Anybody enjoys tinkering with old PCs to find out how slow they are?

[StrangerGuy]

Built in early 2006. Back then I remembered A64 X2s are really expensive, so I had to settle for single core.

A64 Venice 3000+ @ 267x9 = 2.4GHz stock volts
Asrock Dualsata2 (Greatest. Cheapo. Board. Ever)
1.5GB RAM
X1800XT 512MB

Web surfing:
Even with a hefty 600MHz OC, web surfing feels noticeably less smooth than my 2.8GHz C2D. Sites with heavy Flash use makes Firefox crawl. Although it's kinda odd, I had a far weaker 1.83GHz Athlon XP rig from 2003 to 2006 and normal web browsing had zero slowdowns...Perhaps too much bloatware these days?

L4D2:
Single core CPUs really shows their age in L4D2. It is still very much playable with a somewhat powerful X1800XT, but its hard to aim stuff effectively when framerates fluctuates wildly from 20 to 60 fps. In comparison, 2.8GHz C2D + 9600GT = near constant 60 fps with everything maxed out.

 

[Fayd]

odd.

i gave my parents my old 2.0 ghz athlon x2 3800+ machine. no OC.

for web browsing, i can't tell th difference between that and my e4400 machine OCed to 2.7 ghz.

 

[RebateMonger]

Jeepers. I thought you were talking about '286s and '386s. I tried installing some semi-modern Windows on those once. It turns out that modern Windows won't install without a math coprocessor. And without the built-in cache memory, those old CPUs are incredibly slow.

 

[0roo0roo]

crosses my mind, but the actual task of resurrecting old machines from a parts pile... thats what i'd hire a tech slave to do if i were ridiculously rich just for the giggles. but if i had to do it myself....naw. it would be built and then tossed aside because of how totally useless it would be.

 

[mmntech]

odd.

i gave my parents my old 2.0 ghz athlon x2 3800+ machine. no OC.

for web browsing, i can't tell th difference between that and my e4400 machine OCed to 2.7 ghz.

That was my main gaming rig until about six months ago. Not a bad machine ever for today.
My parents have an Athlon XP 3000+ laptop with 768mb DDR and it surfs the web just fine. These aren't old rigs. I'm thinking at least Pentium 3 and before.

 

[BTA]

You mean to tell me I should look into upgrading from my 486SX and 2400baud modem?

Logs me into the local BBS just fine...

I was thinking of upgrading from a CGA video card and monitor to that new fangled 256 color VGA kind...

 

[Marty502]

My mom has my old Pentium III rig. I think the only thing holding it back for decent performance for office tasks is the hard drive.
I really wanna install W2K on it and see how it goes. Should be pretty fast.
Of course, that rig is crippled for heavy Flash applications.

And I'm still rocking a 939 socket AMD X2, as shown in my signature.

Only games that really bring it to it's knees are Crysis (lacking GPU) and Dragon Age (lacking CPU).
I even play L4D2 with 4x Adaptive AA. Not bad.

 

[vshah]

i have a p2-450 lying around at home. winxp is pretty damn slow on it

 

[ScorcherDarkly]

That was my main gaming rig until about six months ago. Not a bad machine ever for today.

It still is my wife's main gaming rig, or was until earlier this week when it stopped booting correctly. Something gave up the ghost, haven't figured it out yet.

 

[JackMDS]

StrangerGuy this behavior is [FONT=&quot] definitely [/FONT] not a Generic behavior, something is wrong on the specific computer.

Download and unzip to a folder CrystalMark from this page, http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

Run it, the total Mark Index a computer like your should be around 40.000, if it is significantly lower then there is a generic hardware/OS problem. If the number is OK, then it is an application problem.

 

[Blain]

I love to breathe new life into old systems, as long as it's reasonable.
Web surfing and office apps are quite happy with less than 4GB's of memory.

I know that's a shocker to many of you out there.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I love to breathe new life into old systems, as long as it's reasonable.
Web surfing and office apps are quite happy with less than 4GB's of memory.

I know that's a shocker to many of you out there.

Unless you put vista on the machine, then it will gladly eat a few gigs of it's own not even counting AV, office, email etc... being open all at once.

But yeah I actually had 2 gigs on my xp machine for the longest time. I have 3.5 now and I can do everything I want from gaming to video editing.

 

[fffblackmage]

I have an old laptop with a 900MHz Duron processor. It was slow with XP on it back then, and still slow with Xubuntu today (though there is a noticeable improvement).

 

[Jeffg010]

Well my first build in summer of 1999 still running.
Abit KT7
AMD 700 thunderbird over clocked to 850
500 Megs of sd ram
400 watt power supply
Windows 98se
20 gig hard drive

I booted it up last summer and it took over 10 mins to boot up. 10 years of junk on the system and that what it has become. When you said old system I looked at the OP post and laughed. I wonder what would happen if I installed Windows XP on it. Not sure I even could get drivers for everything. This system was the only system that still works out of 3 builds of my own. The next 2 PCs after that build both died early deaths.

Fist one just flaked out and started to crash when games ran. The next system after that lasted me 5 years then locked up and never posted vid again. That system brings a tear to my eye. Then my current PC has been running over 2 years now.

 

[JimKiler]

My mom has my old Pentium III rig. I think the only thing holding it back for decent performance for office tasks is the hard drive.
I really wanna install W2K on it and see how it goes. Should be pretty fast.
Of course, that rig is crippled for heavy Flash applications.

And I'm still rocking a 939 socket AMD X2, as shown in my signature.

Only games that really bring it to it's knees are Crysis (lacking GPU) and Dragon Age (lacking CPU).
I even play L4D2 with 4x Adaptive AA. Not bad.

Do you realize how much you could get for that Althon X2 socket 939 on eBay? I sold mine with 2GB of DDR and got $150 in March, and my upgrade was was only $175 after rebated for:

Corsair 400w PSU
Corsair 4GB DDR2
Athlon X2 7750
GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-US2H AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard (includes ATI Radeon HD 3200)

If you are okay not going top of the line you could replace that board, CPU, and RAM for less than you receive for it on eBay.

A lot of socket 939 owners who still want to get a dual core even though a new mobo would be cheaper.

 

[bruceb]

Non of that is really old .. Try a Northstar Horizon, Z-80 CPU @ 4Mhz, 64MB RAM, no hard drive, no color or graphics, 5 1/4" floppy drives, the then standard "S-100" bus interface. Damn thing weighed over 20Lbs ... and it ran either Northstar DOS / BASIC or CP/M .. and you provided your own Video Terminal & Keyboard

 

[aigomorla]

i used to do the oposite.

Run old games on new computers.

What i remember was playing wing commander on a AMD X2 system.
The game was unplayable because it went just too fast.

it had no frame limit feature, and i would crash into asteroids the moment i left the tiger claw.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Come to think of it I remember putting windows 98 on a 486 DX2 with 16MB of ram. That was fun. It took about 3 hours to install, and it was totally unusable.

I've also tried old games on new computers and pretty much experienced the same where the frame rate is all messed up, or it just wont run at all because the video card can't support such low of a resolution lol. It's funny as I had decided to try out Rollercoaster tycoon on my new PC. I remember back in the day playing it and I could select the screen res. It would normally run at 800*600 which to me was awesome, and there was an option for 1024*768 and when I would see that option I'd think "wow that must be for people with insane powerful graphics machines!" Kinda funny.

 

[aigomorla]

It would normally run at 800*600 which to me was awesome, and there was an option for 1024*768 and when I would see that option I'd think "wow that must be for people with insane powerful graphics machines!" Kinda funny.

your talking to a an Original Voodoo2 SLI owner.



Ive been a GPU whore from the getgo.

 

[Oxaqata]

Edit

 

[pukemon]

I've been resurrecting some old P2's & 3's lately. I can't remember - what was considered a powerful gaming machine back in 1997 & 1998?

I have a P2@350, 64/128mb RAM and what appears to be a Rage IIc 16mb - slow as hell on original half Life. Was that even a gaming graphics card?

In 1997/1998 anything with a Pentium II was considered good and the only really viable gaming solution was the 3Dfx Voodoo paired up with a decent 2D card like the Matrox Millennium, ATI Rage Pro, or the Nvidia Riva128 (which had decent 3D but too small framebuffer until the Riva128ZX came out) I remember this because that was my freshman year of college and this was all new to everyone at the time.

Pentium II's with a 100MHz FSB didn't come out until mobos with the Intel 440BX were available. Way back when, Abit (are they still around?) made the BH6 which I think largely gained its fame due to Anandtech and people with Celeron 300A's overclocking to 450. Those were fun times...

 

[yottabit]

I love doing stuff like that... the funny thing is my old computer still beats out my laptop at some games. The old rig is an A64 3000+ with 1 GB DDR 2 and a Radeon XT850PE. Some cpu-intensive games actually run better on my laptop even though it only has an HD3450 for a graphics card because of the Core 2 Duo and 4GB ram. I really have a hard time going back to single core computers now..... when I use it I find myself not knowing what to do while its loading something and I can't open a few instances of my internet browser haha.

When XP first came out there was some competition over who could get it to run on the slowest computer. I definitely remember seeing it run on a 486 at 25Mhz, I remember the guy saying it took something like 24 hours to boot to desktop haha.

I might try something like this if I get bored... maybe Win7 or Vista on a pentium II?

One interesting aside as that I made a private mysql-based intranet for the engineers at my job, and we needed a server to run it. They didn't want to go through the loops of buying a new computer through IT (and we aren't allowed to use one that isn't bought through IT) so we had to use an existing one to host the server. They asked me if I could get it done with the old computer that was in the lab. Well it was one of the earliest Dell Pentium III's with like a 450 Mhz and like 64 megs of ram... yikes. After some bargain hunting I had a 833 Mhz Coppermine in there with something like 3x2 256 sticks of ram, a 2x250 GB Raid 1 array with a cheap raid controller, and a USB2 card hooked up to an 500 GB external harddrive which backs up periodically, along with a stripped out installation of XP OEM, and some THOROUGH dust cleaning of the case. It's been working like a champ the past year or two, and renders the pages in about a second with only a couple people using it at a time.

 

[BD231]

I'm running a file server on a Dell Demension L733R mATX PIII 733, 256mbs of sdram and Windows XP Pro. Super low power (125watt PSU), super quiet and *never* crashes. Its been running 24/7 since 2001 with shut downs for storage upgrades only. Works fine for internet, mp3s and mpegs. AVIs or youtube are not an option, nor can I overclock due to motherboard restrictions.

Dose anyone have any idea how well the PIII 733 dose on power consumption under minimal load? I can't seem to get a good idea on where it stands in contrast to modern CPUs. It has on board graphics and sound.

 

[Marty502]

All of you! A quick question regarding this topic.

What was a good video card back in the Pentium III days? I can't remember what was hot when I got my P3 800 Mhz.
Mine has a Radeon 7500, and it had a TNT2 on it's early days. Man that rig rocked for UT and NFS Porsche.

 

[brandonwh64]

on my AMD K6 3D 400MHZ CPU i had a ATI radeon 9000 AGP