ah, i see the mhz myth is still alive and well.

> file management
cpu doesn't matter
> browsing internet pages
browsers don't multithread the work that they do for a single page all that well. that means single tab = faster single core performance beneficial; the more tabs you work with simultaneously, the more it'll start to lean towards multicore advantage
> copying files
cpu doesn't matter
> (un)packing archives
depends on the compression program, but generally speaking, prefer faster single- or at most dual core performance for these

some other metrics also matter, e.g. tdp - a 6 core 15w that will throttle almost immediately will chew through less work than a 2 core 95w one; or cpu generations - between two similar cpus of the same clock speed and tdp, you will more ofthen than not want the more recent one since it'll have received more dev time and under the hood improvements and thus will usually finish the same work faster

That means the best cpu for my system is the Phenom II X2 3,4Ghz? (now i have an athlon II X2 250 at 3.0Ghz)

https://www.asrock.com/mb/NVIDIA/N68-S/index.it.asp#CPU

I won't comment on that because I don't know which other CPUs your board might take, nor the specs of them, nor what your exact workload is (your post included "etc." which from my experience most of the time does a lot of heavy lifting), nor do I have time to look into all of that. What you described sounds like a lower core count but higher single core performance CPU might be a decent fit, but whether it's the best one, and which specific model you end up with, is for you to decide.

If your board is limited to 95W CPUs, I believe you can run a 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 (if you get the correct variant). If it has no such wattage limit, then you can try to get a faster one like Phenom II X4 980 (3.7GHz). With six cores you trade away clock speed, so they are unlikely to be worthwhile. Only use a dual core if you want to minimize heat/electricity, because their clock speeds don't go any faster than the X4 980 anyway. (There are also triple-cores... probably not bad at 3.4GHz)

The PC industry has been pushing more cores for a long time the same way the auto industry pushes trucks and SUVs. It's more profitable. There is a kind of paradox where haphazard, poorly performing software does not benefit from more cores because making it multithreaded would have required effort that was never there. Whereas carefully written software performs fine without more cores because it is carefully written. Of course there are obvious exceptions, especially among expensive commercial software, where the benefit of extra cores is easily seen.

Yes, the card is limited to 95W, but what happens if I install a 125W CPU like the 3.7GHz version? Computer won't start? Because in the end, by not using it for rendering or anything else, it keeps 100% of the CPU only when I install some Win10 update or open some RetroPC tutorial on YouTube and not even all the time, I need the computer to be more responsive when general use, I wouldn't use it at 100% CPU occupancy for long periods.

Not sure whether the BIOS checks that... but assuming it doesn't and simply lets you go over the board's power budget, then the most likely issue I'd expect to encounter would be for the VRMs to give out under load, leading to voltage sag, leading to an unstable system.

If your sole use case for this machine is managing files for your retro machines, presumably over USB and/or over the network and you want yo use a modern OS (Windows 10),

a) do you really need more CPU performance ? What issues/slowdowns are you experiencing ?

b) if you do need more performance, do you really want to try to get a limited extra amount of it (AM3 has not aged that well over 14 years) at the expensive of comparatively high power draw ?

You may not hit the 125W TDP with what you will be doing with the machine, but you will get more power draw than a slow (by modern standards) low power $100 mini PCs or a random used office tower or SFF PC from 5 to 8 years ago (costing probably less than $50). Either of those options can give you better performance than a top of the line AM3 CPU.

I am all for using retro hardware and using hardware as long as possible (when practical), but if what you have isn't up to the task and upgrading it comes with arguably little potential gain and several disadvantages, it is worth considering other options, IMHO.

If you're building a system for this today, don't use Windows 10. It's going out of support in a few months' time. Either go with Windows 11 (yes, your PC lacks TPM 2.0, but just download the ISO from Microsoft, then image it to a USB drive with Rufus and select the option to ignore TPM 2.0 check. It also lets you install with a local account without the hassle of the regular installer), or use Linux if you don't like messing with Microsoft installers.

That aside, I had a system very similar to this that I used for the same - an Asrock AM2NF3 board that supported Athlon X2 and Phenom I and II CPUs. I tried it with both an Athlon64 X2 7750 Black Edition (2.8GHz) and with a couple of the faster Phenoms, including a Phenom 2 X3 720 and an X4 925. My subjective experience was:
- When web browsing, fastest single-core performance was key. And even with near 3GHz 64b CPUs, it felt noticeable slower than on a current system.
- When doing more than browsing a single web page, two cores was vastly better than one, but that the added value of 3 or 4 was limited.
- Lots of L3 cache didn't hurt either, mainly in that web browsing again.

I did in the end settle on the X3, not because of clock speed (same 2.8GHz as the X2 7750) but because of the bigger L3 cache (6MB instead of 2MB). I couldn't see any relevant difference between the X3 and X4 at the same clock speed. After a while I upgraded to a 7th gen Core i3 system after my son upgraded his CPU to a Core i5. It felt much, much faster when web browsing.

I have an AM2 board dedicated to running an Athlon 64 X2 (3.2ghz in this case) and to drive a Raptor X (with a clear side to the case and the drive mounted in an easily-visible location). I run windows 10 on it.

My experience is that an X2 is fine until the OS decides to do background stuff (e.g. updates, cleanup, etc). Normal maintenance stuff, but they usually slam one of the cores. When that occurs it does noticeably slow down the machine, though playing a game (once it's loaded) tends to run ok. Recently, I've found myself updating steam, windows-store games, and the OS at the same time (so I can do a single-session update). I got annoyed, so I put a Phenom II X6 in (the 1100T variant) 😀 Sooooo much better. Will likely eventually go back to the X2.

Also I found, if the cores aren't hogged by updating, that even Edge runs pretty well. It's really cool exploring modern sites on a modern OS, with a modern browser, with a mere Athlon 64 X2!

So I'd sum it up as a 2 core K8 processor is fine unless you have updates and such going on. For gaming (for period-correct games) it runs well. Best of all, Win10 lets you run Steam, making managing games and running anything post-XP-capable very nice. I also run with 8gb to ensure my setup isn't thrashing memory.

Now I did slap in my AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (single core, 2.4ghz) once. That was a miserable experience! Put the x2 back in ASAP. So I'd say 2 cores is minimum for win10, 3-4 cores for a good experience if it's updating things. GHz helps, but Win10 when updating simply requires too much horsepower for a decent experience with just 2 cores.

Yes agree speed and cores does matter, but for just file work and browsing sticking with a 65watt TDP is fine.
Also ram !! You want 16GB+ with Win10/11 even if just simple work, it sucks ram like never enough 🤣.
For those thinking Win10 yes it does hit end of service Oct 2025 but like my Win7 box that still gets Defender and MS Malicious tool updates every week/month, you can get by way past that next year afaik.
The Win 10 2019 LTSC has extended support thru January 2029....so there are still Win10 options....fwiw

Horun wrote on 2024-12-23, 02:34:

The Win 10 2019 LTSC has extended support thru January 2029....so there are still Win10 options....fwiw

Just don't count on third party apps continuing to receive updates built to run on those. Many devs don't care, so like many times before, once Visual Studio stops targeting an older system by default, a lot of stuff will stop working. Just like that, without a good reason. It is what it is...

darry wrote on 2024-12-23, 00:21:

If your sole use case for this machine is managing files for your retro machines, presumably over USB and/or over the network an […]
Show full quote

If your sole use case for this machine is managing files for your retro machines, presumably over USB and/or over the network and you want yo use a modern OS (Windows 10),

a) do you really need more CPU performance ? What issues/slowdowns are you experiencing ?

b) if you do need more performance, do you really want to try to get a limited extra amount of it (AM3 has not aged that well over 14 years) at the expensive of comparatively high power draw ?

You may not hit the 125W TDP with what you will be doing with the machine, but you will get more power draw than a slow (by modern standards) low power $100 mini PCs or a random used office tower or SFF PC from 5 to 8 years ago (costing probably less than $50). Either of those options can give you better performance than a top of the line AM3 CPU.

I am all for using retro hardware and using hardware as long as possible (when practical), but if what you have isn't up to the task and upgrading it comes with arguably little potential gain and several disadvantages, it is worth considering other options, IMHO.

ok ok, I forgot to tell you why I want to make this machine a little faster and above all why I chose this one. I bought it last year at a relatively modest price (I think around €30) because it was the fastest (and cheapest) motherboard that would allow me to manage my retro machine fleet. I chose it because it is an all-around in media and connection management: it has integrated (and works perfectly on Win10, WinXP and Dos 6.22 that I installed on 3 different hard drives) Floppy disk, IDE and Sata. I can connect old IDE disks and check them, check them with modern software, copy data to them, I can do the same with both 3.5 and 5.25 floppy disks, manage them 100%, check the mountain of floppies to see damaged sectors, copy a file to them on the fly and have it read by the floppy drive of the 286, 386, 486 etc... I chose this asrock because it has great flexibility, I installed a PCI SCSI card with which I check the SCSI disks etc... that's why I was stubborn with it.

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-12-23, 19:13:

darry wrote on 2024-12-23, 00:21:

If your sole use case for this machine is managing files for your retro machines, presumably over USB and/or over the network an […]
Show full quote

If your sole use case for this machine is managing files for your retro machines, presumably over USB and/or over the network and you want yo use a modern OS (Windows 10),

a) do you really need more CPU performance ? What issues/slowdowns are you experiencing ?

b) if you do need more performance, do you really want to try to get a limited extra amount of it (AM3 has not aged that well over 14 years) at the expensive of comparatively high power draw ?

You may not hit the 125W TDP with what you will be doing with the machine, but you will get more power draw than a slow (by modern standards) low power $100 mini PCs or a random used office tower or SFF PC from 5 to 8 years ago (costing probably less than $50). Either of those options can give you better performance than a top of the line AM3 CPU.

I am all for using retro hardware and using hardware as long as possible (when practical), but if what you have isn't up to the task and upgrading it comes with arguably little potential gain and several disadvantages, it is worth considering other options, IMHO.

ok ok, I forgot to tell you why I want to make this machine a little faster and above all why I chose this one. I bought it last year at a relatively modest price (I think around €30) because it was the fastest (and cheapest) motherboard that would allow me to manage my retro machine fleet. I chose it because it is an all-around in media and connection management: it has integrated (and works perfectly on Win10, WinXP and Dos 6.22 that I installed on 3 different hard drives) Floppy disk, IDE and Sata. I can connect old IDE disks and check them, check them with modern software, copy data to them, I can do the same with both 3.5 and 5.25 floppy disks, manage them 100%, check the mountain of floppies to see damaged sectors, copy a file to them on the fly and have it read by the floppy drive of the 286, 386, 486 etc... I chose this asrock because it has great flexibility, I installed a PCI SCSI card with which I check the SCSI disks etc... that's why I was stubborn with it.

Thank you for the added context. That certainly explains why you would like to keep using this motherboard. If you would like to keep it running well and reliably in the long term, upgrading to a CPU with a high thermal output (125W) that is higher than what the board's power delivery subsystem supports seem like a bad idea, IMHO, unless you can somehow cap CPU power draw in a way that still provides you with a net gain compared to what you have.

While the activities you plan to use the system for may seem relatively light, you need to consider that something like zipping or unzipping a compressed file using a multi-threaded application like 7-Zip, for example, will use as much CPU cycles and cores as it can get. As another example, web sites are getting heavier (and have been since forever) and nothing prevents a browser from using abnormal/excessive CPU resources if something goes wrong in a website's client-side code execution, which does not help either. This all adds up, especially if you multitask a lot.

It's your hardware and you choose what you do it, of course but, to me, this a risk likely not worth taking. If you do decide to take that path nonetheless, "overkill" cooling of the boards VRMs and the CPU would be my recommendations. Actually, those recommendations still stand even if running a fully in-spec configuration.

I tried to do something I hadn't done in 20 years, with the CPU I currently have I tried to overclock it, I set the bus from 200mhz to 230mhz (a low increase all things considered) but multiplied by 15 now the CPU instead of 3000mhz works at 3450mhz and it seems to work, maybe I'll improve in basic use

Later the processor generation is, better hardware supported using windows 10 with Haswell and later also 7th gen processor (i7-7700) which I have as well. Not Ivy bridge as the usb 3.0 is not supported, runs at usb 2.0 speed, confirmed on multiple computers. I can confirm this as I have Haswell computer at work with windows 10 and supports USB 3.0 speeds.

To help with your windows 10, I recommend using PT pro/1000 x1 NIC. This network card offloads TCP/ip from CPU. Biggest performance improvement impact. Most noticeable on less performing processors eg: AMD athlon processors, Core 2 Duo etc while networking and web browsing.

For PCI, try intel 1000/pro MT.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2024-12-23, 20:57:

Later the processor generation is, better hardware supported using windows 10 with Haswell and later also 7th gen processor (i7- […]
Show full quote

Later the processor generation is, better hardware supported using windows 10 with Haswell and later also 7th gen processor (i7-7700) which I have as well. Not Ivy bridge as the usb 3.0 is not supported, runs at usb 2.0 speed, confirmed on multiple computers. I can confirm this as I have Haswell computer at work with windows 10 and supports USB 3.0 speeds.

To help with your windows 10, I recommend using PT pro/1000 x1 NIC. This network card offloads TCP/ip from CPU. Biggest performance improvement impact. Most noticeable on less performing processors eg: AMD athlon processors, Core 2 Duo etc while networking and web browsing.

For PCI, try intel 1000/pro MT.

Cheers,

This is a very strange and very clever suggestion, I would never have thought of it and in fact no one seems to notice it. I did a little test and downloading a file from chrome the cpu is occupied more than 50%, do you think that's the reason? 50% on a cpu of more than 3Ghz?

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-12-26, 14:53:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2024-12-23, 20:57:

Later the processor generation is, better hardware supported using windows 10 with Haswell and later also 7th gen processor (i7- […]
Show full quote

Later the processor generation is, better hardware supported using windows 10 with Haswell and later also 7th gen processor (i7-7700) which I have as well. Not Ivy bridge as the usb 3.0 is not supported, runs at usb 2.0 speed, confirmed on multiple computers. I can confirm this as I have Haswell computer at work with windows 10 and supports USB 3.0 speeds.

To help with your windows 10, I recommend using PT pro/1000 x1 NIC. This network card offloads TCP/ip from CPU. Biggest performance improvement impact. Most noticeable on less performing processors eg: AMD athlon processors, Core 2 Duo etc while networking and web browsing.

For PCI, try intel 1000/pro MT.

Cheers,

This is a very strange and very clever suggestion, I would never have thought of it and in fact no one seems to notice it. I did a little test and downloading a file from chrome the cpu is occupied more than 50%, do you think that's the reason? 50% on a cpu of more than 3Ghz?

That's correct, it is Athlon processors is much weaker than C2D and modern software that is much demanding and updates for windows 10 needed bit of more hardware resources. Around 1MHz per megabit TCP/IP processing CPU load. Back in the day when I had main computer was Optiplex 780, the intel pro/1000 PT in slot x1 PCIe noticeably sped up the C2D E8600 3.333 GHz windows 10 performance.

If you do have PCIe x1 slot, get this:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/314179564301?_skw=int … ABk9SR4S07r-AZQ

Or if you have a free PCI slot, get this:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/314179564301?_skw=int … ABk9SR4S07r-AZQ

This will reduce the CPU loading via TCP/IP offloading to this NIC.

Cheers,

Hoof wrote on 2024-12-23, 01:43:

Also I found, if the cores aren't hogged by updating, that even Edge runs pretty well. It's really cool exploring modern sites on a modern OS, with a modern browser, with a mere Athlon 64 X2!

That essentially was my father's office PC running Windows XP/Windows 7 x64.
Had an SSD, 8 GB of RAM (or were it 12GB at the end?), USB 3.0 add-on card and so on.

We decided to put it to rest when Windows 7 went EOL.
In 2016/017 or so. Almost 10 years ago, in short.
Motherboard was AM2 or AM2+, not sure anymore.

Btw, there was a socket 939 motherboard that was surprinsingly snappy, I remember.
I've used it for an experimental build once.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2024-12-26, 17:29:

That's correct, it is Athlon processors is much weaker than C2D and modern software that is much demanding and updates for windo […]
Show full quote

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-12-26, 14:53:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2024-12-23, 20:57:

Later the processor generation is, better hardware supported using windows 10 with Haswell and later also 7th gen processor (i7- […]
Show full quote

Later the processor generation is, better hardware supported using windows 10 with Haswell and later also 7th gen processor (i7-7700) which I have as well. Not Ivy bridge as the usb 3.0 is not supported, runs at usb 2.0 speed, confirmed on multiple computers. I can confirm this as I have Haswell computer at work with windows 10 and supports USB 3.0 speeds.

To help with your windows 10, I recommend using PT pro/1000 x1 NIC. This network card offloads TCP/ip from CPU. Biggest performance improvement impact. Most noticeable on less performing processors eg: AMD athlon processors, Core 2 Duo etc while networking and web browsing.

For PCI, try intel 1000/pro MT.

Cheers,

This is a very strange and very clever suggestion, I would never have thought of it and in fact no one seems to notice it. I did a little test and downloading a file from chrome the cpu is occupied more than 50%, do you think that's the reason? 50% on a cpu of more than 3Ghz?

That's correct, it is Athlon processors is much weaker than C2D and modern software that is much demanding and updates for windows 10 needed bit of more hardware resources. Around 1MHz per megabit TCP/IP processing CPU load. Back in the day when I had main computer was Optiplex 780, the intel pro/1000 PT in slot x1 PCIe noticeably sped up the C2D E8600 3.333 GHz windows 10 performance.

If you do have PCIe x1 slot, get this:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/314179564301?_skw=int … ABk9SR4S07r-AZQ

Or if you have a free PCI slot, get this:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/314179564301?_skw=int … ABk9SR4S07r-AZQ

This will reduce the CPU loading via TCP/IP offloading to this NIC.

Cheers,

using it on win10 AND winxp, is better pci or pciexpress?