 4.1GHz [email protected], that's lower than stock voltage) (OCCT Linpack, Prime 95 blend, Furmark all at once + for some time tried Atto benchmark for SSD, but it had no impact) only reaches 253 maximum power usage and it has AMD FX inside, which is overclocked, RX 560, 4 ram sticks, 4 drives, 3 fans (+ 1 on CPU, +2 on GPU and +1 on PSU, meanwhile my power supply here is 700 watt unit. I tested many power saving features and to be honest they aren't all that good. For overclocking you should turn them all off (for wattage testing no green stuff was on), but it turns out that for daily stuff they also don't do wonders. APM, Turbo core actually make things worse as processor performs inconsistently and it really feels bad in games, when frame times fluctuate a lot. If I'm not wrong, C6 has some stuff to do with halting cores, too bad it's rather sluggish, it feels like computer version of turbo lag. Haven't tested C1E yet, but I heard it messes with PCI stuff and my sound card is in PCI slot, so I don't wan tot use it. The oldest technology for AMD processors in terms of power saving is Cool and Quiet. It's a simple downclocking, when load is low and it works really well. It's the only seamless power saving technology in my UEFI, which doesn't create any problems. Savings aren't very great, but it sort of works. PC ate around 100 watts at idle, with C&Q it only draws around 70 watts. At full load there's no difference at all. Yet even with C&Q off, when PC isn't loaded, wattage drops. Reason is unknown to me as CPU voltage stays the same, Windows power plan is high performance and clock speed doesn't drop. Lowest noticed power draw was only 43 watts at idle, that's without doing anything at all. Computer was left at desktop. I investigated sleep state and turned off state. In sleep mode PC eats 2.3 watts, when turned off it's 1.7 watts. There's almost no difference in sleep and turned off state. I think that blinking power button LED in sleep state probably pulls off all that slight difference in wattage. It really sounds ridiculous.


----------



## The red spirit

Now Athlonium 64's time. Peak wattage was 192 watts in 3DMark 2001 SE as Prime 95 is unable to load as much hardware as possible. Idle - around 100 watts. Cool and Quiet reduces idle wattage by 20 watts. Yet again small gains, but it's something. Impressively it only draws 1 watts from wall when it's turned off, that's really nice. Jeez, why only now I had to realize that computers actually don't eat so many watts and aren't such a big power hogs (My halogen bulbs consume 57 watts and I use 2 of them with one 14.5 watt LED bulb, so I get nice temperature and brightness mix). On the contrary to common belief that AMDs are hot and use lots of power, both systems are full AMD/ATI. They both don't use much power and most of the time are very cool. The only truly hot thing I have seen is laptop version Pentium, which literally melted exhaust plastics a bit and it's still really slow thing. To be more accurate it Pentium P6200 and in terms of performance it's very slow. I once ran Cinebench on it and it only got around 90 points, that's mobile Core 2 Duo's category. Surprisingly that thing is decent for many tasks.


----------



## The red spirit

Yet again using this as my daily, yet again I fucked up something in main PC, this time I suspect only something in assembly.


----------



## The red spirit

The red spirit said:


> Yet again using this as my daily, yet again I fucked up something in main PC, this time I suspect only something in assembly.


Fixed issues lots of time ago.

Now working on Athlonium 64. Finally found root of various issues in it. Turns out that for momentary lock ups, DVD opening problem was responsible sound card. Have tried lots of troubleshooting already and looks like removing it will solve it. 

Also, today PCI SATA controller card arrived.


----------



## The red spirit

Found out after lots of testing that something is really bad with RAM slots on motherboard. So I vent to ebay, looked at what's available and found Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard. It was the most promising option available, too bad not at overclocking. VIA K8T800 chipset doesn't have lockable AGP/PCI bus, so it is tied to CPU clock speed. It will have sligtly worse chipset, more RAM slots, more IDE connectors, more SATA connectors and a bit more colors.


----------



## The red spirit

Athlonium 64 unrelated stuff:
I can say that new AMD-based project is coming. Current codename is project "Mild velocity". I may change it later to something else. No other details will be given. This time project will not be about cutting edge stuff at all, mostly of sentimental value and nothing else.

Athlonium 64 is sadly waiting for new motherboard. Abandoned, forgotten and with parts missing. It's sad to see for me. Motherboard will come from HK, so it probably not going to arrive fast.


----------



## The red spirit

Finally Asoooooos (XD, Asus) board arrived.

Needs BIOS to be flashed from latest beta to latest stable version. Also I'm going with RAID 0 this time. Board feels high end to me. Lots of nice extras otherwise not found on cheaper boards. One of those are Instant music feature. It lets user to listen to music from CD or DVD without turning on computer itself, pretty cool. Another thing is integrated Promise RAID controller alongside with VIA's own RAID controller built into southbridge. Thanks Asus for that. Another cool thing or totally useless feature is that board instead of POST beeps can say them in voice and you can customize those voice announcements yourself. On hardware side I see green LED to indicated that motherboard is getting power. 3 PATA connections are high end compared to standard 2. Board has 3 RAM slots, instead of 2. Not sure if from factory or not, but northbridge chip has heatsink with thermal compound. Many more additional connectors are there, but I won't post the whole list. Layout of this board, unlike many others of that time is actually very good, no weird gimmicks like SATAs being way too close to CPU heatsink or 20 pin power connector being in the middle of board. Overall board feels high end and justifies that feeling with real hardware solutions. It's one of the best motherboards I have ever tried. I would even put it above Asrock 970 Pro 3 R2.0 in terms of features and high end feel.









^So here's a thing itself. Now I always check thermal compound of components I get. Many sellers change it before shipping and it's really nice, but sometimes they don't and checking is must.









^Still nice and blue









^This is how thermal compound looked like before me cleaning it. To me it looks decent.









^Small detail, but it's not nice. I didn't do anything as some glue leaves sticky residue, which is near impossible to clean without sanding (or hard work with sponge, which is still creating lots of scratches to be considered as sanding), so I'm not creative and just let it be.









^Reapplying thermal compound.









^Lots of slots, ports and stuff. Good stuff.









^Capacitors are still looking good. I love color scheme of this board. Overall electric circuitry looks "beefy" enough for me.









^Extra PATA, extra SATAs, Promise RAID chip









^Asus own design of WiFi connector. It was available as add-on purchase back then, but but now I'm pretty sure it's not great and impossible to find. Anyway it was ahead of time with such feature. Now many boards don't have that. Only high end models do. On weird side there's GamePort header on board, as well as FireWire, S/PDIF (header and connector), parallel ports and headers for less painful expansion (no separate PCI card needed, only connector with bracket).









^Some other weird things I only found on sound card before. It has CD/AUX header, really unusual.









^Indicating LED, Gameport, front I/O, removable BIOS chip, one jumper. Despite board being 'jumper-free', it's total bullshit. It has like 4 or 5 separate jumpers just for various USB ports and 3 for other things. So 'jumper-free' my ass.









^I/O shield I got wasn't exactly good for my motherboard, so classical operation of bending metal until it falls off was needed and even then some port holes were way too big. I think i got wrong I/O shield, but at least it was enough holes. Some sanding was required to remove sharp edges. It wasn't exactly "sanding", because this tool in picture has small diamonds.









^Closer look of Promise RAID chip.









^Since I had to disassembly lots of that computer, I decided to show all bents of Scythe cooler. The thing isn't reliable or robust at all. It's very weak cooler and I think that some fins may fall off soon, for now I doubt if they make proper contact with heatpipes. This Scythe cooler has serious quality issues. More modern Mugen 4 PCGH still is weak, at least fins don't fall off. In comparison Cooler Master's Hyper 103 is much stronger and AMD's stock units could be used as football balls if only they weren't so hard. Scythe's quality in comparison is atrocious. Mounting mechanism for time may have been "easy", but as always, those coolers barely fit into case, even to already huge Define R4, issues are even worse with Mugen 4 PCGH. I almost always put fingers with Scythes, hence it truly lives up to their name, I guess. This time I had to push bottom sliding pic and due to lots of pressure needed hand with lots of force slipped and hit RAM. My finger was bleeding. Meanwhile top pin has to be put of plastic clip, which you probably don't even see, then your hand barely fits and you need lots of force to slide it. Pure horror. They could have used screws for that and avoided such problems. At least those coolers cool really well, so they aren't total crap. I think if this cooler finally is going to fall apart, I'm not bothering with retro cooling solutions and getting modern cooler for socket 754. They are still being made, even watercooling. Something like Artic Freezer 7 rev. 2 looks nice, but I would like top-blower style cooler.









^Yeah, more bent fins









^Beta BIOS issue or not so smart feature. It probably detects well only stock AMD cooler's rpm and if RPMs don't match it shows cooler error. 









^Booting screen, nice and green.









^Promise controller's RAID setup menu with two WD Raptor hard drives in RAID 0

BTW if someone noticed change in picture quality, then I have to say that I don't use stock camera app here. I use Camera FV-5, which lets me to shoot compressed, but lossless pictures (PNG) and I can even adjust level of compression. Technically it should be much better than stock lossy and compressed format (JPEG). Also it has more adjustments in terms of contrast, color, focusing modes. I slightly increased colors, because my 4000K LEDs (mixed with incandescent halogens) make pictures look paler than they look in real life, so I compensate a bit. Now I also decided to use centered focus mode, instead of whatever stock was.


----------



## The red spirit

Quick update:
BIOS can't be flashed via CD or USB and only floppy drive I have is in Athlonium 64. So project halted until I get floppy drive for other PC.

During testing out, it looks like one Raptor is dead. It had horrible clicking noise of death. If good BIOS version isn't going to help, then yeah the Raptor is dead.


----------



## The red spirit

Quick update:
BIOS is so frustrating, it really malfunctions. CPU fan failure error after every reboot, double booting (or maybe it's for dual SATA controllers?), random overclocking errors for no reason after rebooting, doesn't detect BIOS files. Interesting thing is that BIOS date isn't even close to what is Asus website and knowing that bracket wasn't exactly for this board makes me think that they flashed similar board's BIOS instead of latest beta BIOS meant for this board. 

On the happy news, I can say it's confirmed that one Raptor is dead.

Windows XP can be installed if VIA SATA controller is used, but Promise's drivers don't work, even when loaded from floppy.

Falcon 4 CD was used for troubleshooting hard drive problems, reformatted, but no luck. 

This is so frustrating and I can't stop thinking about ditching Athlonium 64 and making Athlonium 64 v2 with specs looking like that:
AMD Athlon 8xx (locked ones are cheaper, unlocked ones are more expensive)
FM2+ motherboard (only some low end stuff with lack of decently cooled VRMs left and only one board with A88X chipset)
leftover Palit GTX 650 Ti
2x2GB DDR3
1TB Barracuda Pro

This configuration should have Windows XP drivers and should be far more reliable than Athlonium 64 ever was. I guess I finally realized that Athlonium 64 is ancient and one of those things we are glad to be gone as we have it much better now. Sad.


----------



## The red spirit

Now what I learned about component reliability over time:
Motherboards - they die and malfunction properly. Most unreliable thing (my 4 year old Gigabyte also is dead) and issues are hard to track down.
Hard drives - generally reliable, easy to spot problems, can last century just fine.
CPU coolers - now they are far better than they were then. No more weird designs and crappy mounting or tacky cheap LEDs. Generally accepted that they don't lose reliability, but I suspect hat due to lots of heat and cold cycles heatpiped coolers can lose reliability as fins are probably only hard pressed into heat pipes and those cycles loosen them up to the point of them just falling apart.
Fans - surprisingly even sleeve bearing fans survive decades. Small 40mm fans on the other hand don't. They have to spin much faster and they don't move much air, so higher friction just can't be avoided. Therefore smaller fan is, the less reliable it should be, but that's without counting in centrifugal forces. 
Graphics cards - they can and do die, usually very easy to spot failed card. Low end cards might be more reliable due to less heat cycles, which kill all electronics over time.
RAM - pretty much bullet proof, failures can be spotted in Memtest86.
CPUs - bullet proof mostly. Maybe extremely highly overclocked ones last less, but I think that motherboard even then will fail faster than CPU.
Floppy drives - pretty much bullet proof.
DVD drives - rare to see failure, but original DVD drive of this computer broke down, so yeah. They can fail too.
Cases - low quality stuff may not last a day at all, due to higher screw overtightening expectability. High end cases on the other hand last as long as they look like metal. They are more likely to go out of style, not support big fans rather than have failures, like things breaking down or metal rusting.
Sound cards - generally bullet proof if they work on day they were purchased.
56k modems - generally bullet proof.

In short most unreliable things are:
1. Motherboards
2. Graphics cards
3. Hard drives
4. Small fans
5. Anything else (excluding power supplies as one wasn't in Athlonium 64 anymore, but is still functioning well besides being simple 300 watt low end unit)


----------



## The red spirit

Finally I have pushed myself to work on Athlonium 64 yet again and things are seriously bad. I couldn't make AFUDOS work in any way, Promise controller on hardware side works, but not even drivers from their official page work. So I started making absolutely last resort steps. I tried my luck with AMI flasher, which works with Windows only. I installed Windows XP on slower PATA HDD. It worked well. Installed motherboard drivers, it went smoothly. Then used that flasher and finally something actually works. It worked, but I got excited, too excited. While flasher worked, BIOS was exactly the same version. I tried to flash older BIOS and it had even more issues like PS2 absolutely not functioning and hanging whole system if used, PC not being able to boot at all, random BIOS errors (seriously long column of those), but I was excited to see more overclocking options in there. I tried out overclocking. I thought it was going well, at least at 210 MHz FSB, but when I pushed PC to 220, I couldn't get it stable, not even with +0.2V. Which honestly sucks and it's CPU what is holding back, not motherboard getting unstable at these speeds. It was disappointing. I reflashed it back to latest stable version and it works better. Things that are annoying, malfunctioning or just bad:
1)That damn CPU fan error. I don't get it. It only functions (I haven't tested that either) if you use OEM cooler, but board itself isn't low end model. It's more enthusiast level board and I'm sure people who got them were enthusiasts. It doesn't let system to boot if F1 isn't pressed at every boot.
2)Double POSTing. SO if this board wants to have two storage controllers, it has to boot BIOS once, check controller. In this stage you can't go in BIOS, even if you press DEL. Then it reboots and enters another stage. Check controller and begins to boot. I hate this feature a lot. What's the point of Promise controller if system is made slower by super long POSTING? People put HDDs in RAID 0 to gain speed and this is literally killing all the goodness. Seriously, two controllers with such BIOS implementation is nonsense.
3)DVD drive being stuck on first press problem didn't go away. I thought it was motherboard, but now it looks like the drive itself or just how drive works in secondary PATA port. Annoying.
4)BIOS has less options than that other VIA board. Instead has trash like I have mentioned error code announcement in voice. I guess it weird features like it were important back then. If we think more, we can remember that early 2000s was weird time with lots of cheesy stuff. Computers often had acrylic windows, stupid single color fans, 80mm fans were everywhere, aftermarket cooling sucked big time, cathodes were in PCs, UV painted stuff was high end and etc. Some hardware like some cards were ugly as hell. I think we have it better now. Not to mention more reliable components and more standartization, which is very good for consumer. 
5)Asus EZ flash feature doesn't work. Maybe it works, but it doesn't "understand" anything on floppy or CD, which it should understand. I have found absolutely zero information of how things should be put for that stuff to work. Trashy Asus support and manual was shockingly uninformative about their luxury feature, which honestly wasn't so luxury compared to VIA's.
6)Third RAM slot is mostly useless. It should work and likely does, but at reduced overall RAM speed or 333MHz, which made a big impact on speed. In 3DMark 2001 Se it means like 10-15% decrease in speed, which is a lot. I understand it's more socket 754 platform problem, but I have seen other manufacturers to claim that they support three slots and 400MHz. It's disappointing with Asus.
7)Asus board had poor power related circuitry. There's a load computer phase at boot up, that's normal for older PCs. But Asus is too long and almost feels like something will fry. Thankfully nothing like that happened. Maybe it just lack luxury, but if computer is running and you are *******. Instead of turning it off with power button, you turn off power supply and then turn it on again (PSU), computer power LED lights up and computer starts itself. That looks a bit unsafe, absolutely isn't nice. Maybe capacitors hold lots of charge. That's kinda bad, considering I don't know if there are places on board, where I could have electrical shock. Doesn't feel very safe.
8)Green power LED indicator never turns off. Well, it's indicator that board gets power, but it's always on. PC is turned off and it glows, PC turned on it glows. BIOS has nothing to turn it off. It looks like gimmick, some nasty 2000s stuff with no purpose. Too bad, when I looked at new Asus boards, I found that same damn green LED.

I honestly have very little to say good about this board, other than it looks nice and high end. Horrible BIOS, atrocious driver support, lots of features malfunctioning or not working, tacky "features", poor power delivery to CPU, poor overclocking capabilities. At the time it has okay reviews. It looks like people got them working fine, but then again RAID was very unpopular so maybe they didn't experience that controller horror of Promise. VIA's K8T800 chipset wasn't known for great overclockability mostly due to non-functional PCI/AGP lock, so no one really expected to work well with that. Dual controllers were really rare, so maybe it was just early feature that if it works it's duper awesome, but if it doesn't then you would just couldn't get mad at it. Honestly, I don't see anything good about this board at all. I see lots of poor decisions and poor software, hardware side of it is below mediocre. VIA did it better, because it focused on important stuff and simplicity. Asus didn't and fares poorly at that. 

I absolutely hate it, that's it. I can't remember any other time when I was so frustrated at PC hardware. I know I can't fix many problems of it, because I can't create my own BIOS nor drivers. I don't want to use at its reduced capabilities as well, like using PATA HDDs only. I'm seriously confused what I should do now. I have bought so much of old hardware and big part of it became malfunctioning. Old PC equipment is seriously unreliable. Sure, I could have expected that, but at heart level I didn't expect that. I want to get away from those problems and just buy modern components, which have XP drivers. Yet again, I still have lots of older hardware that works perfectly fine like two CPUs, GPU, sound card, hard drives, other cards, RAM. Some stuff can be re-used, like PCI cards, but some of that stuff like hard drives I would be glad to have something more reliable as I feel like they are going to betray me soon. Some components like CPU, GPU or RAM can't be reused at all. So there are lots of losses even if I chicken out and get some new components. If I get old stuff again, I gamble. As I have seen already, most interesting components seem to stop working fastest. I talk about GPU and motherboard. I finally understood that for casuals like me, this hobby doesn't work. Old hardware has a place in museum or in hardcore enthusiast's house. I'm neither of them. Of course it feels good to actually have all them working, but considering how often that happens and how often I have to deal with trivial problems, I dunno. I sorta want to do it, but problems like these frustrate me a lot. I'm not sure if I could be happy with modern hardware Windows XP machine, I feel like it will lose lots of charm and time-machine effect, but at the same time I'm a bit curious. At this point I probably became too attached to this machine to just don't do anything or bring parts for recycling. Sure recycling parts is good if you absolutely hate them and want them to be turned into something better, but I'm not like that even if I hate hardware a lot. Knowing that this PC is from my childhood, at least was at the start, it's even harder to go this route. I don't wanna make it modern, nor recycle it. Anyway, I don't want to deal with lots of ancient problems either, which just didn't exist back when it was still in use by my parents. I have very hard time in making a decision, which will be so much fateful. I wish it never started malfunctioning and just worked fine until it became totally obsolete and absolutely not enjoyable to use. But it didn't, it still feels like it can be alive and kicking, it's just looser like me can't make it work and looks for the easiest route. I feel like I'm going to be an idiot for doing anything. I can try to keep it in it's era and try to make it alive, but that would be waste of money and potentially extremely frustrating as I will see many components dying. I can buy everything modern, but then I will never feel satisfied by doing that and will feel guilty. I can recycle everything and emotionally feel terrible. Whatever my fate will be, it looks like there's no good choice. Maybe only something less tragic, maybe.


----------



## The red spirit

So, yeah hard choices here. I decided not to risk at all. It's gonna be modern hardware with older software. Part list:
Gigabyte GA-F2A68HM-DS2 40.27 euros
AMD Athlon X4 845 36.17 euros
Toshiba P300 1TB 40.37 euros
and I was looking for RAM. I didn't want something amazing or something fast, just something that is 4GB. My only requirement was dual sticks, so they can work in dual channel mode. I found some kits and they costed like 40 euros. I know, it's not a lot, but still it feels like I may be paying too much for ancient RAM. Then I looked in single stick kits and thought that I could just put them together. I watched yesterday and I could get same spec RAM not in kit, but two sticks for 4-6 euros less and only difference is that there isn't any heatsink, ok. I thought it was ok, but today I looked for cheap single sticks and there was big surprise. They are selling 8GB stick for 12.68 euros. Holy shit! That's almost nothing. I said I wanted RAM in dual channel mode, so I ordered two of them. That's 16GB of DDR3 for like 25 euros. Absolute steal and it looks official. I feel like there may be a mistake, but site isn't sketchy and sometimes I see crazy deals like these. I think I mentioned Intel motherboard for only 11 euros, too bad Intel doesn't interest me. So yeah, looks like refreshed Athlonium 64 will have 16GB of RAM. I remember that 105 euros for 4 sticks of DDR3 16GB was a steal for my main PC, but this is just absolutely next level. It's not used crap either, new and with warranty. So now I think, I may use Windows XP 64 bit version, because 32 bit version only supports 4GB RAM, so anything more is a waste then and in this case I would be wasting a lots of RAM.

Total cost is around 150 euros.


----------



## The red spirit

And after months of waiting the story continues...

Well Athlonium 64 is still not alive, but issues were resolved.

I thought that my order was forgotten and I started contacting e-shop via emails and one day called them only to realize that I'm an idiot and forgot to read their email, which asked what to do, because that RAM is sold out. What a stupid mistake. Still things are progressing and very soon parts will be here.

Since that specific RAM is sold out I decided to do nothing special, I ordered Corsair 2x2GB 1600MHz CL9 Vengeance LP DDR3 RAM. 

After this change, I think I will still go with with Windows XP 32 bit.

Due to this major rehaul Athlonium 64 will never be the same as it was. It's a huge evolution for it and for gaming experience. Now it will be expected to see ultra settings in early 2000s games with awesome fps. It's time for ultimate performance!

1TB hard drive should be speedy and plenty for lots of games, still in case I will run out of space I thought of plan. The plan is to get memory card reader and then install games on SD or micro SD cards. Speed will be low, but still in era of 2004. 

Due to excitement I had after finally knowing that I will get parts soon, I thought of other things and got super enthusiastic. I have thought of getting external DAC (Creative X-Fi HD), adding heatsinks to motherboard, getting rubber frames for fans, prepping GTX 650 Ti with crazy Arctic Cooling S3 cooler, adding southbridge cooling, installing additional fan controller. Probably nothing will happen, but I had a nice time dreaming about all that stuff.

I think that AMD Athlon X4 845 needs introduction. It's special part, not only due to being spiritual successor of Athlon 64 3400+, but actually due to being very different FM2+ Athlon CPU. While its part number doesn't indicate any wonders, performance does:
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-athlon-x4-845-fm2-review,1.html

It's actually trading blows with A10 7870K, which should be faster. Thanks to Carrizo architecture being used for this specific CPU. Carrizo is AMD's more efficient bulldozer architecture meant for mobile devices. It makes this Athlon rare, special, unique. Almost all other Athlons for FM2+ platform don't have Carrizo architecture and are Steamrollers, Kaveris or something else. Carrizo being one of the last bulldozer enhancements benefited from such position a lot. Its power consumption of 65 watts is outstanding, IPC is better than of any other FM2+ CPU and performance is often good enough to often beat higher tier parts, making it the fastest FM2+ CPU out there at lower clock speed. The main problems of it is lower L2 cache being only 2MB and it being locked chip, meaning no multiplier overclocking. Still this chip unusual and as it looks like it even comes with AMD's 95 watt cooling solution. Meaning it will be bigger than needed, quiet and very cool. This is almost complete opposite of AMD's other chips at the time that were hot, power guzzlers, relatively slow and often good overclockers. And while some may say that Athlon X4 870K is faster than it, when overclocked, it's must to know that whole Athlon X4 800 series line up were poor overclockers and overclocked not very far. So gains are small and power efficiency can potentially be twice worse than stock Athlon X4 845's.

It was weird step for AMD to release X4 845 as its performance was rivaling top tier FM2+ chips and this one despite being superior in any other aspect was also much cheaper. At launch Athlon X4 845 costed only 69 dollars and Athlon X4 860K costed around 80-90. 

It had potential to cannibalize 880K's sales, but since media was relatively quiet about it, that didn't happen. Anyway it doesn't mean it's not special. 

I'm happy to comeback after this long break and as expected photos and overly extensive benchmarking will be provided. Despite knowing how much better it is to previous Athlonium 64 configuration this is, same tests will be performed.

Even with new heart Athlonium 64 will be keeping old memories. This time being better than ever.


----------



## The red spirit

...and after months of waiting parts finally arrived...

...Athlon came to reign yet again...









^Somewhere in TRS lab yet another AMD Athlon appeared









^It's AMD Athlon X4 845









^Still in the box









^RTX on









^RTX off









^When you buy Athlon X4 845 you not only get a great processor, but also great cooler. This is included AMD's 95 watts cooling solution. Let's call it "red top". As we can see AMD collaborated with Cooler Master and now cooler has their fan, fin density is better than stock AMD FX 6300 cooler's and it has a single heat pipe for improved heat dissipation to fins. "Red top's" base is made from aluminum. This time I was actually tempted to choose stock cooler over aftermarket cooler, because stock one should be really great.









^This is everything you get by buying AMD Athlon X4 845. Overall it's pretty generous bundle, box in real life looks really big, especially compared to A6 7400K's.









^This time 1TB HDD is used. It's nothing special, just simple 7200 hard drive, but it has more than enough storage and it should be faster than WD Raptor RAID 0, which is a huge improvement for Athlonium 64. I decided to experiment with Toshiba's drive this time, because I wan tot see how well they work.









^And they make it clear that you will be dealing with high performance goodness. Well let's believe those Japanese marketers then.









^Hard drive itself is well packaged.









^Here is its manual.









^And here is the drive itself. Looks nice, like a fresh breath from WD and Seagate domination.









^It's actually surprisingly lightweight and feels a bit "empty".









^Arctic Cooling's products comes to steal spotlight from AMD's "red top" cooler.









^In the box you pretty much only get cooler, those manuals are joke.

















^And here is the beast itself Arctic Cooling Alpine 64 Plus.

















^Comparison of size with AMD "red top" cooler. Arctic Cooler is much bigger, but I actually doubt its efficiency per size. It's hard to say if it's any better than AMD's stock cooler.









^Here is the whole package of Alpine 64.


----------



## The red spirit

^Here is the motherboard.









^Hopefully it's ultra good.









^Sides of the box are pretty boring and uninformative.









^Meanwhile back of the box contains some information about the product.









^And finally the box was opened.

















^Two SATA cables are included as well as I/O shield.









^And here is new Athlonium 64's motherboard. It's actually really small.









^Rear I/O is decent.









































^In the box there is another layer in which instructions are given with driver CD









^Here is everything you get with Gigabyte motherboard. Pretty standard package.


----------



## The red spirit

And building process has started!









^CPU is in the socket.

























^No joke, but Artic's cooler takes up half of whole motherboard, it's really big.









^Here is how it will look like with all cards and cooler installed. Motherboard will be hardly visible.









^I/O shield is in place.









^Motherboard installed, PCI slot covers removed









^Hard drive installed, cabling done

























^I modded case a bit. Since Fractal Design Define R4 doesn't have HDD LED, I decided to hot glue one in between of two USB 2.0 ports and here is the result. It should glow nicely. Later glow will be shown in pictures.









^Sadly motherboard doesn't have support for speaker, which is kinda sad. RIP speaker. It doesn't look like I can add it like HDD LED.

It looks like it's finally obsolete thing.









^The build is finished. Later I added rubber fan frame for top 120mm Cooler Master fan. This time it doesn't fan the fan and it works. In theory it should reduce vibrations, but I still felt them quite well.

























^And finally it's ALIVE!!!









^Athlon is detected correctly. Still BIOS locked up after a while. OS I though I will need to update BIOS. Actually BIOS was up to date and I used it a bit with a A4 6300. Still I overwrote it and then saved configuration settings. Thankfully it was just a bug and it workled perfectly well with Athlon X4 845 later.

















^Remember that picture of ultra stuff? Lol it has dedicated mode for 3DMark 2001 to boost performance. It's stupidly awesome. Also after some time spent using the BIOS, I can say that it's very functional and is miles better than Asrock's BIOS. I can configure almost anything, I have shit ton of various options that some I don't even know what they do. It's awesome to see something like that on budget motherboard. This time Gigabyte didn't disappoint. Anyway, when I had AM3+ Gigabyte motherboard, I was pleased with it's functionality, so it's nice to see them continuing this tradition. Now due to UEFI they can add a lot more settings and they do a great job with that. Respect for that.

BTW I took RAM out of "Mild Velocity" build temporarily. RAM should come tomorrow.

Still DVD drive seems to be stuck on first press, but it works on the second one. Also it's not detected as bootable drive, so I can't install Windows via CD or DVD. I will change DVD drive soon. For now I will try to use USB stick.


----------



## The red spirit

And what the hell I had with USB stick. Totally never again I'm trying to install XP via USB. Nothing works and errorstorms arise. Finally I just borrowed DVD drive from my main PC and everything went smoothly.









^I was so glad to see this screen being totally functional.









^The exciting moment.

















^Remember my case mod? It looks like this. It's pretty decent irl.









^After all the horror I had and wasting lots of time, I finally prepping the drivers. To be honest it's weird to say, but nVidia's logo kinda reminds of 3DFX logo.

Once software stuff will be completely sorted out and essentials installed, I will begin benchmarking.


----------



## The red spirit

Update:

I got so excited only to be hugely disappointed. It looks like even after such rehaul with nothing left the same on hardware side it would seem like there shouldn't be any problems, but I have got a cursed hardware yet again. Here is everything wrong with it:
Constant ghost messages of "Audio jack has been unplugged"
Even if hard drive should be fast it looks like anything hangs the whole system
Sometimes mouse cursor completely freezes for a while
In Furmark GTX 650 Ti has saw pattern in temperature always keep rising and then chocking for a while. Not only temperature readings are weird, but performance gets poor too.
Gaming performance in UT 2004 is very disappointing, being at almost ATI X800 XT PE level. Similar results in 3DMarks 2001 SE. In single channel RAM mode score was only in low 20000s, that's horrible. Dual channel RAM raised it to 36000s, but other problems remain.
Often PC freezes, but no parts of it are decently loaded. CPU, RAM, GPU and HDD at best are at 30% load then.

I have reinstalled sound drivers and that had no effect. In Windows Event Viewer there are some critical errors with Tcpip.

BTW RAM has arrived and I put it in:









The box of it was almost nonexistant and very boring + non-informative:

























I honestly don't care about box much, I just want that shit to work.

Benchmarking will be delayed as much as it will be needed to resolve problems. Hopefully this isn't going to be hardware hell, but as it seems right now (I'm reading about what northbridge does and how to configure it) it's going to be just as bad as it was with socket 754 build. AMD's FM2+ is really very tweakable platform, but at the same time it's hell for noobs like me. There's so much to go wrong and when it does, you better know what to do. 

Also it looks like there's no proper CPU thermal sensor anywhere, only package temperature. OCCT doesn't even see it.

Really now I'm thinking that maybe Windows is at fault, but maybe not. If it's seriously Windows then maybe Athlonium 64 will get Vista, because I really don't wanna deal with all this crap.


----------



## The red spirit

Small update

DVD drive came. No box, because I got bulk version. Actually pretty much all DVD drives can only be bought as bulk. It's pretty weird and I don't know exactly why is that so. Anyway, it's fine.


























After installation it works perfectly fine, it surprised me that it doesn't vibrate much and is really quiet. That's something I'm not used to. All my DVD drives either vibrated a lot or were seriously loud. The first task it had to do was to start memtest86 from DVD, it worked well, test was completed successfully. No errors after 4 passes, that's pretty good.

I'm now checking HDD with HD Tune Pro and it looks like HDD is going to be free of bad sectors and other misfortunes. And while this task is being done, new idea came to my head. I remember that there are 2 exclamation marks in device manager. So I checked what those are. They only say PCI Device, but second one had some traces of "encryption". Maybe I should check BIOS again and investigate CPU safety features.


----------



## The red spirit

Small update

HDD is fine. BIOS options didn't help.

I just came back to my main computer and holy hell difference between 1080p and 1440p is huge. Also when I used Athlonium 64 it felt like everything was fine and not so much out of date, but once I started using my main machine it felt like a huge jump. Not only resolution, but so much of everything is much better. It almost feels like a magic.


----------



## The red spirit

Turns out that wifi is still problematic. I have exactly the same problem I had with previous configuration. When torrenting speed at first is great, but after a while for no reason it starts to slow down to horrible 10kbps. Wifi card doesn't overheat, so all things considered problem most likely lie in shitty TP-Link drivers, which always were like that with any their product I had.

I'm starting to think that maybe old DFI board wasn't malfunctioning.


----------



## The red spirit

Issues mostly have been fixed. Turns out my Windows XP install had some stuff wrong with permissions or with directories. Windows Repair program saved me this time. Even wifi adapter issues are at least smaller.

Still I'm disappointed in onboard sound chip.


----------



## The red spirit

*Benchmark results part 1*

Note:
Issues solved, no 3DMark 2001 boost. Everything runs at stock clock speeds. CPU Turbo enabled.

3DMark 2005 22208 3DMarks
3DMark 2003 49786 3DMarks
3DMark2001 SE 39631 3DMarks
Cinebench R11.5 OpenGL 42.63 fps; Ref. Match 99.46%; CPU 3.71 pts; CPU (Single Core) 1.04 pts; MP Ratio 3.56x
Cinebench R10 Rendering (1 CPU) 3216 points; Rendering (x CPUs) 10447 points; Multiprocessor speed up 3.25x; Open GL 6206 points
Cinebench 9.5 Rendering (1 CPU) 506 CB-CPU; C4D Shading 695 CB-GFX; OpenGL SW-L 2382 CB-GFX; OpenGL HW-L 4670 CB-GFX; OpenGL Speedup 6.72x
PCmark 2005 CPU score 11583; Memory score 6518; Graphics score 19935; HDD score 4636
PCmark 2004 CPU score 11503;Memory score 8479; Graphics score 32629; HDD score 2854
PCmark 2002 crashes
HyperPi 0.99b 1M digits, normal priority 20.910s (average); 32M digits, normal priority 2h 39m 12.563s (average)

SiSoft Sandra 2013 Sp2 lite processor arithmetic 51.14 GOPS; Processor Multi-Media 76.73 MPix/s; Cryptography 1.670 GB/s; .NET Arithmetic 9.29 GOPs; .NET Multi-Media 15.25 MPix/s; Memory Bandwidth 16.961 GB/s; Cache and memory latency 96.3 ns; File system bandwidth 125.432 MB/s; File system I/O 309.3 IOPS; Video shader compute 450.05 MPix/s; Cryptography 1.649 GB/s; Memory Bandwidth 14.998 GB/s; Overall score 3.68 kPT

Passmark 9.0 crashes before installation (error "floating point division by zero")
CPU-M 1.6 Benchmark score 24158 points
Furmark 400x300 preset 3262 points 54FPS, 60000ms
CPU-Z 1.86.0 Single thread 99.3; Multi thread 276.6; Multi thread ratio 2.78
Qwikmark 0.4 CPU Flops 34 Gigaflops; Mem Banwidth 5 GB/s; Disk Transfer 129 MB/s
Winrar 2.994 KB/s


Geekbench 2.4.3
Integer Performance
Integer	7836	
Blowfish 
single-core scalar	2619 
115 MB/sec	

Blowfish 
multi-core scalar	11168 
458 MB/sec	

Text Compress 
single-core scalar	3224 
10.3 MB/sec	

Text Compress 
multi-core scalar	10263 
33.7 MB/sec	

Text Decompress 
single-core scalar	3629 
14.9 MB/sec	

Text Decompress 
multi-core scalar	13688 
54.5 MB/sec	

Image Compress 
single-core scalar	2912 
24.1 Mpixels/sec	

Image Compress 
multi-core scalar	10728 
90.3 Mpixels/sec	

Image Decompress 
single-core scalar	3131 
52.6 Mpixels/sec	

Image Decompress 
multi-core scalar	11147 
182 Mpixels/sec	

Lua 
single-core scalar	6048 
2.33 Mnodes/sec	

Lua 
multi-core scalar	15477 
5.95 Mnodes/sec	

Floating Point Performance
Floating Point	6233	
Mandelbrot 
single-core scalar	2108 
1.40 Gflops	

Mandelbrot 
multi-core scalar	7781 
5.09 Gflops	

Dot Product 
single-core scalar	689 
333 Mflops	

Dot Product 
multi-core scalar	2144 
977 Mflops	

Dot Product 
single-core vector	5054 
6.06 Gflops	

Dot Product 
multi-core vector	23303 
24.2 Gflops	

LU Decomposition 
single-core scalar	2220 
1.98 Gflops	

LU Decomposition 
multi-core scalar	3159 
2.77 Gflops	

Primality Test 
single-core scalar	5250 
784 Mflops	

Primality Test 
multi-core scalar	14447 
2.68 Gflops	

Sharpen Image 
single-core scalar	1946 
4.54 Mpixels/sec	

Sharpen Image 
multi-core scalar	7618 
17.6 Mpixels/sec	

Blur Image 
single-core scalar	2725 
2.16 Mpixels/sec	

Blur Image 
multi-core scalar	8829 
6.94 Mpixels/sec	

Memory Performance
Memory	4217	
Read Sequential 
single-core scalar	5160 
6.32 GB/sec	

Write Sequential 
single-core scalar	7354 
5.03 GB/sec	

Stdlib Allocate 
single-core scalar	2213 
8.26 Mallocs/sec	

Stdlib Write 
single-core scalar	2549 
5.28 GB/sec	

Stdlib Copy 
single-core scalar	3813 
3.93 GB/sec	

Stream Performance
Stream	5572	
Stream Copy 
single-core scalar	5295 
7.24 GB/sec	

Stream Copy 
single-core vector	6023 
7.81 GB/sec	

Stream Scale 
single-core scalar	5234 
6.79 GB/sec	

Stream Scale 
single-core vector	5898 
7.96 GB/sec	

Stream Add 
single-core scalar	5282 
7.97 GB/sec	

Stream Add 
single-core vector	6510 
9.06 GB/sec	

Stream Triad 
single-core scalar	5507 
7.61 GB/sec	

Stream Triad 
single-core vector	4828 
9.04 GB/sec	

Dacris Benchmarks 8.1
CPU 25900 MIPS
Memory 13900 MB/s
Hard Drive 43.7 MB/s (wrong HDD was tested, Samsung Spinpoint)
2D Video 22.8 MP/s
3D Video 174 TTP/s

Category Grade Weakest Component Grade Description
Overall 9.1	Hard Drive (7.4)	Web browsing, watching videos, playing music, file sharing.
Software Development 8.3	None Using Visual Studio to develop software.
Gaming 9.7	None Playing the latest 3D games such as Crysis.
Web Hosting 7.8	Hard Drive (6.3) Running IIS or Apache, hosting web applications.
Database Hosting 8.4	None Running SQL Server, hosting a large SQL database.
Multimedia 8.6	None Producing professional, studio-quality music or video.
Graphic Design 9.1	None Creating complex artwork with Photoshop.

For Web Hosting usage, you may wish to upgrade the Hard Drive to reach an acceptable level of performance.'

Compare your results to other computers at http://www.mersenne.org/report_benchmarks
AMD Athlon(tm) X4 845 Quad Core Processor 
CPU speed: 3793.06 MHz, 4 cores
CPU features: 3DNow! Prefetch, SSE, SSE2, SSE4, FMA
L1 cache size: 32 KB
L2 cache size: 1 MB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 64 bytes
L1 TLBS: 64
L2 TLBS: 1024

Timings for 2048K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 9.66 ms. Throughput: 103.52 iter/sec.
Timings for 2048K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 33.91, 33.92, 34.35, 34.71 ms. Throughput: 116.90 iter/sec.
Timings for 2304K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 11.53 ms. Throughput: 86.76 iter/sec.
Timings for 2304K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 41.38, 40.64, 40.16, 42.35 ms. Throughput: 97.29 iter/sec.
Timings for 2560K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 12.73 ms. Throughput: 78.58 iter/sec.
Timings for 2560K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 45.92, 46.08, 46.79, 47.04 ms. Throughput: 86.11 iter/sec.
Timings for 2688K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 15.83 ms. Throughput: 63.18 iter/sec.
Timings for 2688K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 55.15, 55.38, 54.76, 55.14 ms. Throughput: 72.59 iter/sec.
Timings for 2880K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 15.63 ms. Throughput: 63.99 iter/sec.
Timings for 2880K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 56.41, 57.17, 56.31, 57.58 ms. Throughput: 70.34 iter/sec.
Timings for 3072K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 16.15 ms. Throughput: 61.92 iter/sec.
Timings for 3072K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 59.10, 59.34, 59.10, 59.68 ms. Throughput: 67.45 iter/sec.
Timings for 3200K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 18.68 ms. Throughput: 53.53 iter/sec.
Timings for 3200K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 76.66, 75.80, 76.06, 76.69 ms. Throughput: 52.43 iter/sec.
Timings for 3456K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 19.60 ms. Throughput: 51.02 iter/sec.
Timings for 3456K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 74.44, 74.82, 70.23, 70.77 ms. Throughput: 55.17 iter/sec.
Timings for 3584K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 20.55 ms. Throughput: 48.65 iter/sec.
[Sun Oct 14 02:34:52 2018]
Timings for 3584K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 89.57, 89.56, 76.30, 77.05 ms. Throughput: 48.41 iter/sec.
Timings for 3840K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 20.79 ms. Throughput: 48.10 iter/sec.
Timings for 3840K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 120.78, 121.16, 120.71, 121.90 ms. Throughput: 33.02 iter/sec.
Timings for 4096K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 24.31 ms. Throughput: 41.14 iter/sec.
Timings for 4096K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 88.48, 88.97, 97.30, 98.26 ms. Throughput: 43.00 iter/sec.
Timings for 4608K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 25.93 ms. Throughput: 38.56 iter/sec.
Timings for 4608K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 97.40, 96.52, 97.77, 98.84 ms. Throughput: 40.97 iter/sec.
Timings for 5120K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 35.11 ms. Throughput: 28.48 iter/sec.
Timings for 5120K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 129.14, 130.59, 136.68, 138.53 ms. Throughput: 29.94 iter/sec.
Timings for 5376K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 32.83 ms. Throughput: 30.46 iter/sec.
Timings for 5376K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 125.73, 125.84, 137.73, 139.14 ms. Throughput: 30.35 iter/sec.
Timings for 5760K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 42.82 ms. Throughput: 23.35 iter/sec.
Timings for 5760K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 155.77, 156.08, 152.64, 154.14 ms. Throughput: 25.87 iter/sec.
Timings for 6144K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 38.57 ms. Throughput: 25.93 iter/sec.
Timings for 6144K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 147.22, 148.28, 146.67, 147.61 ms. Throughput: 27.13 iter/sec.
Timings for 6400K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 48.54 ms. Throughput: 20.60 iter/sec.
[Sun Oct 14 02:40:04 2018]
Timings for 6400K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 221.95, 220.77, 213.98, 215.20 ms. Throughput: 18.36 iter/sec.
Timings for 6912K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 56.46 ms. Throughput: 17.71 iter/sec.
Timings for 6912K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 208.44, 209.23, 204.59, 206.72 ms. Throughput: 19.30 iter/sec.
Timings for 7168K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 64.19 ms. Throughput: 15.58 iter/sec.
Timings for 7168K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 231.68, 232.98, 229.22, 231.49 ms. Throughput: 17.29 iter/sec.
Timings for 7680K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 55.05 ms. Throughput: 18.16 iter/sec.
Timings for 7680K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 234.38, 233.58, 239.08, 242.08 ms. Throughput: 16.86 iter/sec.
Timings for 8192K FFT length (4 cores, 1 worker): 59.20 ms. Throughput: 16.89 iter/sec.
Timings for 8192K FFT length (4 cores, 4 workers): 366.85, 382.29, 379.36, 384.51 ms. Throughput: 10.58 iter/sec.

XTREMEMARK BENCHMARK RESULTS:

Test started at: 2018.10.14 02:56:54
Test ended at: 2018.10.14 02:57:04
Threads executed: 4
Thread priority: Normal
Quantity of operations: 100000000
Average operations per second: 10457516,34

Time taken by Thread 1: 4,156 seconds;
Time taken by Thread 2: 9,531 seconds;
Time taken by Thread 3: 9,562 seconds;
Time taken by Thread 4: 8,922 seconds.

Total time spent: 32,172 seconds;
Global time spent: 9,562 seconds.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I couldn't resist testing out UT 2004 and Far Cry at 1080p max settings. They both run well and at over 60 fps. Looks almost pointless to test UT 2004 at lower settings. Upgraded Athlonium 64 is a beast and it scores highly in all benchmarks. Only HDD speed is a little bit slower than expected and single hard drive still can't compete against 10k rpm hard drive RAID.


----------



## The red spirit

*Change of main goal of Athlonium 64*

Now it's pretty obvious that it's no longer 2004 PC and at the start it wasn't. Time have changed. I discovered pre 2004 hardware and saw the best it can do, then I saw what era accurate best 2004 hardware could do and now I see how 2004's games look maxed out. Soon after gaining lots of power and way too modern hardware, I decided to change the goal of this whole project. Now it will be a machine to play early and mid 2000s games. It's time for new adventures.

*Overview of new era*

Well many things will be the same as I already did adventures of early 2000s. This time goal is to see them at their highest quality and enjoy them to the fullest.

To keep it short early and mid 2000s were dark, violent, cruel, sad or scary times in video game industry. Not in a bad way. Many most memorable titles just had quite similar idea. Compared to 2004 graphics have improved, but not too much. Many effects were added. Computers entered dual core era and graphics card manufacturers did lots of crazy things just to keep gamers and enthusiasts surprised. It may not be 3DFX era, when one ruled them all, but at this time nVidia and ATI were going all out. GPUs were getting larger, more power hungry so fast that we didn't even notice that dual slot GPU coolers and lots of power connectors became a norm. Graphics cards got much hotter, bigger, beefier, VRAM grew and soon doubled what was available before. PSU manufacturers had to react quick to SATA and new 6 pin connector boom. Gamers, enthusiasts wanted power and it was done at cost of heat, space and cost. CPU coolers have progressed to better times, when stock cooler started to become a bit lame. 10K rpm hard drives were the best you could get. Windows XP was getting old, but new Vista just failed to gain users, so many people still kept using XP. At these times SLI and crossfire were still decent things. Not only GPU manufacturers were crazy, but monitor manufacturers too. Lots of resolution and aspect ratios were used 4:3, 5:4, 16:10, 16:9. Arguably this also was the last good era for sound card lovers. Mostly due to XP being the last OS to fully support audio hardware acceleration and most audio 3D effects (also death of Aureal). These times were the last times to be audio enthusiast to its fullest. Now if we conclude this era, many things have happened and were seeing lots of improvements. 

Games became different too. It wasn't early 3D era, when many games had poor mechanics, poor graphics, unpredictable performance and many other gimmicks. To say something nice about past era it was wild west of video gaming, many developers were doing crazy things, inventing new ways to play games, pushing visual effects to limited hardware. Early and mid 2000s were different. Some experimentation was done, but generally lots of genres have matured, mechanics generally became better and most remarkable thing is that graphical quality kept growing as well as immersion was at its best. It was the breaking point of video gaming industry for better or for worse. I think it was almost perfect blend of two worlds. Interesting left overs from mid and late 90s and some glimpses at the future. 

Since this PC has evolved, changed into different beast than it was, I will change benchmarking accordingly. I will benchmark some same games at previous settings to see how much stuff improved, but main focus will be on how well it copes with new goal, playing early and mid 2000s titles at 1080p and their maximum settings.

To sum up this era here's a picture:









Why this one? Because I think that dude on graphics card sums up perfectly how hardware makers, software makers felt back then. everyone wanted to do their best and push the boundaries of many things. I could imagine how taxing it was for people, who made things like that happen as well as consumers that were "greeted" by mind blowing system requirements for games. It was horror, but the one were were super happy to endure and say it was worth it.

*Quick overview of games*

F.E.A.R - hands down this is the best 2005 game. It's absolutely amazing horror shooter. In this game you are agent of special forces that deal with paranormal activities and have to beat villains no one has ever seen before. At its time this game was applauded for graphics quality, sound effects and great overall immersion. I couldn't resist and played it a bit and it totally is awesome. To me this game is the definition of 2005 gaming era.

Crysis - what can be said about it, it was huge miscalculation of hardware capabilities, but also it was one of the biggest graphical pushes in gaming history. Only now it's possible to max it out at 4K and get 60 fps with RTX 2080 Ti. It's still a beast. it took years for hardware to catch it up. But if we talk about software itself, then I have to mention that game mechanics were very interesting and nano suit was awesome game element. Sadly, story was pretty lame and game itself is quite boring. Either way it's remarkable game. Probably the only one I won't be running at 1080p and maximum settings too.

Painkiller - we had quake, we had UT and we have something entirely new. It's dead simple arena shooter. No it's not very fast or skill demanding, but as a whole concept of it is very interesting. You shoot bad guys and that's it. Despite very simple goal it's made very well and does pretty much the best it could do with such goal. Weapons are enjoyable, combat is fun, dynamic, alive. Visual effects are great, game mechanics are good and sound is great too. Despite me not liking modern fps games, this one isn't full of obese dudes in way too fat armor camping in the corner without good story (*cough* Gears of War *cough* Unreal Tournament 3 *cough*). It makes gamer always run, be engaged and it manages not to overwhelm you (considering you chose right difficulty level). It's definitely something nice to remember.

Manhunt - I have never played any games from these series before, but the game stood out due to its violence to the point that some people found it being too much and some countries banned it altogether. It was full of gore, violence and other nastiness. Something I totally should check out. Yesterday I just looked at intro and you are starting out as violent criminal and you should have been executed, but some psychopath "saved" your ass and sent hordes of bad guys to not escape too far from your prison. You start out without anything and it's obvious that you don't jump into combat, instead you are pretty smart and use various items to perform sneak attacks. It's totally memorable in its own way and this is why I will check it out.

Unreal Tournament 2004 - My favourite fps game of all time. It's perfection of words tournament and unreal. Characters all have their own backstories, all are deadly, scary and have dark backgrounds. Some of them are straight up assholes (intro), but all of them gathered into intergalactical tournament to prove everyone, who is the strongest. We have various races, various their special stats all of them formed into teams, which their leader can manage put into fictional sci-fi environmnets for deadly competition. Your only tools are your skills, weapons and hopefully teammates that may listen to your commands. Game mechanics are perfect, weapon variety is great from biological weapons to shooting lightings like Zeus. Combat is perfect, game engine is truly awesome, graphics still look great and soundtrack is beyond good. This is tournament like it was in 99, but this it's better in every single way you can imagine. To me this game defines video gaming in 2004.

Doom 3 - yet another game with doom guy, but this time with all new graphics, visual effects, pretty much whole new everything, yet goal is the same. You shoot everything that moves. Graphically and technologically it was one of the best titles of 2004 and I certainly should check out what is happening here.

Half Life 2 - if not one of the best games of half life series, then it's maybe even the best video game of whole time. You are a person stuck into sci-fi world to discover some secrets and engage into double lifestyle, which as many people say it was spectacular attempt at doing so. Definitely something to discover.

Resident Evil 4 - many people say various things out it, but what is universally agreed is that it's a big remake to whole series. It stands out and as many people say it's awesome part of series. I will likely look at it.

Quake 4 - at this time quake game was becoming an old thing. It was weird, maybe even slightly unwanted, still it's quake. This time in much better graphics and some story in space.

Condemned - yet another cruel, horror game. In this game main character is detective and similarly to F.E.A.R. has to investigate criminal world that turns out to be somewhat paranormal. Soon you become lots in buildings and are dragged into criminal world.

Call of Duty 2 - duty calls again all warriors to come back to the war. Even if it's very similar to CoD 1, many new environments were added, as well as many new missions. It's adventure of warrior in WW2.

Far Cry - you're random tourist, but due to unfortunate events you start out in the puddle of island full of mysteries and some bad guys doing biological experiments. Soon it's obvious that you are being hunted not only by humans, but by various monsters and even Dr. Doyle isn't most dependable dude on Earth. Still even in this hell on Earth you want to not only save your ass, but your girl's too. In 2004 this game was spectacular. Not only it had mind blowing graphics, but what I found most remarkable are sound effect. All sounds were made with great a attention to detail and awesome refinement. Pistol will sound quite weak, but shotgun sounds will pack lots of power and with proper speakers can truly make you feel like gun can rip you in shreds. Mostly likely you will have some random automatic weapons. Voices are also full of bass. Besides the feast of sounds (even better with good EAX hardware), it's feast of graphics too. Story is great too, characters are interesting and importantly despite being shooter, Far Cry is superb adventure game. Environments are perfectly made and this game offers immersion that almost never was replicated ever after. This is not some tatau baboon from modern times, but a decent well rounded package full of everything you would expect and be surprised by finding unexpected. I kinda enjoyed tatau baboon from FC3 and pink guy from FC4 or some hippie made FC Blood Dragon, but first game in series was something else entirely. It was on entirely different level and is the greatest Far Cry series game. While some say that after disappointing Far Cry 2 Crysis was spiritual successor of it, I can never agree with that. Crysis is just too poorly made to be Far Cry successor. Alongside UT2004 this game is defining 2004 video gaming for me.

TES Oblivion - while it's one of the most modern games here it still deserves to be played on Athlonium 64. Not due to support issues on modern hardware, but just because of feels. It feels very nicely nostalgic. With it's poor graphics it deserves to be here. It's proper 3D RPG game from Bethesda. While it's not perfect, it's truly great at what it does. Compared to Morrowing or Skyrim it feels very different, truly distinct. I just don't know how to describe it, but it's a weird perfection of not being perfection. One of it's most memorable quote is "Stop right here you criminal scum!", lol I love it.

GTA San Andreas - dark story of corrupt cops and dark side of criminal world, full of betrayals, murdering and fools. I almost didn't want to include in this list, because it's rather poor compared to other games here and because it's super boring due to how popular it always was and still is. Anyway it's a proper game of criminal world and obviously something to remember from 2000s.

Juiced - Surprisingly not NFS and for a good reasons. Need for Speeds even back then were only shadow of their former selves and mostly for the worse. Their driving mechanics sucked, customization options are poor full of ricer bullcrap and races very often are just tedious and not fun in any way. Juiced is different. It's 'colorful'. Juiced has proper modding, great physics and driving mechanics. Sound track of it is phenomenal, definitely of the best found in video games. Graphics are still good. Still most important thing in it is that it was fun game unlike NFS. Added elements of competing driver faces, betting, good damage modeling, respect system, various racing modes makes it very fun to play. It's also full of animated text to make it more alive, it was user selectable phone, contacts, pink slips, real challenge of driving powerful cards, great distinction between cars, nice car library, amazing sounds effects + engine sounds. It's far more alive than any NFS game, it has it's own character, style and it's pretty clear that it's a quality game. You can not like its style, but you can't say that it's poorly made game. It's not just great racing game, but it's the best street racing game on whole 2000-2005 time frame. Nothing even comes close to it, absolutely nothing. It was playing catch up in quality and it outdid everyone. Sadly it was mostly forgotten, but by some who didn't forgot it, they would still swear today that it's greatest racing game of all time. It's definitely somethign to experience, discover, fall in love and still keep playing it. Along with F.E.A.R. it's a game to define 2005 for me.

Silent Hill (3 and 4) - I don't know much about these series, but it's definitely one of the best games of this era, it's always on lists of being one of the best and all I know that I will experience some real horror. Definitely something to check out and hopefully it's going to be well made game worth digging into 2000s.

Hitman Contracts - ah the sneaking game. Bald dangerous guy in formal clothes came to do some planned crimes. Ok, I will see how well Pitbull knows to act as ninja. In all seriousness, I will check it out for the sake of 2000s

And this is overview of new gaming era for this PC. Lots of amazing virtual entertainment is coming as well as benchmarks for you. "These are dark times, stay safe citizen" this quote sums up this era well. Dark, scary and deadly era of early and mid 2000s.


----------



## The red spirit

*Gaming benchmarks part 1*

*Benchmarking for legacy comparison*

I keeping my word about testing only some games from initial list, mostly games have issues or other stuff I don't wanna deal with. Anyway here are the results:

2018-10-16 08:30:14 - UT2004
Frames: 21998 - Time: 129500ms - Avg: 169.869 - Min: 86 - Max: 322

2018-10-16 08:41:52 - XR_3DA (Stalker)
Frames: 82237 - Time: 278860ms - Avg: 294.904 - Min: 186 - Max: 480

2018-10-16 08:49:01 - quake3
Frames: 103275 - Time: 185140ms - Avg: 557.821 - Min: 367 - Max: 766

2018-10-16 08:55:47 - cmr5
Frames: 57942 - Time: 217812ms - Avg: 266.018 - Min: 185 - Max: 376

2018-10-16 09:02:26 - CoD2SP_s
Frames: 78775 - Time: 310578ms - Avg: 253.640 - Min: 116 - Max: 391

Overall performance is great after major rebuild. Games that were disqualified:
GTA 3 (invisible menu bug)
NFS Porsche Unleashed (maybe later I will deal with it, but generally it almost never works well and has lots of issues, only Windows 95 or 98 would actually help to run it properly)
UT 99 (got version with HD textures pre-installed and it works great and scales to 1080p, graphics are super amazing and can rival UT 2004)


----------



## The red spirit

*Gaming benchmarks part 2*

*Benchmarking for legacy comparison, but at 1080p and maximum settings*

2018-10-16 09:44:30 - UT2004
Frames: 18580 - Time: 126031ms - Avg: 147.424 - Min: 71 - Max: 328

2018-10-16 09:46:38 - UT2004 (accidentally pressed F11 during benchmarking,so I pressed it again and now results are split)
Frames: 3301 - Time: 21875ms - Avg: 150.903 - Min: 94 - Max: 256

2018-10-16 09:49:24 - XR_3DA
Frames: 22069 - Time: 273594ms - Avg: 80.663 - Min: 41 - Max: 131

2018-10-16 09:57:44 - cmr5
Frames: 40782 - Time: 238265ms - Avg: 171.162 - Min: 92 - Max: 1756

2018-10-16 10:13:19 - CoD2SP_s
Frames: 51712 - Time: 426328ms - Avg: 121.296 - Min: 52 - Max: 228

And besides dry data, I wanted to show what difference maximum settings at 1080p make, so here are screenshots of tested games:
UT2004 (5 way deathmatch, career)


































Stalker: The shadow or Chernobyl (the beginning + 1st mission)

















































Colin McRae Rally 2005 (1st time trial in challenge mode)

























































Call of Duty 2 (Winter War, Demolition)

























































































Even after all those years these games look great with decent hardware. Sure, they are noticeably worse than actual modern games, but the difference isn't too big. All things considered, the results are spectacular.


----------



## The red spirit

Weirdly enough I use this PC as my main PC. Even if my main PC is better at everything, I just like Athlonium 64 more.


----------



## The red spirit

*Benchmark results part 2, the finale *

Everest Ultimate Trial:









HD Tune Pro:









































Crystal Disk Mark 5.5.0:









So Athlonium 64 generally improved in every aspect of it, except HDD speed. 10k rpm Raptors in RAID 0 stomp this single Toshiba thing hard, especially in 4K, access times and IOPS measurements. Pretty much meaning that Toshiba HDD alone is much slower.

CPU cache test doesn't reveal much of improvements, but quite often Athlon X4 845 is better than Athlon 64 3400+ (s754).

Rest games benchmarks will come later and I think I will not only provide results how game runs at maximum settings, but also screenshots, so that graphics quality could be seen. That's why this post is finale of general benchmarking portion.


----------



## The red spirit

Unreal Tournament (1999)

It's pre-modded version and what is changed is above standard FOV, HD textures, forced OpenGL, fixed aspect ratio for 16:9 monitors, fixed 1080p. FPS lock is at around 61-64 fps, since it never drops below that, I don't wanna mess with that game. It looks great, it plays great. After years of enjoying UT 2004, once I played this modded UT99 I realized that it can be fun too. In the past as I tried old UT99 I just thought of it as inferior game and that UT 2004 is better, but I was wrong. Very wrong...

Graphics while obviously old, they still look great and in usual tempo of the game it doesn't matter much, meanwhile textures are very noticeable at high speed and overall make this game looks really good. Here are some screenshots:


















































































































































Now after playing it for a few days I can say that UT99 is one of the best games I have ever played and arguably is better than UT 2004. Unreal Tournament is just so much fun to play. It's fast, simple and addictive fps game. Absolutely a legend.

And music is awesome too:


----------



## The red spirit

Athlonium 64 received some upgrades:









Why:
Sound card - I really felt like Athlonium 64 needs a sound card, but this time it's a bit different. Now it's time for external DAC. Or in other words I don't have free PCI-E slot for sound card and PCI sound cards are too low end. So it got DAC. Sure I lose EAX, but I get amazing sound quality in return and much less noise.

Speakers - My "2.1 set" is basically 5.1 set, but with 3 speakers disconnected. While sound quality is quite bearable and build quality is alright, what I can't stand is very directional sound and not only that but I could sit close to speakers and hear almost nothing, but if I turn my head 5 degrees or get further from PC, it's loud AF. It's hella uncomfortable this way and I didn't really like lack of detailed sound, so it got replacement. I didn't want to spend much and I looked at 2.0s and 2.1 and I was almost convinced to get Creative SB Kratos S3, but shitty gamery aesthetic is unappealing to me and from reviews it's pretty obvious that their sound isn't very clear and set mostly focuses on bass. From my experience it's never good sign and knowing Creative I shouldn't expect clear sounding bass, but expect bass set way too high to the point of hearing massive distortions. Still i didn't want to spend much and I found Creative A250 set and it was praised for exceptional clarity at low price, but I got T3300, which is pretty much the same thing just has wired sound remote and most importantly bass adjustment knob. 

Noctua shit - low noise adapters for fans and fan rubber mounts. One of the fans in Athlonium 64 can't be connected to fan controller and it spins much faster than others. I really like to keep all fans at low rpms, so I got low noise adapter kit and on top of that I kinda wanted to go further with reducing fan vibrations with rubber mounts. 

WiFi adapter - I had enough of TP-Link crap. I just doesn't work properly, so hopefully if I pay more I get something decent. Asus wireless gear is quite decent as I have experienced. USB adapter, because PCI adapters are low end trash and I don't have free PCI-E slot.

Unboxing

Creative T3300:

























Yeah nothing special here, very spartan package and everything else about these speakers.

Noctua shit (but really I can't remember those numbers):

































Overpriced as hell, but those are one of the nicest packages I have ever seen. That's awesome and products feel premium.

Asoooooooooss!

























All I can say that adapter is huge. It's not a finger, it's not a penis, it's a light saber! XD But for real it's as big as medium size kitchen knife and it shoots beams and has LED, so it's light saber! lmao

Packaging of it is decent and generous, jsut like it could be expected from Asus.

And now it's time for classic Sound Blaster:

















What I love about Creative is that they try to keep same design of Sound Blaster boxes since their first models, now it's just classic and feels legendary. Just like my Audigy 2 ZS, there's still the same black and gold color scheme going on, which I love. It's feels like having high end audio equipment but without wrecking your wallet. Box contents are alright and there are some CDs too, but those are under documentation. 

Now short reviews of all items. 

Creative T3300 - Wires are super thin and obviously very cheap. Subwoofer is pretty small and unimpressive and tweeters super tinny. At least all parts feel pretty robust. But first impression was blown away soon. Wired remote while feels a bit cheap it works well. Speaker set is surprised me a lot especially for their price. Tweeters produce really clear highs and mids, meanwhile subwoofer is tight on bass, but bass is clear, just not powerful and I could actually crank it up more without noticing any distortions. Overall sound is decently balanced and I don't notice directionality of it. Despite very low specifications of speakers, they sound great in reality. For the very little I paid, I didn't go wrong with this set and it's probably the best things for its price. Outstanding. Another thing I don't like are hardwired wires, which you can't unplug and not very long tweeter wires, I almost had those too short, but in the end it turned out to be just enough.

Creative Sound Blaster XFi HD - First impression of it wasn't great far from it. I though that setting it up would be painless. You know plugging in Creative to Creative, what can go wrong? And the first thing that was wrong was that there isn't any 3.5mm audio jack anywhere on it. Closest to it is headphone jack, which is 6.25mm. I found adapter at home, but really that shouldn't happen. Once connected to PC and drivers are installed I have sound and can mess a bit with small amount of Creative's software. Anyway I wanted great sound and close to original sound reproduction, so I turned off effects. I decided to test it out in games, sadly I got no audio at first, until I realized that I must turn off EAX and then it worked fine, not fine, but it blew me away. The sound quality of it is exceptional I noticed difference between it and onboard audio instantly. It was huge, absolutely monstrous. I could feel that I could hear much wider array of sounds (20-20k Hz), sound clarity was super good. It felt totally realistic. I haven't noticed for a long time how mashed together many sounds were on onboard sound chip, but once I listened to this, I instantly could tell that this is miles away. What surprised me is actually great super high frequency sound output. I could hear sounds over 8k Hz really well and some bullet shots in games had ear piercing sounds that I never heard before. Audio depth feeling has improved a lot too and that was especially audible in UT2004. I Colin McRae Rally 2005 I heard truly great engine sounds clearly all revving up and smashing Celica into tree to ears felt like it should, not muddled, but ear raping. In youtube I can instantly tell that sound is compressed and some of my lower resolution mp3s sound really non dynamic and muddled. But flacs! They are next level. Loudness levels of different sounds are reproduced massively better, sound clarity is much better, bass is tight and dynamic. For testing I used Dr. Dre and GnR songs. It feels like being there, the sound immersion is so good. The difference is night and day, I can hear all effort that went into properly recording music and voices and I can hear all those who never cared how their audio is recorded. Sound Blaster DAC and Inspire T3300 speakers proved to me being an outstanding combination to the point I never expected them to be. Now after this point I would need to invest lots more for any better sound than this, to the point of getting studio monitors like Presonus Eris E8s and hella expensive DAC. This is my first speaker purchase in my whole life and it's super successful one. 

BTW one secret will be revealed. LTT videos have very good sound quality and it's audible

Noctua low noise adapter set - I only needed one and I bought whole set of 3, because they don't sell less. Anyway it works and is premium product without doubt, but I almost can't tell any difference in noise so all I can say that it's meh. Unimpressive.

Noctua rubber fan mounts - Once I started to actually work with them I noticed how hard it's to just install them. I spent like 2 hours to install them on all fans. The thing is that rubber is really hard and I need lots of force in places, where I can't insert my hand properly. After my work I could feel the pain on those finger I used. I needed lots of force and in the end I can't tell difference between them and just standard screws. Vibration reduction is very minimal too, so I was disappointed. I thought that hard rubber is dumass like me should mean awesome noise reduction, but it didn't turn out like that. It was totally not worth my time, nor the money I spent on them. maybe I expected too much out them, maybe. Anyway I'm not impressed and my verdict is going to be poor choice.

Asus USB-AC56 - it's big, but it works well. I notices lots of wifi routers, almost twice the TP-Link did and signal strength is much better. I can't say anything bad about stability either. I just don't like that Asus bloatware isn't optional. In actual torrenting test it wasn't great at pure speed, but it remained quite reliable. Overall it works well and it's a good product. While it didn't blew my mind, it didn't disappoint me either, so it's good.

So now I overall have really quiet PC which can play lots of games on ultra settings and which can reproduce outstanding sound quality. That's very nice.


----------



## The red spirit

Short post about audio quality comparison between Athlonium 64 and R&D Machine #1 (my main PC).

Audio specs of Athlonium 64:
Creative T3300 2.1 speakers
Creative XFi HD external USB DAC

Audio specs of R&D Machine #1:
AIWA FNV-70L HiFi speakers + AIWA CX-70NVHE main control unit
Asus Xonar DG sound card

Athlonium 64:
After some time I notice that high tones while audible they quite don't have much power, midranges are audible and clear, but a bit more power would be nice. Bass exists, and sounds clear, but is on the weaker side too. Speaker low SNR isn't very audible, but it's there, anyway it doesn't impact overall sound quality much. Overall this setup is good at frequencies from 400Hz up to around 12000 Hz. Sound is clear and details are reproduced well. Everything you should hear is pretty much there and is reproduced good enough.

On this setup it's possible to hear difference between 160kbps mp3 and 256 kbps mp3, but after 256 mbps mp3 it's hard to heard anything much more. meanwhile with R&D Machine #1 this happens earlier at only 128kbps and while higher resolution audio files do help it, returns are diminishing at that point.

R&D Machine #1:
main unit of setup lets adjust two settings bass and BBE. BBE is in other words crystallizer. It's complex technology, but what it does it alters sound in a way that they sound clearer and sharper. If you set it too high sounds will be too harsh and may feel like breaking glass. Anyway I like to set 1/4 bass and 1/4 BBE. Speakers are just powerful and feel nice, but focus feels to be on higher low end of spectrum and mid ranges. Those sound punchy and pleasurable. Sadly, good sounding sound range is from 200 Hz up to 8000 Hz, which is less than Athlonium 64. Still bass sounds better on this setup due to 2 subwoofers and them both being more powerful. It feels more like it in reality does and can be really powerful, but not powerful enough to beating my own chest or shaking table (there are vibrations felt there tho). Sound card very obviously to me sound like bottleneck here as sound feels muffled a bit and not as clear as on Athlonium 64. Anyway overall this setup while lacks in clarity, sound range it feels a bit more pleasurable than Athlonium 64's. Athlonium 64's setups feels like it produces very clear sound, but it sounds a bit synthetic. This machine supports EAX, maybe up to version 2, which actually makes zero difference in games. In some cases makes it harder to hear things, like in UT2004 I barely can hear shooting sounds, when it's turned on. This happens due to quite poor dynamic sound volume range of card and speakers producing 'soft' sound. So generally I just disable it anyway. Overall this setup is melodical and soft sounding, but not very accurate nor exceptionally clear. 

In the end both setups are better than using onboard sound cards and both have their strengths. One factor to mention is that Athlonium 64 is much more silent system, like 2 or 3 times. That's quite important while listening at low volume, which to me happens very often. At low volume conditions clearer sound and better dynamic sound range helps a lot. Melodical setups need more volume to sound good.

I have experimented with bypassing integrated sound card in Mild Velocity build and chose HDMI as sound output. Still sound travels to TV and my TV speakers have poor sound range, only 400-7000 Hz until some serious distortions. Anyway as far as sound processing goes, I can say it's not the worst and is probably slightly above onboard sound processing. For comparison those Creative speakers I had with Athlonium 64 before, they sound worse than Mild velocity with TV speakers, so yeah that should tell something.

To me it's weird to see lac of enthusiasm in audio stuff nowadays. It still matters, less than it did before, when environmental sound effects were at their best, but not any less in terms of sound clarity and in a way how your sound will be produced. I see so many misconceptions about shopping for this equipment like "sound card or DAC doesn't matter with cheap speakers". This isn't good, but still sound stuff is legit thing to care about just it's weird to see almost no one caring about it much. Many people are fine with built in speakers or some not expensive headphones. It's like in computer hardware terms Ryzen 2200G is totally fine and is all you need and people would call GTX 1050 Ti quite expensive and almost luxury card, while GTX 1070 would be multi thousand dollar sound setup equivalent. Even if not everyone can afford good audio setups, they still should at least aim to have something better than Ryzen 2200G


----------



## The red spirit

Halo 1

2018-10-27 02:08:26 - Halo
Frames: 198619 - Time: 660125ms - Avg: 300.881 - Min: 0 - Max: 741

Max settings with maximum resolution of 1600x900.

Screenshots:









































































































































































































It wasn't fun to play. It's an obvious console port and all animations are rendered at 30 fps, yet I have way over 100 fps in game itself. I don't know how to say it, but the game feels dead. It's huge it's empty, that's how Halo feels. While combat is interesting and enemies are alright, nothing really happens in game and it feels purposeless. Maybe it felt awesome to shoot some fictional alien ass back then, but now it's just not cutting it. I must mention how horrible it is to control that car. You have to steer it with mouse and besides that mouse also is responsible for looking and there are no settings to change that. Overall it's not very high quality game and I can feel that it's not for me at all.

I don't know what to say about it, but it just feels like a trashy game. BTW Duke Nukem is much better at kicking some alien ass, so even if Duke Nukem forever wasn't the best I would still recommend it over Halo.


----------



## The red spirit

Short overview of game Driv3r:

There won't be screenshots nor benchmarks, but all you need to know is that game is complete garbage. It looks like unfinished game with shit ton of graphical glitches and horrendous physics. Graphics are beyond bad. Control layout is bad too, for example for the first time in my life I saw button Z used for accelerating your car and for steering , and . are used. And if you think that you can change controls, then I have to say that control menu is broken too. You can find screenshots online if you want, but I'm not playing such a trashy game just for that. It was the shortest time in which I wanted uninstall a program from PC. That should tell something.


----------



## The red spirit

Far Cry

2018-10-27 17:08:48 - FarCry
Frames: 125111 - Time: 862406ms - Avg: 145.072 - Min: 52 - Max: 743

Catacombs map (used specifically for ability to compare this to FX 5200 and ATI X800 XT PE, even tried to recreate some similar screenshots), maximum settings, 1080p.

Screenshots:









































































































































































































This game simply doesn't age. While graphics now aren't specifically anything special, they aged very well. Where this game truly shines are in sound effects and portraying immersive sci-fi adventure. It's a masterpiece. Guns sound truly powerful and vehicles often have strong rumbling sounds. Explosions can rip your ears if you set volume too high. The story at least to me is great and I like this plot as it is. Unsurprisingly this game was the graphics benchmark of 2004. In 1080p and maximum setting it looks great (to me). It's simply a flawless game and there's nothing wrong with it. It's still a best Far Cry game so far, yet 3rd and 4th were good too. 1st one is more special and overall feels better to play it. A great way to define is to call it a timeless classic and the game that defined 2004.


----------



## The red spirit

Found PC buyer's guide from 2004:
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/pc-buyers-guide-december-2004,3.html

It's really nice to still find something like that. I thought that back then high end resolution was actually 1280x1024, but turns out it was 1600x1200. I didn't knew that hard drives could have been 300GB.

Also found another 2004 PC part guide (in magazine):
https://books.google.lt/books?id=Cn...AQ#v=onepage&q=2004 pc building guide&f=false

It's full of old ads (which I love), it's full of 2004's gaming aesthetic and it ahs 2004 hardware:
https://books.google.lt/books?id=Pw...AB#v=onepage&q=2004 pc building guide&f=false

^There's actually ad of smartwatch in 2004. I didn't knew those things existed for such a long time.

The archive of maximum PC magazines:
https://archive.org/details/maximumpc

It's awesome places to be taken back in time. 

In my own country I was buying every single issue of Computer Bild magazine at least for 4 years and I loved to read magazines about tech. Sadly they are gone now, but at least I know where I can find Maximum PC magazines, which are much bigger per unit and have more interesting tests and articles.

In 2003 nVidia GeForce FX 5900 costed only 196 dollars and Pentium 4 3.00Ghz only 269 dollars and now we have RTX 2080 Ti at over 1k dollars and iBurn9 over 9000K at 500 dollars. It looks like we are deprogressing. Now for 196 dollars it's only possible to find GTX 1050 Ti or at best RX 570 4GB and for 269 dollars it's possible to get Ryzen 2700X. Now we get much less GPU power in terms of relative tier and performance, but CPU power is actually quite similar per money as it was back then. Still accurate matches of older hardware to more modern hardware are now more expensive.


----------



## The Veteran

Good to know. I get where you are coming from. I love to rea magazines and info's about new techs. I still have them. Sorry that you don't get them more. I prefer hardware 2010-2018 than the hardware that was around 2000-2010. I think they are more efficient and do not have to waste so much energy. The older computers quality is really bad I barely get comfortable using them.


----------



## The red spirit

khanrumell1 said:


> Good to know. I get where you are coming from. I love to rea magazines and info's about new techs. I still have them. Sorry that you don't get them more.


I read them even if information correctness wasn't very good. I just love to read such sort of literature. I still have my own collection of them. It's very heavy.



khanrumell1 said:


> I prefer hardware 2010-2018 than the hardware that was around 2000-2010. I think they are more efficient and do not have to waste so much energy.


Then you really can't understand one of the main ideas of Athlonium 64.

It's not about being modern or efficient, it's about sentimental value.

Even if we talk about what happened in 2010-2018, then I can say that not much and this decade is straight up boring for enthusiasts.




khanrumell1 said:


> The older computers quality is really bad I barely get comfortable using them.


Maybe the ones from early 2000s, when phenomena of capacitor plaque was there, otherwise they aren't any less reliable than modern parts, besides obvious wear they already had to endure.

I'm not sure if you are interested, but if we would talk about the best of the best from 2004, then part list of computer like that would be:
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (or dual Opterons in dual socket motherboard)
DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR
2x nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultras in SLI (better with AC Silencer 5s)
2x or 4x WD Raptors (WD72) in RAID 0
4x1GB DDR 400Mhz Corsair XMS Xpert RAM 
Creative Audigy 2 ZS
Scythe Andy Samurai Master or Cooler Master Jet or Zalman cnps7000 cu or if you feel extreme than Prometeia Mach 2 GT
OCZ PowerStream 520W
Cooler Master Wavemaster case
Fast DVD Drive (back then it was must to have optical drive as Windows XP only came on CD or DVD and making it work on USB is near impossible and back then big USB drives were 256MB or 512MB at best) (you better have fast DVD drive as all your software installed through DVDs)
Windows XP Professional (64 bit Professional is optional as support for it wasn't great and some things from that era just don't work)

And the fun thing is that pretty much every part of such build now costs exactly the same or more than it did in 2004. Some parts are super rare and you can't find them anymore anywhere.


----------



## The Veteran

I also love to read about tech magazines even if information correctness wasn't very good. It is super fascinating.

I just love to read such sort of literature. I still have my own collection of them. It's very heavy. I know how it feels to have a heavy bag. As a bookworm I get these problems day-to-day. It is one of our pet peeves. I am a Goodreader.

Well no. I have not researched on that Athlonium 64. I have not got much opinion on that computer. But I am just talking about computers that I have been using in the past and the ones that I use now. I can see much differences.

I can understand the sentimental value and it is a blast from the past. Something you can't let go of because it was made on past. But it is about it being efficient. I find it much easier to use these computers now than the ones from the past. They are almost antique.

It would be useless to hold on to the things that were made in the past that do not work anymore and no longer in use.

I do understand that not much and this decade is straight up boring for enthusiasts and maybe the things in this modern time things are # not really interesting and creative as it was before. I used to use a Nokia Brick back in the past. I did not 100% like the product but it was fun and there were things the Nokia Brick had that aren't here on modern phones. This goes same thing to other products that aren't computers. E.g. Books aren't as creative as they were before. This goes same to TV shows, films, music, cooking and games etc.

Maybe it is the computers from early 2000's I am talking about and not the computers that were made around 21st Century.

Maybe it is the computers from early 2000's I am talking about and not the computers that were made around early 21st Century. But I do think the computers that are around these days as reliable than the ones that were made before 1999. We now have apps and there were inventions of computers that can be hidden through a wooden desks which really blows my mind. We finally have good use for graphene and apparently being used for computers for flexibility. Computers can be rolled and folded. I think I retract slightly from my earlier statement based on computers being creative in the past than they are now. I think the computers now are actually more creative and advance.

I am not familiar with most of computers of what some people suggest. They do seem interesting. But who needs CD's and DVD's when you can download music and movies from an app. YouTube also holds movies and music for us to watch and listen. I don't understand why people would also go to a cinema to watch movies either when you have a TV at home.

I prefer computers that are professional and maybe ones I that I can use for my college or my work and not for fun. The best computer hardware I have been using was HP. It is exactly something that I was looking for all this time. It is casual yet you can use it for your college work and profession. It is my best product of computer hardware's I have been using. I have used Toshiba, Parasonic, Mackintosh and LG. I must say I did not get better values from them to be honest. And don't get me started with Apple Macs I really do not like any devices that Apple have been inventing. I found them really useless and wild to my liking.

The costs are exactly the same as they have been. For the things that are rare and have been of use you must use them. But once you feel like it is no longer of use to you in the moment of time why still have it around. A lot of people stick to traditions.


----------



## The red spirit

khanrumell1 said:


> I know how it feels to have a heavy bag. As a bookworm I get these problems day-to-day. It is one of our pet peeves. I am a Goodreader.


My collection is just stored in one place and haven't been touched for years. 



khanrumell1 said:


> Well no. I have not researched on that Athlonium 64. I have not got much opinion on that computer. But I am just talking about computers that I have been using in the past and the ones that I use now. I can see much differences.


Oh you should look a bit at Athlonium 64's past. My recommendations are first 3 pages of this thread. You can even find old school graphics comparisons between two graphics cards.




khanrumell1 said:


> I can understand the sentimental value and it is a blast from the past. Something you can't let go of because it was made on past. But it is about it being efficient. I find it much easier to use these computers now than the ones from the past. They are almost antique.


Well i have some words about efficiency you are talking about. It's maybe true, but most older software was much lighter and could run decently well on machines of that age. Also some software only likes older OS and you basically are out of luck running it on modern Windows, so it's efficient in some ways to have an older machine with old OS. Some things old machines can do much better, for example Windows XP has sound acceleration, which was removed from more modern windows versions. Spatial sound only worked well until 7. It's worth knowing that Windows XP is much lighter OS and it runs much better than 7, 8 or 10. It basically has less background crap running and gives you more resources for stuff you work with. There are some more advantages of old machines, but to say that modern computers are more efficient, it wouldn't be entirely true. The only way they are more efficient is UEFI in some ways, but if you have some problems with IRQs, too high core count, not all UEFIs will be any good. SSDs help a ton and while you can use them with older machines with XP, they will wear out faster. Faster processors are good.

Now some ways that modern machines aren't very efficient:
Heavy OSes
poor cooling solutions everywhere and no single slot top of the line graphics cards (tell me more about copper heatsinks)
lack of optimization everywhere
no DVD drive most of the time
no fan controller most of the time
lack of IO in small machines
limited OS support
graphics cards use lots of power to play at high settings
processors get super hot
internet is nice, but usually downloading shit is slower than just reading software off physical media
games can use as much as 70 gigabytes of storage, yet they don't look much better than their predecessors (FC 5 compared to FC 4 or FC 3)
overall computer power consumption hasn't decreased much
if you need technical help you will get autistic screeching 95% of time, meanwhile in the past you could just write to Maximum PC and get decent and detailed answer if you are lucky
lots of previously small software became obese, yet functionality hasn't changed too much



khanrumell1 said:


> It would be useless to hold on to the things that were made in the past that do not work anymore and no longer in use.


You have to realize that in this era of computing your 10 year old PC can be still usable now, meanwhile back in the late 90s or early 2000s just after 2 years you computer could become absolutely useless. 



khanrumell1 said:


> I do understand that not much and this decade is straight up boring for enthusiasts and maybe the things in this modern time things are # not really interesting and creative as it was before. I used to use a Nokia Brick back in the past. I did not 100% like the product but it was fun and there were things the Nokia Brick had that aren't here on modern phones. This goes same thing to other products that aren't computers. E.g. Books aren't as creative as they were before. This goes same to TV shows, films, music, cooking and games etc.


Even cooking? XD lmao. 



khanrumell1 said:


> Maybe it is the computers from early 2000's I am talking about and not the computers that were made around 21st Century.


I dunno what you are talking about  (I mean about which era) 




khanrumell1 said:


> Maybe it is the computers from early 2000's I am talking about and not the computers that were made around early 21st Century. But I do think the computers that are around these days as reliable than the ones that were made before 1999.


No way.

Capacitor plague was huge and lots of motherboard died in early 2000s, there was thing like sudden Northwood death syndrome (electromigration as discovered in practical usage) (well we have other problems now, but it was too much widespread at the time), there also were much more low quality power supplies used back then.

Athlonium 64 is just lucky machine to survive that long without power supply failure, without capacitors leaking and by using AMD Athlon processor instead of Intel Pentium 4 (Northwood). The only thing that has died in this thing was graphics card fan, yet card could run at full load without it (likely due to zero thermal protection) for weeks. 

There have been some other hardware failures that were either caused by human error or still aren't investigated enough to diagnose what went wrong if anything went wrong at all. 




khanrumell1 said:


> We now have apps and there were inventions of computers that can be hidden through a wooden desks which really blows my mind.


??? Example, plz?



khanrumell1 said:


> We finally have good use for graphene and apparently being used for computers for flexibility.


like where?



khanrumell1 said:


> Computers can be rolled and folded.


Folded, yes (laptop). Rolled, hell no.



khanrumell1 said:


> I think I retract slightly from my earlier statement based on computers being creative in the past than they are now. I think the computers now are actually more creative and advance.


I would rather not comment on this stuff as pretty much all claims are often too subjective or are too inaccurate or are limited by knowledge of each era.



khanrumell1 said:


> I am not familiar with most of computers of what some people suggest.


What are you talking about here?



khanrumell1 said:


> They do seem interesting. But who needs CD's and DVD's when you can download music and movies from an app. YouTube also holds movies and music for us to watch and listen.


Driver installation, Windows installation, watching older movies, looking at your own older files, listening to superior quality music files.

Blu ray drives are better and offer more functionality due to ability to store more data.



khanrumell1 said:


> I don't understand why people would also go to a cinema to watch movies either when you have a TV at home.


Much higher volume, much better sound and video quality, much more immersion, 3D there doesn't suck as much, possible 4D options, place to hang out, some movies are released earlier there, some content can only be watched there.



khanrumell1 said:


> I prefer computers that are professional and maybe ones I that I can use for my college or my work and not for fun. The best computer hardware I have been using was HP.


...and I have been making fun of HP for a really long time, well because their quality is garbage.

sorry for that



khanrumell1 said:


> It is exactly something that I was looking for all this time. It is casual yet you can use it for your college work and profession. It is my best product of computer hardware's I have been using. I have used Toshiba, Panasonic, Macintosh and LG. I must say I did not get better values from them to be honest. And don't get me started with Apple Macs I really do not like any devices that Apple have been inventing. I found them really useless and wild to my liking.


You came to right place if you want to hate on Apple.




khanrumell1 said:


> The costs are exactly the same as they have been. For the things that are rare and have been of use you must use them. But once you feel like it is no longer of use to you in the moment of time why still have it around. A lot of people stick to traditions.


I would say that costs have changed a lot for individual components, even in same tiers.


----------



## The Veteran

??? Example, plz?


----------

