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First post, by LHN91

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Hi all,

I'm beginning a build I've meant to do for quite a while. I'm tentatively calling this "Bumpgate? What Bumpgate?" and it'll be pretty obvious why. The alternate build name is "Poor Timing - 2006 Edition"

Current spec is looking like:

Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4
Athlon 64 X2 5000+
2 x 1GB OCZ PC2 6400 Platinum Revision 2 4-4-4 RAM
2 x 512 MB Nvidia GeForce 7950GT - one Gigabyte GV-NX795T512H-RH and one BFG Tech BFGR7950512GTOCE
Windows XP

Photo of the parts - no cleaning done as yet, but both of these 7950 GT cards were working fine when I removed them from their last PCs. One was in my previous XP retro box and the other was in a PC at my wife's aunt's that hardly saw any use.

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Feedback is more than welcome!

Reply 1 of 18, by LHN91

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Well I tossed the machine together to test it all out - along with a 500W Deep Cool PSU.

Right now, both cards seems stable in 3DMark03 (just what I have on hand) solo, but if both are plugged in, SLI enabled or not, neither can manage - the PC just shuts off. I suspect the PSU... or the weird wiring I had to do to use a modern PSU geared towards SATA with a GPU and board that both take a Molex connection.

Any suggestions? For the record I installed the most recent Nvidia drivers for the cards, which I know can be a mistake.

Reply 3 of 18, by LHN91

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leileilol wrote:
LHN91 wrote:

Windows XP

maybe bump this up to Windows XP 64-bit 😁 enjoy the 2006 (lack-of)64-bit driver hell!

Well the Motherboard drivers do exist for XP 64-bit..... that's actually tempting, in a masochistic sort of way. It's also probably one of the 2 post Windows 2.0 Windows OS's I've never really used heavily, the other being Windows 2000 actually.

Would definitely fit the "Poor Timing" concept, that's for sure.

Reply 4 of 18, by shamino

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XP64 is perfect for an Athlon64, unless you want to do something that it has issues with, of course.
I use XP64 as my primary OS, but on a secondary PC (which is an Athlon64, as it happens), I ran into some problems with support for some legacy stuff. XP64 is the breaking point for some such things. A major one for our purposes is that it obsoleted the legacy joystick interface.

Reply 6 of 18, by Srandista

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Just more incompatibility (not really an advantage though)...

Socket 775 - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA, Pentium E6500K, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, ESS Solo-1, Win 98/XP
Socket A - Chaintech CT-7AIA, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT, ESS ES1869F, Win 98

Reply 7 of 18, by leileilol

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You can run 64-bit executables and play that special 64-bit UT2004 (the only official release with a DX9 renderer) and 64-bit FarCry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

64-bit is usually disregarded as "ram who needs it" then but that's not really the only case where it'd be useful.

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Reply 8 of 18, by Woolie Wool

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I never knew the nVidia 7000 series had a major design flaw, I used an nVidia 7950 GT for a couple of years but wanted DirectX 10 so I upgraded to an 8800 GT. Maybe I was lucky to have upgraded early!

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Reply 9 of 18, by LHN91

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Well it seems it was the PSU that was causing my issues - I swapped to an otherwise mediocre Cooler Master unit and was able to successfully run 3DMark03 in SLI in 32bit XP.

Still, this is before any proper wiring or anything, more a proof of functional hardware than anything. Photos and 3DMark score below - pardon the actual photo of the screen, I've got an old Mac Pro USB keyboard on the desk at the moment with no print screen button 😒

I think this is a pretty good 3DMark03 score for this hardware? I do plan to do 3DMark06 as well soon.

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Reply 10 of 18, by LHN91

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I've installed a couple of games to test things out this evening.

Its interesting how quickly these parts were obsoleted - not to mention how quickly the CPU becomes a bottleneck.

For example Mass Effect 2 runs relatively well in SLI, but it maxes the CPU before the GPUs get a chance to go above about 80%.

Bioshock 1 seems to run worse than I expected as well, and that would have been a contemporary game for this machine.

Any further suggestions before I pull it apart to begin the process of making the build pretty?

As for sound, right now none is installed. I'm thinking I'd like to install my Audigy 2 ZS with the front panel unit. I think that's as close to contemporary as I have on hand at the moment unfortunately.

Reply 11 of 18, by Azarien

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Baoran wrote:

Does 64bit XP have any advantages compared to 32bit XP other than being able to have more ram?

I can think of two disadvantages:
- it is not 32-bit, meaning that you have all the compatibility problems of 64-bit systems (like being unable to run 16-bit programs, including InstallShield installers and DOS stuff)
- it is, well, still XP - actually, a Windows (non-)Server 2003 - meaning that most new programs won't run either.
Enjoy the compatibility walls from both sides 😀

But still, an interesting system to try.

Reply 12 of 18, by shamino

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I like XP64, but I know it didn't catch on so I definitely see the humor in using it for a "bad timing" mid 2000s build.
I don't think the Athlon64 fits that description though. On that point, the one thing that would make this even more "bad timing" is if it used one of those late, high powered 64-bit dual core Netburst "Pentium D" CPUs. Was there a bumpgate-prone nVidia chipset for that?
Add in the SLI 7950s, XP64, and maybe a Velociraptor hard drive. 😀

Its interesting how quickly these parts were obsoleted - not to mention how quickly the CPU becomes a bottleneck.

I think the 7000 series was one of nVidia's more forgettable generations, other than the fact that it was the last to offer AGP models. The 8800 cards made quite a jump in performance.. although bumpgate got even with them in the end.

Reply 13 of 18, by leileilol

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There were 64-bit AMD Semprons in 2005.

In '06 XP64 didn't worry me much for the 16-bit stuff being dropped as I already was using Dosbox and VirtualPC 2004 to get over those pains. Running Win31 in Dosbox was a very novel idea back then.

What would really hit someone hard at the time however would be Starforce-protected games as they refused to work on Win64 for years. They didn't have a 64-bit drive-killing driver yet X_X and there's really no true cracks for those. What the 'cracks' were for those were usually mini images for the pirates to mount with starforce than the legitimate users.

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Reply 14 of 18, by Srandista

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StarForce... To this day, I remember that guide for cracking Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which contains 35. steps. I didn't try it then, but what a times...

Socket 775 - ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA, Pentium E6500K, 4GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, ESS Solo-1, Win 98/XP
Socket A - Chaintech CT-7AIA, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT, ESS ES1869F, Win 98

Reply 16 of 18, by oeuvre

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leileilol wrote:

Running Win31 in Dosbox was a very novel idea back then.

Now imagine running DOSBox fullscreen on a late 2000s iMac in a school setting... running Windows 3.1

It threw off many people.

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Reply 17 of 18, by LHN91

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I'm finally getting back to work on this build.

I've gone ahead and added an Audigy 2 ZS with the front panel - I know it's not directly era appropriate but it's a lovely sound card for EAX capable games.

I've also installed XP64, which seems to run really well on this machine.

I've run a couple things on it and it's been really stable so far. Mainly 3Dmark03 and 3DMark06, but also Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, probably one of my biggest flawed favourites. It runs fully maxed at 1920x1080 with EAX4 enabled, which is really nice to see - though this game isn't terribly hard to run, admittedly.

I'm looking for suggestion on games/benchmarks to run on this machine. As I do them, I'll post results.

Reply 18 of 18, by XCVG

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shamino wrote:

I like XP64, but I know it didn't catch on so I definitely see the humor in using it for a "bad timing" mid 2000s build.
I don't think the Athlon64 fits that description though. On that point, the one thing that would make this even more "bad timing" is if it used one of those late, high powered 64-bit dual core Netburst "Pentium D" CPUs. Was there a bumpgate-prone nVidia chipset for that?
Add in the SLI 7950s, XP64, and maybe a Velociraptor hard drive. 😀

It's bad timing for 2006 specifically, because that's the year Core 2 Duo came out. I remember looking at AMD setups of various types, and then Intel came out with Core and blew them out of the water. I had an E6300 on an ASRock 775DUAL-VSTA, too bad that system was never stable.

Socket AM2 came out the same year, so an even worse "bad timing" build would be using an early 2006 Socket 939 motherboard and CPU. Performance is basically the same, but with no upgrade path (and you would have known you had no upgrade path in about three months).

Netburst would have been a bad choice, but Netburst was generally a bad choice at the time and we knew it. Buying the latest Athlon 64 thinking Core won't be *that* amazing and this one is already available... that's bad timing.

LHN91 wrote:
I'm finally getting back to work on this build. […]
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I'm finally getting back to work on this build.

I've gone ahead and added an Audigy 2 ZS with the front panel - I know it's not directly era appropriate but it's a lovely sound card for EAX capable games.

I've also installed XP64, which seems to run really well on this machine.

I've run a couple things on it and it's been really stable so far. Mainly 3Dmark03 and 3DMark06, but also Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, probably one of my biggest flawed favourites. It runs fully maxed at 1920x1080 with EAX4 enabled, which is really nice to see - though this game isn't terribly hard to run, admittedly.

I'm looking for suggestion on games/benchmarks to run on this machine. As I do them, I'll post results.

Good luck finding one, but an Audigy 4 would be perfect for this machine. It was a very marginal improvement over the Audigy 2, virtually impossible to actually get, and launched within a few months of the X-Fi lineup. It is off by a year- that was in 2005, not 2006, but definitely has the same sort of feel.

I seem to remember the biggest XP x64 compatibility issues being with old/weird hardware and legacy software. It never had a problem with modern hardware of the time to my knowledge.

As for games... will it run Crysis?