Psion handhelds are awesome! Happy 5MX and Revo owner here! Was playing with a HP OmniGo 100 last night, then saw your post 😲

I was playing around with this JVC VHS deck, a product of my latest dumpster dive. I hooked it up to an X800 All-in-Wonder and made a VHS copy of Furious 7. The source file was an uncompressed BD rip playing on MPC-HC. I had MPC downmix the DTS MA 7.1 audio to a Dolby Surround encoded stereo mix going into the VCR. The end result wasn't that bad! The video was, well, typical VHS to put it nicely. The audio was surprisingly good, with lots of bass. My receiver was even upmixing the Pro-Logic stereo audio to 7.2.

I also got my hands on some first-gen i7 gear, something I've been meaning to play with for awhile now. It's an i7-920, overclocked to 3.6GHz. So far, the performance is good, but I was expecting a little more out of it. I suspect this may partly be my fault, as I'm no pro when it comes to 1366 BIOS tweakage. I'm also running my spare DDR3-1333 modules in it, which may be pulling performance down (even though the IMC only officially supports up to 1333). On average, the 920 @ 3.6GHz is only around 5% faster than my q6700 @ 4GHz and Phenom 1090T @ 4.07GHz. It only really pulls ahead of the 4GHz C2Q when apps use more than 4 threads. Nehalem is a beast at x264 video encoding; well ahead of the q6700 and nearly tied with the 6-core 1090T.

3DMark01 performance is very interesting. In this test, the i7 is actually slower than the C2Q and PhII. I'm still learning the ins and outs of Nehalem tweaking and overclocking, but the subpar 3DMark01 performance has me baffled.

Opteron 185 OC (3.13GHz, DDR-400 dual)
Win7: 28,983
WinXP: 47,464

i7-920 OC (3.6GHz, DDR3-1333 triple)
Win7: 49,065
WinXP: 62,880

C2D E8600 (3.33GHz, DDR3-1333 dual)
Win7: 49,834
WinXP: 63,401

C2Q Q6700 OC (4GHz, DDR3-1600 dual)
Win7: 57,170
WinXP: 74,592

PhII-X6 1090T OC (4.07GHz, DDR3-1760 dual)
Win7: 58,807
WinXP: Haven't tested XP on this machine yet

i7-4930K OC (4.6GHz, DDR3-2400 quad)
Win7: 92,357
WinXP: 116,074

The performance in 3DMark03-3DMark11 appears to be just fine. Only 3D'01 (and 2000) are slow on this machine. Hmm.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I was playing around with this JVC VHS deck, a product of my latest dumpster dive. I hooked it up to an X800 All-in-Wonder and made a VHS copy of Furious 7. The source file was an uncompressed BD rip playing on MPC-HC. I had MPC downmix the DTS MA 7.1 audio to a Dolby Surround encoded stereo mix going into the VCR. The end result wasn't that bad! The video was, well, typical VHS to put it nicely. The audio was surprisingly good, with lots of bass. My receiver was even upmixing the Pro-Logic stereo audio to 7.2.

VHS players that supported "Hi-Fi" were capable of near CD quality audio. 😀

I also got my hands on some first-gen i7 gear, something I've been meaning to play with for awhile now. It's an i7-920, overclocked to 3.6GHz. So far, the performance is good, but I was expecting a little more out of it. I suspect this may partly be my fault, as I'm no pro when it comes to 1366 BIOS tweakage. I'm also running my spare DDR3-1333 modules in it, which may be pulling performance down (even though the IMC only officially supports up to 1333). On average, the 920 @ 3.6GHz is only around 5% faster than my q6700 @ 4GHz and Phenom 1090T @ 4.07GHz. It only really pulls ahead of the 4GHz C2Q when apps use more than 4 threads. Nehalem is a beast at x264 video encoding; well ahead of the q6700 and nearly tied with the 6-core 1090T.

3DMark01 performance is very interesting. In this test, the i7 is actually slower than the C2Q and PhII. I'm still learning the ins and outs of Nehalem tweaking and overclocking, but the subpar 3DMark01 performance has me baffled.

Retro? I still use the X58/LGA1366 platform as my main PC but with a six core Xeon, I don't think I'm the only one around here that does it. 😜

Kamerat wrote:

Retro? I still use the X58/LGA1366 platform as my main PC but with a six core Xeon, I don't think I'm the only one around here that does it. 😜

Retro? My main music production rig is a trusty ASUS P5KC s775 originally bought in 2007, with the most recent upgrade being a modded Xeon E5450 in place of the Q6600! Still a daily driver 🤣 😜

psychz wrote:

Retro? My main music production rig is a trusty ASUS P5KC s775 originally bought in 2007, with the most recent upgrade being a modded Xeon E5450 in place of the Q6600! Still a daily driver 🤣 😜

Nice! Any SSD in that rig? I might upgrade soon as my Xeon 5645 ES is missing one memory channel leaving me with just 16 of 24GB. As a lightweight fanboy I might go for AMD Ryzen. 😀

My retro activity today is playing with a rig based on ASRock 939Dual-SATA2, ASRock am2cpu, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, Sapphire Radeon 4670 AGP 1GB and 2x2GB PC6400, just finished installing Ubuntu 17.04.

Kamerat wrote:

VHS players that supported "Hi-Fi" were capable of near CD quality audio. 😀

With the right adapter, Betamax decks were used for digital PCM recording prior to the advent of DAT.

Kamerat wrote:

psychz wrote:

Retro? My main music production rig is a trusty ASUS P5KC s775 originally bought in 2007, with the most recent upgrade being a modded Xeon E5450 in place of the Q6600! Still a daily driver 🤣 😜

Nice! Any SSD in that rig? I might upgrade soon as my Xeon 5645 ES is missing one memory channel leaving me with just 16 of 24GB. As a lightweight fanboy I might go for AMD Ryzen. 😀

My retro activity today is playing with a rig based on ASRock 939Dual-SATA2, ASRock am2cpu, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, Sapphire Radeon 4670 AGP 1GB and 2x2GB PC6400, just finished installing Ubuntu 17.04.

Ryzen is anything but lightweight..

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I also got my hands on some first-gen i7 gear, something I've been meaning to play with for awhile now. It's an i7-920, overcl […]
Show full quote

The Socket 1366 platform needs memory speed (over latency but latency also matters) and IMC speed to really perform well in 3dmark 2001 and the like.

This is the upper end of s1366 performance! I have not tried 3dmark 2001 though and I probably never will! 😁

*The X5650 scores listed as 4 GHz were actaully benched at 4.4GHz and the difference is memory timings. Cinebench do not understand turbo multipliers very well... The performance jump going from overclocked X5650 CPUs to overclocked X5690 CPUs is slim.

I think this build will last me to 2020, 10 years after I first got the EVGA SR-2! No other main build I have had have ever lasted me more than two years.

Skyscraper wrote:

The Socket 1366 platform needs memory speed (over latency but latency also matters) and IMC speed to really perform well in 3dma […]
Show full quote

Standard Def Steve wrote:

[img] […]
Show full quote

[img]

I also got my hands on some first-gen i7 gear, something I've been meaning to play with for awhile now. It's an i7-920, overclocked to 3.6GHz. So far, the performance is good, but I was expecting a little more out of it. I suspect this may partly be my fault, as I'm no pro when it comes to 1366 BIOS tweakage. I'm also running my spare DDR3-1333 modules in it, which may be pulling performance down (even though the IMC only officially supports up to 1333). On average, the 920 @ 3.6GHz is only around 5% faster than my q6700 @ 4GHz and Phenom 1090T @ 4.07GHz. It only really pulls ahead of the 4GHz C2Q when apps use more than 4 threads. Nehalem is a beast at x264 video encoding; well ahead of the q6700 and nearly tied with the 6-core 1090T.

3DMark01 performance is very interesting. In this test, the i7 is actually slower than the C2Q and PhII. I'm still learning the ins and outs of Nehalem tweaking and overclocking, but the subpar 3DMark01 performance has me baffled.

The performance in 3DMark03-3DMark11 appears to be just fine. Only 3D'01 (and 2000) are slow on this machine. Hmm.

The Socket 1366 platform needs memory speed (over latency but latency also matters) and IMC speed to really perform well in 3dmark 2001 and the like.

This is the upper end of s1366 performance! I have not tried 3dmark 2001 though and I probably never will! 😁

<snip>

*The X5650 scores listed as 4 GHz were actaully benched at 4.4GHz and the difference is memory timings. Cinebench do not understand turbo multipliers very well... The performance jump going from overclocked X5650 CPUs to overclocked X5690 CPUs is slim.

I think this build will last me to 2020, 10 years after I first got the EVGA SR-2! No other main build I have had have ever lasted me more than two years.

FYI the 1366 platform still uses a northbridge and front-side-bus. You get -significant- improvements in performance by overclocking the FSB waaaaay more than actual clock speed via unlocked chips. That should be what ya focus on before anything else with overclocking these platforms. When I had mine I saw as much as +30% performance boost running with like 276 FSB vs 200, while having the CPU clocked @ stock speeds with my i7-920 chip. Then another +30% more when you increase the clock speed ontop of it.

kithylin wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

The Socket 1366 platform needs memory speed (over latency but latency also matters) and IMC speed to really perform well in 3dma […]
Show full quote

The Socket 1366 platform needs memory speed (over latency but latency also matters) and IMC speed to really perform well in 3dmark 2001 and the like.

This is the upper end of s1366 performance! I have not tried 3dmark 2001 though and I probably never will! 😁

<snip>

*The X5650 scores listed as 4 GHz were actaully benched at 4.4GHz and the difference is memory timings. Cinebench do not understand turbo multipliers very well... The performance jump going from overclocked X5650 CPUs to overclocked X5690 CPUs is slim.

I think this build will last me to 2020, 10 years after I first got the EVGA SR-2! No other main build I have had have ever lasted me more than two years.

FYI the 1366 platform still uses a northbridge and front-side-bus. You get -significant- improvements in performance by overclocking the FSB waaaaay more than actual clock speed via unlocked chips. That should be what ya focus on before anything else with overclocking these platforms. When I had mine I saw as much as +30% performance boost running with like 276 FSB vs 200, while having the CPU clocked @ stock speeds with my i7-920 chip. Then another +30% more when you increase the clock speed ontop of it.

Thanks for the tip! 😜

I totally need advice about this as I'm totally clueless about Socket 1366 overclocking after using and overclocking the platform for 9 years and beeing one of Vogons geekiest geeks. 😁

The Socket 1366 platform do not use front side bus, a Nehalem or Westmere i7 CPU uses one bidirectional QPI link (the x5xxx Xeons have two) and the memory controller (IMC) is integrated in the CPU. The memory controller is also one of the most important factors for performance and normally tops out at a bit over 4000 MHz. Running a high BCLK with a low multiplier is faster than running a high multiplier with a low BCLK but there is much more involved. I use 23x200 = 4600MHz simply because the EVGA SR-2s stability evaporates at bus speeds over 200 MHz. This is true for my 3 SR-2 motherboards and all other EVGA SR-2 motherboards, a dual CPU system can not be pushed as far as a single CPU system.

The Nehalem/Westmere memory contoller must be clocked at at least twice the memory speed or stability will suffer so to be able to run for example 2133 MHz memory reliably the memory controller must handle running at 4266 MHz. Not all Nehalem and Westmere CPUs memory controllers can handle running at over 4000 MHz and you rarly saw DDR3 memory faster than 1866 MHz beeing sold in tripple channel sets for that exact reason.

edit an ---> a

I took a break from tinkering with retro PCs and decided to play some games on my old ZX Spectrum +2A, with the help of a PC though. 🤣

Loading the games from .tap & .tzx files on my PC, outputting from a USB sound adapter and straight into the cassette deck via a CD Car Casette Adapter. Working really good, though I do need to research better software to playback the tzx/tap files, preferably something with a rewind function!

Currently set up on my rather messy & dusty desk, with a Powerplay Cruiser joystick & a Cheetah 125+ Joystick:

I'll have to track down my Commodore 64, which I've buried somewhere in storage, as I always preferred that over the Spectrum and would love to try out the CD/Casette adapter on it.

Kamerat wrote:

Nice! Any SSD in that rig?

No, not yet, can't justify the cost of one atm. Also can't afford to upgrade, let alone update this system; it's a fully loaded SL 10.6.8 *ackintosh, which I decided to use in the home studio, to which I connect certain (outdated) hardware with no support for more recent OSes, such as UAD-1 cards, Focusrite LiquidMix etc. Logic 9.x doesn't play well with 10.7+ too, and I'm not really fond of LPX. As it is now, everything works, so I keep it that way 🤣 Getting a more recent box would mean getting rid of several older audio gear I use 😵

I picked up a Quad core AMD Opteron Tyan server board with an nvidia chipset as well as 8gb of ddr2 800. Freeeee! No real use for it right now tbh, but meh.

Took apart my k6 system, too much problems and unstable. Going to redo the whole build, still want the K6 among my collection but might shelve it if parts are to expensive.
I liked the build Phil made recently with the crossover from retro with a modern flair which might be fun to do. *starts pondering* still got some led strips and led fans hmmmm

I'm testing hardware in vanilla World of Warcraft.

I'm a paying WoW customer, own all the expansions and the server I'm using for the test runs a clean room design emulating the vanilla server so there are no legal issues even if Blizzard and perhaps member sliderider do not agree. 😘

So far I have found that the minimum CPU requirement, a PIII 800 does not bottleneck the minimum GPU requirement, a Geforce 2 GTS much at all. I use an Athlon Thunderbird system and going from 800 MHz to 1333 MHz did pretty much nothing for performace.

The game is fully playable with an 800 MHz CPU and a Geforce 2 GTS. I did not try using only 256MB memory though as I'm not a masochist.

Upgrading the video card to a standard Geforce 3 did actually hurt the performance at 1024*768 with minimum details and drawing distance with the Thunderbird CPU at 800MHz as the Direct3D 8 rendering path is more demanding than the Direct3D 7 one. At 1333 Mhz the performance was improved and I could increase the texture detail and drawing distance. I think a setup like this would have handled running 5 man dungeons alright.

At the European release of WoW I had an Athlon 64 system with a Gerorce 6800GT flashed with the Ultra BIOS so this is new territory for me. It's fun to see how hardware from early 2000 handles WoW as I had friends and guild mates who actually used such old systems back in 2005 - 2006.

Edit

After upgrading the CPU to the top year 2001 Socket A CPU, the Palomino 1900+ the Geforce 3 becomes a bottleneck. Even when overclocked at the GF3 ti500 spec (240/500) running at 1280*1024 with max texture detail results in about 30 FPS, fully playable but I think it's time to see what the GF4 ti4600 can do.

This Geforce 4 ti 4600 has a large capacitator ripped off but just as the ti 4200 that got "decapped" by the Dell Precision 530 MT case the ti 4600 dosn't seem to care. Many other caps are bulging and leaking, the Geforce4 series of cards seem to be very over-engineered. A recap of this card is on the to do list along with hundreds of pieces of other hardware I should recap...

/Edit

Edit2

After some testing I concluded that the Geforce4 ti 4600 isn't fast enough for my liking, with spell effects, weather effects and other stuff turned on/up I was back at 30 FPS even with a slight overclock.

When it comes to video card I'm back where I once started playing WoW, with my old Geforce 6800GT! The Palomino Athlon XP 1900+ runs WoW fine though, especially when overclocked to 1800 MHz.

/Edit2

I went thrifting 😀

The finds:

Skyscraper wrote:

The Socket 1366 platform needs memory speed (over latency but latency also matters) and IMC speed to really perform well in 3dmark 2001 and the like.

I had my 920 running at 4GHz with some nice, toight CL6 DDR3-1600 RAM today. Man did that take a lot of voltage. Good thing I don't really give a damn about this CPU (if I do decide to build a proper system around this board, I'll use a more "glamorous" CPU like the i7-975). Performance in 3DMark01 is much better now, but still behind the Core 2 and Phenom II. I also overclocked my E8600 to 4GHz to use as an additional reference point:

i7-920 @ 4GHz (triple DDR3-1600):
Win7: 56,320
WinXP: 72,299

C2Q Q6700 @ 4GHz (Dual DDR3-1600):
Win7: 57,170
WinXP: 74,592

Phenom II-X6 1090T @ 4.07GHz (dual DDR3-1760)
Win7: 58,807
WinXP: Haven't tested

C2D E8600 @ 4GHz (Dual DDR3-1600):
Win7: 60,106
WinXP: 78,361

Not that it really matters. 3DMark01 is the only benchmark where the Nehalem i7 curiously lags behind. At 4GHz with fast RAM, it easily outperforms the other chips in every other benchmark I've run. But it makes me wonder: Since the i7 is weak in 3DMark01, would it also fall behind in old games like Quake III? I may have to find out soon. 🙄

This is the upper end of s1366 performance! I have not tried 3dmark 2001 though and I probably never will! 😁

That's awesome man. One of these days I'm going to have to run that on my main system just to see how it compares. Based on the 3930K @ 3.3GHz, I'm gonna guess that a 4930K @ 4.6GHz would be as fast as a 12c/24T X5650 @ 2.67GHz...?

Purchased another desktop, a Dell Dimension E510 at a thrift store for $25, and the keyboard for $5 with an Intel Pentium 4 HT, about 1GB DDR2 RAM, ATI PCI-E card, Fax modem, integrated HD audio with different outputs (front speakers, back speakers, sub, etc.), integrated ethernet, 8x USB 2.0 ports, Intel graphics (on-board), Serial, Parallel, CD+/-RW DVD ROM combo, Floppy drive, 80GB HDD, and possibly Windows XP MCE 2005 installed on it, or maybe it's formatted. Going to either install Linux on it, or as a pfSense firewall since it has enough power under the hood, and I have memory for the system as well (upgradable to 4GB). Could use some cleaning inside and out, but the condition is phenomenal (I didn't see any scuffs, scrapes, dings, or scratches on the casing itself, and the inside looked rather dusty since 2 of the slot blanks went AWOL (or didn't get put on there, such as add-on cards were installed in one point in time), but I have slot blanks from a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus that has 3 sound cards (Lo-Tech Tandy Compatible Sound Card, Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro (OPL3, Covox Sound Things, Disney Sound Source, SB Pro, CD ROM controller, and parallel port expansion), and a Music Quest MPU401 Clone card), and a 3Com EtherLink III 10BaseT Ethernet card.

Also bidded on an HP Pavilion N3350 on the shopgoodwill.com website for $23 ($10 + S&H and taxes) that has an AMD K6-2+ 550 Mobile, Trident video card, 64MB RAM, 4GB HDD (no OS and formatted), DVD drive, FDD, ESS Maestro 3 sound and modem, no PSU, but I have one that would work with it that's for a Compaq Presario C700 notebook. Can't wait to get the HP notebook, and it'll be my portable MS-DOS and Windows gaming machine.

Edit:

Not retro activity related, but, I made some animated GIF images via GIMP 2.8 on my Dimension 4550 running Windows XP Home Edition with SP3:

/Edit

Skyscraper wrote:

I'm testing hardware in vanilla World of Warcraft. […]
Show full quote

I'm testing hardware in vanilla World of Warcraft.

I'm a paying WoW customer, own all the expansions and the server I'm using for the test runs a clean room design emulating the vanilla server so there are no legal issues even if Blizzard and perhaps member sliderider do not agree. 😘

So far I have found that the minimum CPU requirement, a PIII 800 does not bottleneck the minimum GPU requirement, a Geforce 2 GTS much at all. I use an Athlon Thunderbird system and going from 800 MHz to 1333 MHz did pretty much nothing for performace.

The game is fully playable with an 800 MHz CPU and a Geforce 2 GTS. I did not try using only 256MB memory though as I'm not a masochist.

Upgrading the video card to a standard Geforce 3 did actually hurt the performance at 1024*768 with minimum details and drawing distance with the Thunderbird CPU at 800MHz as the Direct3D 8 rendering path is more demanding than the Direct3D 7 one. At 1333 Mhz the performance was improved and I could increase the texture detail and drawing distance. I think a setup like this would have handled running 5 man dungeons alright.

At the European release of WoW I had an Athlon 64 system with a Gerorce 6800GT flashed with the Ultra BIOS so this is new territory for me. It's fun to see how hardware from early 2000 handles WoW as I had friends and guild mates who actually used such old systems back in 2005 - 2006.

Edit

After upgrading the CPU to the top year 2001 Socket A CPU, the Palomino 1900+ the Geforce 3 becomes a bottleneck. Even when overclocked at the GF3 ti500 spec (240/500) running at 1280*1024 with max texture detail results in about 30 FPS, fully playable but I think it's time to see what the GF4 ti4600 can do.

This Geforce 4 ti 4600 has a large capacitator ripped off but just as the ti 4200 that got "decapped" by the Dell Precision 530 MT case the ti 4600 dosn't seem to care. Many other caps are bulging and leaking, the Geforce4 series of cards seem to be very over-engineered. A recap of this card is on the to do list along with hundreds of pieces of other hardware I should recap...

/Edit

Edit2

After some testing I concluded that the Geforce4 ti 4600 isn't fast enough for my liking, with spell effects, weather effects and other stuff turned on/up I was back at 30 FPS even with a slight overclock.

When it comes to video card I'm back where I once started playing WoW, with my old Geforce 6800GT! The Palomino Athlon XP 1900+ runs WoW fine though, especially when overclocked to 1800 MHz.

/Edit2

My copy of WoW has an advertising insert for the 6800 series (which doubled as a rather decent coupon at the time). It also has an insert for the Pentium 4 processors of the same time frame. I need to get a scanner and scan those at some point.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

My copy of WoW has an advertising insert for the 6800 series (which doubled as a rather decent coupon at the time). It also has an insert for the Pentium 4 processors of the same time frame. I need to get a scanner and scan those at some point.

I think mine had the same, or something very similar. I think my TBC has one as well for newer cards but not 100% sure on that.

But personally, today I've been drawing up the plans for an AT and Baby AT test bench I'm going to make in the future. Didn't want to keep pulling things in and out of cases, and I'm not a fan of leaving things on the desk. Going to get a seven segment display in there too if I can pick one up that I can find the pinout for, and also space for HDD/CF card reader, floppy/floppy emulator and Power/Reset/Turbo buttons.

Will probably take some iteration but should pay off in the end.