Reply 40 of 79, by Skyscraper
gerry wrote on 2023-05-06, 19:03:does the opteron feel 'responsive' enough in use though? it might emulate the experiences of early adopters of the time
It does feel very responsive but so did the Pentium 4 3.0C. It's hard to emulate any differences people might have experienced between the platforms back then as everything is somewhat different now even when we try to recreate the past.
For example the reason I have not updated the Opteron 244 3DMark scores yet and added the rest of the benchmarks using a fresh Windows XP install as I planned is VIA + AGP + ATI + XP-SP3 issues. I don't really think people experienced these problems just as much back then, at least I didn't when testing using the now wiped XP-SP2 install. Only 3dmark05 and 06 seems affected and freeze in firefly forest, games and other benchmarks run fine so back in 2003 this exact problem would have been a non issue anyhow. Back then there were always known combinations of drivers that worked but so far the MSI K8T Master2 + Radeon 9800 Pro with XP-SP3 seems to have me beaten. 😁
While I have not solved the issues I have now worked "around" them.
I noticed that I could run 3dmark05 and 06 right after I reinstalled the Omega version of the Catalyst 7.4 driver with fast writes disabled and before rebooting. This was enough to get a more representative 3dmark05 score even if it's still a bit below the "mark". I have a pretty good understanding of how these parts should perform in 3DMark so I can tell where there likely is performance left on the table. I also did new and more representative runs with the Opteron in 3DMark2001 and 03 so it's now easier too see where things are heading in the "future".
.
I found my boxed Radeon 9800 Pro (R350 128MB). I tested this card to make sure the issues I was experiencing weren't caused by issues with the other 9800 Pro.
Most of the paperwork seems to be located somewhere else but I'm confident I still have it.
.
One conclusion from my testing with the MSI K8T Master2 is that for the AMD FX51 launch in September it's probably better to emulate an AGP nForce3 or K8T800 s940 platform using s939. The only notable difference between early nForce3/K8T800 s940 and s939 motherboards is that the former uses registered memory and the latter doesn't, the performance should be very close.
I will of course still use the K8T Master2 FAR for dual CPU testing and perhaps some testing with Nvidia cards but I doubt I have the patience to keep using this board with ATI cards and as we know ATI cards were the fastest in 2003.
.
I will update the 3dmark benchmarks and add the rest of the benchmarks for the Opteron later today then it's time to build a Barton system.
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.