Reply 60 of 126, by alexanrs
The P5B is a beast compared to my P5VD2-VM. My dad bought that PC for me a few years ago, and asked the salesman to pick the parts. Sure thing, they got him the cheapest board and a Pentium D925 (when C2D's were already available, the board itself even officially supports the E6X00 ones), and a single GB of DDR2 533MHz. Oh, and no graphics card, and with S3 Unichrome onboard was atrocious both in speed and in image quality in OpenGL/Direct3D. The driver that shipped with the CD managed to lag with the translucend box used to select files in XP (hopefully, things improved with driver updates). My older A64 (then coupled with a FX5200) was a much better gaming machine, and this only changed after I bought na 8600 GT.
Nowadays that board is being used by my "little" brother, currently equipped with a leftover GTS 450, 3GB DDR2@633 (actually 4GB DDR2 800MHz, but the board can't handle neither the full capacity nor the full speed) and a C2D E6700. If I could actually OC it (ACHI in the VIA chipset is too sensitive), could use more than 3GB and the board had dual-channel, this machine would be pretty decent. As it is, it handles multimedia tasks well and not-so new games like Skyrim without trouble with excellent FPS count.