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.

HighTreason wrote:

And what use are these random seek times in this kind of scenario? I'm far more interested in capacity and sequential read/write. I remember when SSDs became the "cool" thing to have and my friend put these shitty 32GB Corsair ones in, he had SATA III and I still had SATA II, but I used to just sit and laugh at him getting jelly over my much cheaper WD Black RAID 0 setup.

I'd still game, but the last really good one came out in 2005 and the last tolerable one came out around 2009. So I'm done with it. It's all corporate bullshit or so-called "indie" rip-off trash.

For SSD's, a typical non-server box isn't going to be transferring large files very often, so the raw throughput doesn't matter that much. And with Windows 8 and Fast Boot, even my shitty 120GB mechanical drive that only benched at 30 MB/sec sequential loads Windows 8 in like 5 seconds. Really the main use for SSD's right now is how responsive they make systems feel and that mostly comes from the fact that they don't need to seek with a physical head.

With gaming though, I can agree with what you're trying to say but it's just the flow of things. For example, I enjoyed installing games from a CD and getting a much more personal experience from them and then connecting to the net and playing online with dialup - now I can buy them 10 at a time for $1 via Humble Bundle and download many of them faster than they used to install via CD. It's become a Pokémon game of sorts, "gotta catch em all", there's no real exploration by renting or downloading demos anymore atleast not in that manner and there's so many games coming in that the "do I have time for this?" filters go up and your standards go way up.

Things change though, we can all still play Mario on the Nintendo if we wanted to - he never changed, we did. Life bro. Find a game you truly love like you do Duke Nukem and game on!

It was the one thing I kicked his ass at - other than the GPU, for reasons unknown my GTX 460 ran most games significantly better than his XFire 5950's... I suspect a generation gap but most places around here were touting it as a competitor from the same generation. I also know his PCI-E slots were probably faulty because I ended up repairing them at a later time.

If they made good games again, I'd go right back to it, but I just can't stand the way they look, feel, play and sound these days so I just ignore them. I'll play what I know when I'm bored or try an older game I haven't tested before, but new ones simply don't interest me. They don't even try to push the technology anymore so there isn't even that redeeming factor now. The whole industry will probably go down the shitter in the next ten years anyway in favor of mobile crap like "Press the red button", "Silly Piggies" or "Flappy Tweets" as well as a few shit ports of Doom or something that will come out.

Also, whilst I'm here. Fuck Rockstar. And there is no way I am giving a penny to anyone at Valve either for that matter.

alexanrs wrote:

The P5B is a beast compared to my P5VD2-VM.

The P5B is an excellent board, I don't know why the previous poster put it down. Sure, Asus used lousy capacitors on it, but you can completely replace all the VRM's electrolytic capacitors with polymers, which I did on one. The rest of the "TK" caps also need replacing. Runs like a champ. Already built two Xeon 771 E5430 computers with them, they work fantastic.

honestly I didn't go to an SSD for boot times, I just dont like long boot times, they annoy me, I dont want to want to wait for it to load, I want to press the button, sit up straight in my chair again and be at the login screen, thats not to much to ask. My SSD however is used for windows, i keep games on a mechnical, but other items that I use all the time, programs and such are on the SSD, as well as my 3d models and gmax itself. This is so I can load them up alot faster once they are textured and yes i do load them up alot faster.

candle_86 wrote:

honestly I didn't go to an SSD for boot times, I just dont like long boot times, they annoy me, I dont want to want to wait for it to load, I want to press the button, sit up straight in my chair again and be at the login screen, thats not to much to ask. My SSD however is used for windows, i keep games on a mechnical, but other items that I use all the time, programs and such are on the SSD, as well as my 3d models and gmax itself. This is so I can load them up alot faster once they are textured and yes i do load them up alot faster.

I personally don't see the big problem with boot time. I use hibernate which is faster than a cold boot but still slow BUT I turn the machine on first thing in the morning and keep it on all day. While if is booting, I do other things

I just leave mine running all the time. Typically, with a machine that worked properly, I would have videos uploading and rendering at that time or some other tasks that take up a lot of time. Through the day I'm at the machine enough that it would probably waste more electricity if I had to keep starting it up and shutting it down. Shutting down actually takes longer than starting up.

I shut it off at night, as I live in an economy apartment, and quite frankly, blue LED's effect my sleeping

My boot times usually overlap with 'get coffee' time so startup hype is not much point for me either.

havli wrote:

The P4 EE - maybe it is better to get the 3.2 GHz Gallatin Xeon. It is 200MHz slower and only 533MHz FSB, however it is possible to run dual-CPU config. 😀 Socket 604 boards are not that expensive either.

I can sort of speak to this - I have a Dual 604 system (Asus PC-DL; it's Intel 875p based) with 3.06GHz 1M Gallatin Xeons. In benchmarks/usage the 3.2GHz Gallatin P4 EE is generally superior across the board, unless you're doing something that explicitly can address both CPUs (which doesn't usually resemble gaming from the early 2000s). Anandtech actually did a review of that motherboard with the same CPUs, and had a number of other CPUs and boards in there: http://www.anandtech.com/show/1139/8 They don't, however, have an EE in there. The single-socket P4 is just a 3.06GHz 800FSB chip (the 3.2EE is superior, and remember there's a 3.4EE too).

There is a Xeon 3.2GHz 2M 533FSB chip, which I've found to be somewhat harder to source, that the PC-DL can also use. However given that the performance gains from going 2.8GHz 512k -> 3.06GHz 1M weren't that substantial, I'm skeptical that going to 3.2GHz 2M would be that substantial either. It's certainly a neat board, and a neat platform, but it isn't an absolute brute for performance. I know there are later, 7000-series chipset boards that can do 800FSB and DDR2, which may offer better performance - I think Asus has one called NC-DL or something like that, and there's the iWill DN800SLI too (http://www.digitaldingus.com/reviews/iwill/dn … 0-sli/index.php).

I shut it off at night, as I live in an economy apartment, and quite frankly, blue LED's effect my sleeping

The reason I use hibernate at night is the fans are bloody loud! They definitely make it hard to sleep

smeezekitty wrote:

I shut it off at night, as I live in an economy apartment, and quite frankly, blue LED's effect my sleeping

The reason I use hibernate at night is the fans are bloody loud! They definitely make it hard to sleep

Turn on variable fan rate in the BIOS. In Asus, I think this feature is called QFAN. All but the most inexpensive motherboards give you control of at least some of the fans... The P5B lets you control all the headers IIRC. You can use HWMonitor to see what your temps and fan speeds are.

candle_86 wrote:

I shut it off at night, as I live in an economy apartment, and quite frankly, blue LED's effect my sleeping

I hate how most of the recent good cases (that I have seen) have abandoned the old green/red standard and are now shipping with only blue or while LEDs. I had no trouble sleeping with my older PCs in my room, but with the newer ones those LEDs make my room brighter than a nightclub. At least all my fans either have no light or their LEDs can be switched off.

I actually can't sleep without a steady noise like a bunch of computer fans running flat out. I do live in a rather noisy neighborhood though.

I hate overbright LEDs, hate neon crap, hate LED fans, hate case windows. That shit is for teenagers, these days I'd rather just get stuff done.

mockingbird wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

I shut it off at night, as I live in an economy apartment, and quite frankly, blue LED's effect my sleeping

The reason I use hibernate at night is the fans are bloody loud! They definitely make it hard to sleep

Turn on variable fan rate in the BIOS. In Asus, I think this feature is called QFAN. All but the most inexpensive motherboards give you control of at least some of the fans... The P5B lets you control all the headers IIRC. You can use HWMonitor to see what your temps and fan speeds are.

The motherboard can't control the case fan. It's fixed to full speed.
The CPU fan speed can be decreased to tolerable levels but the case fan is still noisey 2400 RPM.

HighTreason wrote:

Even a really shitty one

You're doing it again, why are you doing it again? 🤣

P5B is my favourite 775 board, it served me 2006-2014 and now serves my wife. The integrated sound died a few days ago though, but what would you expect from a board working several hours every day for 9 years? I dropped in an SB Live! 5.1 (surprisingly, there are drivers for Windows 7 x64) and it sounds good. It's kind of amazing, a 12-year old soundcard, a 9-year old mobo, an 8-year old CPU with a 7-year old GPU cope very well with any task she throws at them 😀

HighTreason wrote:

If they made good games again, I'd go right back to it, but I just can't stand the way they look, feel, play and sound these days so I just ignore them. I'll play what I know when I'm bored or try an older game I haven't tested before, but new ones simply don't interest me. They don't even try to push the technology anymore so there isn't even that redeeming factor now. The whole industry will probably go down the shitter in the next ten years anyway in favor of mobile crap like "Press the red button", "Silly Piggies" or "Flappy Tweets" as well as a few shit ports of Doom or something that will come out.

Man, that's why we're all here! I understand you very well. There are some cool titles like FTL, but most stuff is plain boring.

smeezekitty wrote:

The motherboard can't control the case fan. It's fixed to full speed.
The CPU fan speed can be decreased to tolerable levels but the case fan is still noisey 2400 RPM.

I had this problem with a Vostro 420 (Foxconn G45A01) ... The problem though was that the fans don't spin fast enough when the CPU temp increases... The scaling is there in the BIOS, but it's broken because there's no change in speed.

SpeedFan works great in this case though. It has its own little subroutine for fan scaling which works great. As long as the fans are plugged into a 3 or four pin header, SpeedFan can usually control it.

Which motherboard are you using, by the way?

I have to agree with you RacoonRider, the P5B is a great board. My onboard sound works. Unfortunately, they used Soundmax and not Realtek, but it serves me well enough. This is my work computer with a bit of gaming on the side.

RacoonRider wrote:

You're doing it again, why are you doing it again? 🤣

P5B is my favourite 775 board, it served me 2006-2014 and now serves my wife. The integrated sound died a few days ago though, but what would you expect from a board working several hours every day for 9 years? I dropped in an SB Live! 5.1 (surprisingly, there are drivers for Windows 7 x64) and it sounds good. It's kind of amazing, a 12-year old soundcard, a 9-year old mobo, an 8-year old CPU with a 7-year old GPU cope very well with any task she throws at them 😀

Sort of unrelated, but how does the SB Live hold up in Win7? 😊

wait a live 5.1 was released in 2001 wasnt it, so the sound card isnt 12 years old, its 14

They were available in fall 2000