I just wanted to add that replacing the FX5900 with a GF7600GS fixed the slow FEAR benchmark. It now runs fluently with everything at minimal except the pixel doubler thing, which I disabled. Fluent @ 1024x768 with 100% above 40FPS.
A world of difference compared to 100% below 25FPS!
wrote:I just wanted to add that replacing the FX5900 with a GF7600GS fixed the slow FEAR benchmark. It now runs fluently with everything at minimal except the pixel doubler thing, which I disabled. Fluent @ 1024x768 with 100% above 40FPS.
A world of difference compared to 100% below 25FPS!
Everything at minimal, or max? A 7600GS should give you much better performance than that. I can't remember the exact figures of my Prescott 6800GS rig but it can play at 1280x1024 everything maxed out, mostly above 40fps.
Everything was at minimal, which is a difference just like night and day between those 2 cards!
I'm probably gonna slowly tweak the settings upwards during the next LAN party till it reaches a bottleneck, but for now all if good 😀
Btw, I tried overclocking the Sempron to 2.2Ghz, but that no worky. Probably the memory or the chip itself can't handle it. But if it can play FEAR @ stock, then it should be good enough for basically anything performance wise 😉
For the next LAN party, I've installed BF2 + 1.41 patch + 1.50 patch + AIX on the A64 3200+, the other A64 3200+ and on the A64 3800+. I didn't bother installing on the Sempron 2600+ as the SATA 1 drive will probably take very long to load levels.
Unfortunately the 3800+ was a little bit choppy in busy circumstances but only a little.
At least I managed to get AIX working in a LAN, I could join servers with 2 computers 😀
Btw, AIX is a SP+COOP mod for BF2
Just a small update (in case I forget 🤣), 2 weekends ago the LAN worked perfectly, it was tons of fun and the new 3500+ rig worked perfectly stable 😁
Unfortunately the 3800+ AM2 rig didn't want to cooperate, it either gave a BSoD or it would load BF2 but no mouse pointer when it had entered the game. 3dmark2001 (yeah I know it's veeery old compared to the hardware) ran perfectly on all 3 new LAN rigs (The Sempron 2600+, the 3500+ and the AM2 3800+).
My guess is it might have trouble with the PSU. Above I posted the 3800+ did work with BF2 AIX but honestly, I can't remember that instance (must be having one of those alzheimer moments 😜).
Trouble with the psu? Old, bad caps or not enough wattage? Did you check that h/d out, I mean since it was sold as dead and all?
I presume it may be a case of not enough wattage. The PSU itself is brand new. I'll try out a few other games like UT3 and see what happens 😉
Thanks for the reply 😉
*BUMP*
I finally went to work and finished another 2 rigs.
The first one is a Pentium 3 build around a VC820 Intel board. The board is Slot 1 with RIMM sockets.
I have 2 VC820 boards, one with 2 RIMM slots and one with 3 RIMM slots. I always knew the one with 3 RIMM slots was older because they later found out that using 3 RIMM modules was unstable.
Still I wanted to give the older board a try.
I had problems getting it to post and eventually figured out that all 3 RIMM slots needed to be filled (I reckon it sais so in the manual, but who reads them anyway 😜) and got the Pentium 933 to work after cleaning the contacts with rubbing alcohol.
The build includes a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP but no network card as the motherboard already included one. Harddrive is a 20gig laptop drive
However, after having installed Windows ME on the thing it appeared to be unstable. Lots of errors just browsing with explorer and such. So I thought "It's probably the motherboard" and switched the installed VC820 with the one with only 2 RIMM slots. The switch worked perfectly, except that the newer board doesn't have onboard LAN.
Windows ME installed all the onboard components so installing drivers was easy (only the V3 needed drivers to be installed).
Out of curiosity I looked up the production dates of both VC820 boards. The old one had a production date of week 30 1999 and the newer one of week 37 2000.
Then I figured out the reason why the older board was unstable. The old VC820 is an engineering sample motherboard! No wonder it was so unstable!
It has the word "SECRET" on both north and south bridges. Nice to have in a collection 😁
Anyway, the newer VC820 it is.
I used another silver case for this build, the same case I used for one of my other ME rigs.
The second rig is of newer vintage, being my very first netburst rig
It's also an Intel motherboard, Socket 478 (forgot the model number) with the 865 chipset. It has 4 memory slots and supports dual channel.
I had a P4 3.2Ghz Northwood laying around and used that in combination with an Arctic Cooling all-aluminium cooler.
This rig is basically thrown together out of parts that were left over from my previous builds, I just wanted a netburst rig for a change (thanks to sgt76 😜).
The parts I had laying around included a 160GB SATA drive made in 2004, a Radeon 9600XT with copper Zalman cooler which I installed on that card years ago and (to make use of all those memory sockets) 2x128MB and 2x512MB DDR-400 memory modules.
I put the rig together, installed XP on the thing and it came with a few surprises. First of all, the board runs the 1.25GB memory at only 320Mhz instead of 400Mhz, but it does run it in dual channel 😎
After having installed Speedfan I had a look at the temps while gaming (temps stayed at or below 55 degrees or something) and then had a look at the SMART readings.
To my surprise the harddrive had a fitness of exactly nuttin!. Guess that harddrive won't be around for much longer, but until it fails or gives other problems, I'll continue to use it 🤣 as I'm kinda running low on SATA drives 😜
I played some UT3 on the thing, but graphics were looking ugly (me thinks the Radeon 9600XT can't handle it) and at the end of the round the screen turned black for a few seconds before returning me to the game (I at first thought it had crashed altogether, but that wasn't the case).
Pics are to follow shortly!
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Heres the pics!
First 2 pics are to compare both VC820 motherboards
They look different and have different features installed in them.
The old one has onboard LAN which the newer board lacks.
The old board doesn't have the pretty colors used in the backplate ports (or whatever they are called 😜).
The old board has a Crystal sound chip while the new one has a Creative sound chip, located in different positions
The old board has 3 RIMM slots while the new one has only 2.
Part of the reason for me to build this rig is because I wanted something with those cool looking RIMM memory modules (they somehow just look cool with those heatspreaders).
This rig uses a passively cooled Pentium 933 Slot 1 CPU. It stays cool enough to the touch with those 2 fans close by. It's also the most silent rig I ever build! Can hardly hear if it's running or not.
The second new rig is a Pentium 4.
I chose this particular board because it's one of the very few Pentium 4 boards I had laying around with so many memory slots. To my surprise it also featured 2 SATA ports, for me a reason to add a SATA drive in there.
I had one weird problem after this build was done.
I did the installation in the attic with the parts laying on a cardboard box. After XP was installed (I used a homemade XP disk which already had SP3 slipstreamed) I mounted the entire thing in a case very similar to the one I already used. Of the 4 5 1/4 mounting bays, 3 were glued shut. No problem, a single DVD drive will do 😀
I tested it laying on it's side and it still worked.
Then I dragged the case down stairs and tested it again standing tall. And then I heard a rattling sound coming from the case?
After having touched all fans to slow them down (to hear if the rattling also slowed down) I concluded it was the PSU fan hitting the fan grill. Never 'heard' that problem before!
So I unmounted the PSU and basically turned the fan grill upside down so it's now "hollow". Anyway, that fixed the weird rattling sound 😀
Then I tried to play UT3 (Unreal Tournament 3) on it, but apparently the graphics card isn't good enough for UT3. I'll try some other games later.
This system is also quite quiet btw, thanks to not having to use one of those stock Intel coolers 😀
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The other LAN rigs have been perfectly stable btw.
The odd problem of the AM2 rig not playing BF2 isn't solved, but it does play all the other games without any problem
The 2 ME lanrigs have been tested and Unreal now works in a LAN. But somehow installing kernelex messed up all the other games I've installed on it so far 🙁
heheheh....
How well speed wise does the Pentium 3 perform with Rambus versus Sdram? I have a Dell slot-1 tower here that uses Rambus, but I have not bothered to screw with it yet. Was wondering if it would even be worth messing with?
Afaik rambus isn't faster then sdram. I got both the motherboard and the rambus memory in a few big lots, so I just put together what I already had. It's not noticeably faster then an sdram rig me thinks.
If you already got the parts for it, then I'd say give it a shot. Only thing too bad is that it's a Dell due to proprietary PSU and such
So far I've only run SuperPi on it
Edit: You have any particular benchmark for me to run? So I can do some comparison for you?
Yeah, I was gonna say, if you could do a default 3d mark 99 or 2k test, Id be interested in that I guess. Thanks.
