Whom is still rocking an Athlon / Phenom II (even X6), or a Core2Duo/Quad? X58 users too.

[Shivansps]

I got to be honest, we are replacing old systems due to rising energy costs... I have tons of old hardware myselft but at this point is only a collection that i dont going bother in selling it.

Using older hardware than 4th gen Intel(it also got hit hard by security patches), or anything that ist Ryzen on AMD is really not recommended, god forbid using one of those FXs. But i understand this may not be a concern for many people.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Still running my old Q9550 in my wife's computer. Solid Sims/Excel machine .

 

[Shmee]

Update on the X58 rig. It appears that intermittently channel A will disappear, and the ram in either of those slots is not recognized properly. So right now I have it running 4x2GB in dual channel. Unfortunately the kits are only rated for 1333MHz, 2 sticks are from a Supertalent kit and 2 from a Corsair kit.

I kinda forget what I am running, but I think it is 183x23. So RAM is less than 1333 MHz due to a lower memory multi and higher blck.

Also, for those familiar with X58 and xeons, will the X5660 support 8GB DIMMs in my board? (Asus P6X58D Premium, latest bios)

 

[Johnny Ringo]

Different strokes for different folks. I honestly never feel burdened, or waiting for anything with the Phenom II 720. But I don't play games. Just light office based tasks.

I certainly realize that modern CPU's wipe the floor with this old AMD rig, but I don't do anything that is taxing CPU wise. I just need more RAM than the 8 GB, and DDR2 is too expensive to invest in that on an old platform.

 

[scannall]

Update on the X58 rig. It appears that intermittently channel A will disappear, and the ram in either of those slots is not recognized properly. So right now I have it running 4x2GB in dual channel. Unfortunately the kits are only rated for 1333MHz, 2 sticks are from a Supertalent kit and 2 from a Corsair kit.

I kinda forget what I am running, but I think it is 183x23. So RAM is less than 1333 MHz due to a lower memory multi and higher blck.

Also, for those familiar with X58 and xeons, will the X5660 support 8GB DIMMs in my board? (Asus P6X58D Premium, latest bios)

Overtightening the heatsink on those X58 boards will often mess with the 2 ram slots closest to the processor. If you're lucky you can loosen the heat sink a bit and get those channels back. It should support 8 gig DIMMs. Both my Asus and Gigabyte X58 boards do.

 

[Shmee]

Overtightening the heatsink on those X58 boards will often mess with the 2 ram slots closest to the processor. If you're lucky you can loosen the heat sink a bit and get those channels back. It should support 8 gig DIMMs. Both my Asus and Gigabyte X58 boards do.

Thanks for the update! I will have to try loosening up a bit then

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Different strokes for different folks. I honestly never feel burdened, or waiting for anything with the Phenom II 720. But I don't play games. Just light office based tasks.

I certainly realize that modern CPU's wipe the floor with this old AMD rig, but I don't do anything that is taxing CPU wise. I just need more RAM than the 8 GB, and DDR2 is too expensive to invest in that on an old platform.

Fun fact. One of the drives in my "legacy" OS PC is an NVMe drive. Just a no-frills Intel 600p 512GB (got several of those) combined with an old Athlon X3. While only Win7/8(.1) and Linux can boot from it (XP and Vista can't even see the drive... ), you'd be very hard pressed to notice much difference from my Ryzen system doing standard desktop stuff. Even web browsing just flies. (Insert obligatory warning about letting XP/Vista anywhere near the internet connection)

Well done for a literally 10 year old Athlon X3, and underlines just how important a fast storage system is.

 

[VirtualLarry]

How did you get an NVMe drive shoe-horned onto an AM3(+?) rig, including booting?

 

[Insert_Nickname]

How did you get an NVMe drive shoe-horned onto an AM3(+?) rig, including booting?

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970A-G3.1/index.asp

One of the rare breed of AM3+ boards with an M.2 slot, and full NVMe boot support. It's more or less the ultimate evolution of the AM3+ platform. The advantage is it can run anything from XP to 10 native, with full driver support.

Sometimes you just need an older OS for testing, or getting old stuff to work. Having a single system for everything reduces clutter significantly.

 

[VirtualLarry]

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970A-G3.1/index.asp

I remember when those came out. Contemplated buying a couple of 'em.

 

[Kane2103]

Pretty Much on 24/7, running win XP (ha), LCD Screen broke many a year ago, does its job of security cam duty. Still runs like a champ (a retired champ in his 60's maybe)

https://imgur.com/Qe9gf9I

Old Dell Inspiron e1405 - Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 @ 1.66ghz , 1Gb Ram

Holy Cow. Speaking of outdated. My Signature!

 

[Shmee]

Another update here about the X58 board, I tried loosening the Hyper 212 quite a bit, but still no luck seeing more than 8B of RAM. I suspect the board is just troublesome, at least much more likely than the Xeon being the issue.

 

[scannall]

Another update here about the X58 board, I tried loosening the Hyper 212 quite a bit, but still no luck seeing more than 8B of RAM. I suspect the board is just troublesome, at least much more likely than the Xeon being the issue.

That's too bad. I did that to one of my X58 boards as well. It's a known issue. Tons of posts in various forums over it. Some people get the memory channels back. Others don't.

 

[Johnny Ringo]

Fun fact. One of the drives in my "legacy" OS PC is an NVMe drive. Just a no-frills Intel 600p 512GB (got several of those) combined with an old Athlon X3. While only Win7/8(.1) and Linux can boot from it (XP and Vista can't even see the drive... ), you'd be very hard pressed to notice much difference from my Ryzen system doing standard desktop stuff. Even web browsing just flies. (Insert obligatory warning about letting XP/Vista anywhere near the internet connection)

Well done for a literally 10 year old Athlon X3, and underlines just how important a fast storage system is.

That is impressive!

That is the exact scenario that I am in. I have a Samsung 830 SSD for the OS, and despite that the motherboard only supports SATA II, it still is hard to distinguish between my i5 at work, that also has a SSD. Sure that i5 will run laps around this old AMD in benchmarks, but even if the i5 renders a web page .1 seconds faster, would I realize it? If the i5 recalculates a spreadsheet in .1 seconds faster would I notice? I doubt it. I can say for certain that I don't notice any difference.

I simply use the computer as a light office duty machine. Even with acting as a Plex Server to server media to Roku's, it is more than adequate.

Where I do run into a potential issue down the line is the DDR2 limitations, and being cost prohibitive to upgrade that to 16 GB. I still usually have 1-2 GB free out 8 GB after loading up VM's...but it is pushing the envelope for sure.

 

[kallisX]

Using older hardware than 4th gen Intel(it also got hit hard by security patches), or anything that ist Ryzen on AMD is really not recommended, god forbid using one of those FXs. But i understand this may not be a concern for many people.

i thought the current x4 950 was worse than FX.. atleast some of them were quite a bit faster? minus the heat perhaps.

 

[Shivansps]

i thought the current x4 950 was worse than FX.. atleast some of them were quite a bit faster? minus the heat perhaps.

The problem with the FXs is power and heat, performance is a secondary problem i could accept the performance if power and heat was acceptable.

For example im using a FX8320 at work right now, this one came up for free because the old owner just wanted to get rid of it...

When i first plug it in... my god, all bios defaults, it was consuming 253W of power at the wall during y-cruncher 1st test (that is not the most power hungry test!). After some tweaking i managed to drop power usage to around 130W by undervolting and undercloking to 2384mhz@0.95v.... So i cut total power usage by about half just by that...

But performance is bad.

Thats around 200GE performance at 2400G power consumption (130W).

At any rate we are about to do a general upgrade to reduce power since be have 15 pcs powered on 24/7 running old Phenoms, Celeron and Pentiums...

 

[Gt403cyl]

Currently have a PC with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ / SLi 8500 GT’s that I’ll be working on once I’m done with this Q6600 overclock/benchmark. (Got 3.6GHz pretty solid now!!!)

 

[Shmee]

I still have an Athlon 64 X2 as well, 4200+ believe, in an old nforce 4 SLI board I think, socket 939! 2GB DDR. Too old to run windows on, I used it in the past for mining on Xubuntu. Even with an SSD it was pretty slow in Windows 7.

 

[Johnny Ringo]

Finally found a local deal that I could not pass up. A brand new in unopened box (albeit several years old), Dell 3020 tower case with i3 4150 @ 3.5 Ghz, and 8 GB of RAM, 1 TB hard drive for $60.

I popped in the 16 GB of DDR3 that I had laying around from the upgrade from 7 years ago, that I never did, and did a fresh install to Windows 10 Pro 64.

It is snappy, and I have not even installed a SSD yet. (I plan to reinstall Windows 10 once I have a brand new SSD), and then move over 2 of my older drives out of the Phenom 720 workstation.

I was really looking for i5's, but when a never used system came up for that cheap, I had to jump on it.

It is slightly faster than my Phenom II in multi threaded benchmarks, and vastly faster in single threaded benchmarks. I can tell a "slight" difference, but I honestly never felt CPU bound on my Phenom.

All in all for $60 it is a nice upgrade.

 

[NTMBK]

Pretty Much on 24/7, running win XP (ha), LCD Screen broke many a year ago, does its job of security cam duty. Still runs like a champ (a retired champ in his 60's maybe)

https://imgur.com/Qe9gf9I

Old Dell Inspiron e1405 - Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 @ 1.66ghz , 1Gb Ram

Holy Cow. Speaking of outdated. My Signature!

Oh wow, that old Dell design takes me back. My flatmate used to have one like that.

 

[SPBHM]

I still have an Athlon 64 X2 as well, 4200+ believe, in an old nforce 4 SLI board I think, socket 939! 2GB DDR. Too old to run windows on, I used it in the past for mining on Xubuntu. Even with an SSD it was pretty slow in Windows 7.

what is the video card you are using?
old cards like geforce 7 can make the windows graphics performance feel slow on windows 8 or 7 Aero and cause a lot of CPU usage from what I noticed (it's far worse on 10 than 7)

my 4000+ X2 worked fine even on windows 10 IMO with a newer video card.
I retired it because the motherboard became unreliable;

recently I was playing around with a T7200 with GMA 950 and it felt atrocious on windows 10 because of the IGP and dwm.exe taking all the CPU time, but on windows 7 without Aero it felt ok, and also on Mint XFCE if felt probably the best I've seen that thing, maybe apart from XP.

 

[Shmee]

I believe it had a Fury or a 290 via riser cable. I suppose it is possible the windows was slow as it was cloned from a HDD that was going bad. That or just not enough RAM.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

what is the video card you are using?
old cards like geforce 7 can make the windows graphics performance feel slow on windows 8 or 7 Aero and cause a lot of CPU usage from what I noticed (it's far worse on 10 than 7)

my 4000+ X2 worked fine even on windows 10 IMO with a newer video card.
I retired it because the motherboard became unreliable;

I'd just say that counts as known issue. Ideally you want at least a DX11 (WDDM 1.1) compatible GPU for 8 and 10.

Reason is Windows 8 and newer have moved fully to a fully Direct3D based compositor. Which is quite capable of overwhelming older cards. There isn't any GDI+ fallback like 7. That is what's actually happening when you disable Aero under 7. It switches to the old GDI+ compositor. Which has far, far lower HW requirements. (Even my old Voodoo Banshee could do full GDI acceleration)

There was a thread over in Graphics Cards on this a little while ago.

recently I was playing around with a T7200 with GMA 950 and it felt atrocious on windows 10 because of the IGP and dwm.exe taking all the CPU time, but on windows 7 without Aero it felt ok, and also on Mint XFCE if felt probably the best I've seen that thing, maybe apart from XP.

Ah, the good old GraphicsMediaDecelerator.

The GMA900, 950 and 3150 is relying on the host CPU for some of the graphics pipeline. It'll be running in full 3D mode all the time, with corresponding CPU load.

 

[Modular]

My parents are still using my old AMD Phenom II X4 920 on a Biostar TA790gx. 8 GB of RAM and it runs Windows 10 with no issues at all.

I have 2 Athlon II x4 635's running Folding at Home and BOINC boxes. One on Windows 10 with 4GB of RAM and the other on Linux Mint with 2GB of RAM. Both are not doing any CPU work as the projects I have them on are GPU only (for obvious reasons). I did have to replace a few of the capacitors on the Athlon 635 boards, but after that, they've been rock solid.

All three run on SSDs and are plenty snappy and do the job really well for any normal computing usage.

 

[UNCjigga]

Still have a Core 2 Quad-based Dell Vostro as my only desktop rig now...I hardly ever boot it though (13 years old?) Moved all my files to a cheap, low-power ARM-based NAS with a way faster file system and NAS-spec Red drives. All my computing is done on laptops with a USB-C docking station for dual monitors, Ethernet, speakers, webcam, keyboard & mouse. Makes it easy to swap between work PC, home PC and Chromebook.