VOGONS


My Duron 892 rig

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First post, by weldum

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I'm making all the posts very close in time, hope there is no problem in that.

Let's change things a little, first the history:

This board is really good for what it is, the only problems that i had were because of the FSB being factory overclocked and no having options to correct the AGP nor PCI frequency (thanks PCChips).
This machine was the sister to the P2 466, because both have exact same layout, same chipset (different variant, because this is for AMD and the other is for Intel) and same crappy problem of the cmos batery non working, i'm suspecting on a broken fuse or diode.
The biggest difference through, is that the processor is soldered (a duron 850, common practice in PCChips and some other manufacturers, like the Kobian C3 rig) and this one has the physical AGP slot (2x only).
Despite all the shortcomings, this rig is rock solid, before was rocking a good Geforce 2 MX400 (equivalent to the 256 DDR) but that one was sold, so instead now has a SiS 315, which is a nice improvement over the integrated video (SiS 630/730) and in some games it goes as far as getting almost the same performance as the MX400, which is very impressive on it's own.

The specs:

CPU: AMD Duron Spitfire 850 MHz, but running at 892.5MHz, because of the FSB being 105MHz, and overclocking IDE, Chipset, AGP and PCI, and making some video cards to lock the system. Soldered on the board.
Mobo: PCChips M810 LR7
Chipset: SiS 730S (Capable of AGP4x, but softlocked to 2x)
RAM: 512MB Dimm SDRAM PC133
Video: SiS 315 32MB AGP
Sound: C-Media 8738
NIC: SiS 900 Fast
HDD: Seagate Barracuda ATA II 10GB IDE
OS: Windows XP SP3
PSU Half Length ATX
AOpen Small Case

The benchs:

duron.png

Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne: dissapointing performance, very low fps
Unreal Tournament 2004: feels very snapy, althrough the frame rate is rather low, in small maps is very playable. Has some textures drop
Unreal Tournament: excellent performance, althrough i've noticed some graphical glitches, the texture filtering is crap, is like having high resolution textures with no filter
Serious Sam TFE: excellent performance, no graphical flaws
Serious Sam TSE: same as above, but in some maps like Grand Cathedral it drops to about 20 or 25 FPS due to the amount of enemies
GLQuake: 55.8 FPS, excellent performer but has a big flaw, all the scenery looks color inverted
Quake 2: same as above but with no graphic problems
Quake 3: works excellent as well, very near 60 fps
Counter Strike Source: in the video test, 15 FPS and lots of glitches in textures, in real game (de_dust) around 5 to 12 FPS
Halo: Not so bad, but it drops textures, very playable through
GTA3: not so bad but drops some textures and have some slowdowns
GTA Vice City: almost perfect, some slowdowns but nothing more
Max Payne: runs perfect but has the texture problem present in UT
Max Payne 2: very good, with occasional drops and no graphical problems
Need For Speed Underground: fairly playable, stable but somewhat low FPS
Need For Speed Underground 2: at best gets like above, but most time is pretty slow
Need For Speed Most Wanted: like Underground 2 but slower overall

Maybe someone would wonder why only GLQuake has FPS number in almost all my "My blahblah rig" posts. The only command that I know is "timedemo demo1" and is for GLQuake only, so for now only GLQuake is being benchmarked properly.

That's all folks! (for now)

DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475

Reply 1 of 4, by mrau

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why xp? isnt that a little bit sluggish on a duron? have You tried 98? this might give You a performance bump; also: a stronger gpu might help a ton or two and fix the glitches;

Reply 2 of 4, by weldum

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Maybe, don't know really, but the processor is soldered. And about the OS, it runs really good, i only install the OS and the drivers, no other software is installed. Also, i really prefeer XP because 2000 has incompatibilities with some usb2.0 cards, and with any dos based os can't use NTFS, having to rely on third party software (for flashdrives and such) or network sharing which is very slow and unsuitable for how i work with these computers

A pentium mmx with 64mb of ram, that's sluggish in XP

DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475

Reply 3 of 4, by Ozzuneoj

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I think I have that same board with the crazy overclocked Duron running with a 105Mhz FSB. Can you imagine getting cheap-o motherboards these days that tried to disguise the fact that they were running low end Celeron N-series processors by overclocking the BCLK? Completely unheard of these days... but not uncommon back in the early 2000s. 🤣

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 4 of 4, by weldum

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In some ways i miss pcchips and other cheap crappy brands, they made everything fun and somewhat painful

DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475