Honestly? I'd go Linux if I were you, and dual boot XP. Linux Mint is faster on older hardware than Window 7 IME, and less security issues.

And yes, upgrade the RAM, regardless of OS.

hmm im not familiar with mint, what about lubuntu, I've set that up a few times for folks

Yeah, that'd work too if you like the barebones UI.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, and supposedly the version with MATE is fully featured but also pretty light on ressources. Haven't tried it myself yet, though.

FWIW, Mint with Cinnamon runs better than Windows 7 on my Pentium D box...

To browse quite decently with a Pentium 4 Preshott 3.4 HT + 6800 Pro + 3GB DDR400 + Windows 7 I created a small 250MB ramdisk, then installed Pale Moon portable in the ramdisk.

Browsing on P4's isn't fun anymore thanks to flash. I gave up 2 years ago with my XP machine and doubt a newer OS would help.
Linux may work out better but never played with any myself

Don't you have a motherboard with a PCIe slot? Getting flash acceleration with AGP cards might be impossible (I don't know if the bridged ATI cards have it)

The Prescott 3.4GHz system I built for the lunch room at work handles the Internet just fine. The boss often use it as his own Athlon 64 system is clogged with god knows what.

The Prescott runs XP SP3 with Microsoft Security Essentials and latest Firefox with Adblock+. The machine is often used for playing Youtube clips which works prefectly at 480P and it also handles 720P but just barely. The computer uses a ATI FireGL video card, I think its the FireGL version of the Radeon 8500, its definitely too old to support any type of Flash/H264 acceleration.

The best part is that the system is built of pure trash that I was going to throw away, the board is scratced really really badly and its a wonder anything works at all. One memory channel is dead so the system is limited to 2GB DDR400 single channel memory 😀. The PSU is probably from before year 2000 and is rated at 250W, it squeels like a pig during heavy load and the fan is not very quiet as there are no other case fans at all. I thought the computer would last only months but it has now been runnning 3 years 24/7.

To sum it up, use the Prescott with XP.

chinny22 wrote:

Browsing on P4's isn't fun anymore thanks to flash. I gave up 2 years ago with my XP machine and doubt a newer OS would help.
Linux may work out better but never played with any myself

It's still fun, you just shouldn't be loading up flash. 🤣 The only thing flash is used for anyways is ads.

Skyscraper wrote:

... The PSU is probably from before year 2000 and is rated at 250W, it squeels like a pig during heavy load and the fan is not very quiet as there are no other case fans at all. I thought the computer would last only months but it has now been runnning 3 years 24/7 ...

Banzai! For the scientific interest, what might be the ambient temp at that lunch room?

so use the P4 over the Opty?

The p4 setup with Windows 7 would be a good little web browser. I would up the ram to at least 2gb (4 if you can) but even with the old x850 it should chug along pretty well. Another option is to see if you can get 7 to run on the opteron anyways regardless of official driver support or run Linux (as was previously suggested)

I know the P4 I can take to 4gb officaly but it doesn't support 64bit, so 3gb is realistly all thats useful, the opteron will support 4gb as well but at PC2700 instead of 3200 since I will have to fill all 4 banks

I know Windows 8.1 is picky when it comes to instruction sets, and won't run on Athlon 64 and some P4s. Windows 7 and the original Windows 8, though, are fine. Both work well with 2GB, as long as you install the 32-bit versions, but Windows XP will be faster.

Well XP is on both of them right now, the P4 is being borrowed by my soon to be father in law, but he refuses to use it as its the devils work to rely on a computer, so 🤣. But both are running XP currently with unoffical SP4 so they get all updates for Windows Embeded.

now if I found a Dual core and a 939 PCIe board any chance of me using my GTX 960 in it, its under warranty bought it a week ago so if its blown ill jsut get a replacement 🤣.

Well, it should work on any PCI-e motherboard. Some VIA chipsets have trouble with G92 cards (8800GT, 9800GT, GTS 250)... I myself have an LGA775 board with a VIA chipset that gives BSODs like crazy with a GTS250. It works just fine with a GTS450, though, so I guess the 960 is safe.

well if want to find an Nforce 4 honestly, as I had nightmares with K8T890 motherboards

alexanrs wrote:

Don't you have a motherboard with a PCIe slot? Getting flash acceleration with AGP cards might be impossible (I don't know if the bridged ATI cards have it)

I can confirm Flash/h.264 support does work on bridged ATi cards, at least with newer ATi AGP Hotfix drivers - I have an HIS HD 4350 AGP 512MB (which are apparently still made; Newegg and other retailers still sell them brand new) in my P4EE, and it handles 1080p YouTube without breaking much of a sweat. The in-the-box drivers from HIS do not support Flash, but the latest AGP hotfix from AMD enables it. There is still a CPU component for Flash, which is "heavier" for a P4 or other old CPU as opposed to something like a Core i7, but from my my own observation its like 20-25% CPU load + GPU, versus like a few % CPU load on a modern system GPU, or 100% CPU load (and it still stutters) for Flash-on-CPU with the P4. This is at 1080p mind you. Drop things off to 480p or 720p and its much less of an issue (and personally I prefer lower-resolution streams a lot of the time as they eat up less of my Internet bandwidth).

For PCIe, you'd want to go GeForce 8400/8500/8600 or 9 series (including the G92 8800s) or higher, or Radeon HD 4000 series or higher. AFAIK there are no other AGP cards than the bridged HD 4000 that support Flash, but a few of the lesser Radeon cards will also support h.264 (e.g. X1600Pro AGP will still provide AVIVO h.264 support, which could help with Blu-ray, and will ofc still support DVD playback). I don't know much about the PCI GeForce 8/200/600 cards - technically the GPUs support CUDA, Flash, etc but I'm not sure if the PCI bridged cards implement it (I know at least on the GeForce 6, the bridged cards gave up a lot of video decode features).

Putting the GTX 960 into a 939 motherboard *should* work, but it may refuse to boot. I know that when I tried GTX 770 with my DX48BT2 it locked the machine up on power-on, and some searching revealed there is apparently an incompatibility between the GTX 770 (and ostensibly other newer cards) and some pre-PCIe 3.0 boards (of course, that isn't 100% - there are plenty of people with GTX 770 in PCIe 2.0 boards). I would say try it and if it works great, and if not at least you'll know. A GeForce 8600 shouldn't cost too much, and will give you Flash, 264, partial VC-1, etc support as well as relatively up-to-date drivers for Vista/7 (and afaik 8/8.1 too).

WRT SSE3 - it may or may not help. My P4EE (which is SSE2) doesn't seem to have much trouble; it isn't a rocket-ship, but it still does a good enough job. You shouldn't give up SSE2 support though - that will break many applications.

RAM-wise, you want at least 2GB. 4GB is better. Enabling ReadyBoost can also help with some things.

well checked the 939 opty supports SSE3, so there is that, so I'll try to find a PCIe 939 board, if the GTX 960 wont work, I do have a 9500GT DDR2 I could use in it