Re: Windows XP Help me pick a CPU

Posted on 2019-01-31, 11:13

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I can't think of any games that run better on XP that need (or even make use of) a quad core cpu. An e8400 is like $6 on ebay here and performs + overclocks fantastically - there is really no need to mess around with 771 modding and the like

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Re: 10 year cpu challenge

Posted on 2019-01-21, 04:37

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

In 2009 i had a C2Q 9550.. it was the last cpu i owned in a frenzy of upgrades spanning 2005-2009, where i upgraded enough that the old parts had yet to become dusty. Since then I only upgraded once to an i7 2600K, which serves me well right to this day (even for gaming)

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Re: best windows 98 agp card

Posted on 2019-01-14, 10:56

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

A GF2 Ti is faster than the later geforces in some older games Stick to nvidia 45.23 and older drivers.. everything later has issues Please don't bother with the very latest AGP cards. They were only made for people who were too poor to upgrade their systems to pci-e (i worked in a pc shop around …

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Re: Project: First Person Shooter History

Posted on 2019-01-13, 01:17

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Very cool! I'm tempted to use this list to play through some of the shooters i missed out on back in the day Hardware wise there is a cut off point at which you can use a modern windows 7/10 pc without any issues to play all the modern games. Build engine games (duke 3d, blood) are the last games …

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Re: Daemon Tools 3.47 No Longer Works on Windows 98 After Installing Unofficial Service Pack 3

Posted on 2019-01-12, 08:39

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

stick with service pack 2.1a, there are issues beyond that

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Re: With Steam dropping Windows XP/Vista, what games benefit from staying on XP?

Posted on 2018-12-26, 01:47

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Steam is a garbage way of running older games.. if you own them, you're much better off sourcing the original disks/images instead

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Re: 2018 - A Year of Bad RAM

Posted on 2018-12-23, 09:26

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've downsized my collection of hardware and in testing 2 trays of ram (almost 100 sticks), i've thrown out maybe 30 sticks because they were defective. No other piece of hardware (including motherboards and video cards) has anything remotely near the failure rate of memory in my experience

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Re: 3DFX cards - too expensive

Posted on 2018-12-02, 05:04

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Either you can get a voodoo 2, or use a glide wrapper

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Re: How stable is your Windows 98?

Posted on 2018-11-25, 00:14

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Changing hardware and drivers a lot can really upset a windows 98 installation.. so can bad drivers.. otherwise I have found it to be really stable

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Re: Any specific AGP cards I should keep (lower end) ?

Posted on 2018-11-22, 10:04

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Keep a TNT2, a couple of geforce 2 and 4 era cards, an S3 and anything 3dfx. Ati and matrox are really not worth keeping unless you have some very unique or nostalgic cards. Some higher end 'last of an era' cards, like the fx5900 ultra, are also worth keeping but anything newer where there is a pci …

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Re: Glide in Windows 98

Posted on 2018-11-17, 06:13

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

It would be a good idea to reinstall windows 98 on that PC.. maybe onto another hard drive as a test install first to get the right drivers set up first. nvidia drivers after 45.23 have issues in windows 98, but for geforce 2 era cards, 30.82 is the sweet spot. Also directx 7

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Re: Modifiying old machines

Posted on 2018-11-15, 00:49

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

your best bet would be finding an ATX motherboard tray with the whole backplate in one piece, then using your sheet metal skills to put that in otherwise you can get an ATX case and frankenstein the whole rear panel (including the ATX power supply cutout) plus motherboard tray into the shell and …

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Re: One or two retro builds?

Posted on 2018-11-14, 02:24

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Try a glide wrapper.. they are good enough and your system is fast enough to easily do it. I prefer it over messing with voodoo 2's

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Re: Sound Card Recommendation for old P2-400MHz?

Posted on 2018-11-09, 10:44

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The sound blaster AWE64 was commonly bundled with that era PC. Unless you want to experiment with 3D sound and get an aureal vortex or original sound blaster live, I would stick with ISA. You get good dos compatibility and if they have windows drivers, they work fine for windows games too Gateway …

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Re: Sound Card Recommendation for old P2-400MHz?

Posted on 2018-11-09, 03:21

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

The sound blaster AWE64 was commonly bundled with that era PC. Unless you want to experiment with 3D sound and get an aureal vortex or original sound blaster live, I would stick with ISA. You get good dos compatibility and if they have windows drivers, they work fine for windows games too

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Re: What is the best video card for both Windows 95 and DOS

Posted on 2018-11-09, 00:16

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Tseng cards aren't useful in pci.. S3 is great for dos and early windows, a 3dfx banshee or voodoo 3 is great for dos, windows and 3d from that era

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Re: Glide in Windows 98

Posted on 2018-10-29, 08:51

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Not glide related, but newer directx and nvidia drivers can cause issues. Try DX 7 and nvidia 30.82 or lower

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Re: Nvidia Fermi retro?

Posted on 2018-10-27, 02:28

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

It depends what aspect of 'retro' matters to you. You can build a really good windows XP gaming box with a GTX480, but it doesn't really fit with a period correct XP gaming pc.

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Re: Dual channel U320 SCSI, any benefit?

Posted on 2018-10-08, 09:04

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Could there be any performance hit by using 256 MB of RAID cache vs. 64 MB? I can even install as little as 32 MB. The two drives I am using, Cheetah 10K.7, ST3146707LW, contain about 7 MB of cache, while my 15K.5 drive, ST373455LW, contains 13 MB. I don't think you would notice a difference in …

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Re: Dual channel U320 SCSI, any benefit?

Posted on 2018-10-06, 07:56

by

by oohms

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Cache and processing power on a raid card is used most for parity raid eg 5 or 6. Mirror or stripe isn't very processor intensive and doesn't require much cache.

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