Living wrote on Yesterday, 12:45:
i find amazing that a 20 year old processor its still usable today for mundane task. I cant be the only one here feeling that, who, like many others, grew with CPUs that were obsolete in less than 5 years
Also, i noticed in recent years that a core 2 duo / pentium dual core stalls much more than a similar aged 939 / AM2 processor. Maybe its the on die memory controller and communication between cores. I not saying that the experience is better since Conroe still is faster in single core, but when taken outside of the period correct software, things gets much more closer and smoother with K8
Yeah, what's even more baffling to me is that if you go to a store an buy "the cheapest laptop", which many people do when they do not have a PC and suddenly need one for something like working from home mess of 2020, it ends up being significantly slower than a system like this. Dual core atom (atom-based celeron/pentium), 4GB of RAM, eMMC instead of SSD, win11... and everything soldered so no upgrades possible.
douglar wrote on Yesterday, 13:47:
I hear you, it feels strange that a 20 year old 939 could still come out of mothballs and make a workable PC like a world war II battleship. Well, almost. "ad funded websites" are the exception. You might feel the pain if you go to one of those websites that make my Ipad turn to lava if I click on the wrong link. What are they doing? Mining bitcoin? Had to upgrade my mother-in-law to 4 cores to deal with that.
Why would anyone use modern internet without some form of ad blocking though? I can not, regardless of performance, it is simply unusable.
Yes, browser extensions which do that cost a fair amount of performance themselves (processing all the lists and rewriting pages), but ultimately they improve performance by removing all the crap from pages.
DNS based blocking on a router or something does not cost anything to client device significantly improving performance and also does not require installing anything on client device, but the results are a bit more... ugly.
AlexZ wrote on Yesterday, 17:28:
s939, AM2, s775 can be used as office PCs even today if you can fit them with SATA SSD, 8GB RAM (modern browsers and other apps need a lot of RAM) and install Linux. If you use just one app at time or NVME storage you might get away with 4GB RAM.
386/486/pentiums had a much shorter life span. You could live with single core Athlon XP/s754 perhaps until 2010 as office PC. The term "retro" should probably apply to single cores only.
Yeah, generally more RAM=better in this case, 16GB are possible on AM2 and are useful. But... at least for now with linux, SSD and some tweaking (perhaps using zram, likely - very high "swappiness" value) 4GB still provide comfortable experience. It does not even start actually writing to swap all the way to a browser with a dozen of tabs, music/video player, open office writer or something and a few windows of file manager. Which i'd consider multitasking enough.
Once you run a couple different browsers it'll start swapping and slowing down, but even then performance remains acceptable for a while.
There is no objective way to measure it and people will have different opinions, but IMO progress started slowing down significantly somewhere around pentium 3. Before that each generation provided benefits so huge it was often simply impossible to run some software on previous generation. After that... even high-end pentium 3 system could be used all the way to XP being completely phased out, not to mention later single core CPUs. And first dual cores are still usable to this days...
AthlonXP 2200+,ECS K7VTA3 V8.0,1GB,GF FX5900XT 128MB,Audigy 2 ZS
AthlonXP 3200+,Epox EP-8RDA3I,2GB,GF 7600GT 256MB,Audigy 4
Athlon64 x2 4800+,Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe,4GB,GF 8800GT 1GB,Audigy 4
Core2Duo E8600,ECS G31T-M3,4GB,GF GTX660 2GB,Realtek ALC662
