philscomputerlab wrote:So looking beyond Pentium 4 and Athlon 64, what 32 bit gaming options are there?
The Core 2 platform was very good. Looking on eBay there a ton of motherboard bundles for little money to be had. But there are also a wide range of boards, some with older chipset that don't support the newer processors. What about AMD? An AM3 board with a Sempron or Athlon II could work very well?
Basically something that runs XP well, supports 4 GB of memory and is compatible with 7, 8 and 9 series of graphics cards. Are newer graphics cards even necessary? I always like to avoid driver problems...
Core 2 for desktops shared LGA 775 with NetBurst, but aside from a few oddball in-between chipsets (like PT880 and 945), NetBurst and Core are separate beasts (and remember that later P4s are 64-bit). I think "32-bit gaming" is also kind of a misnomer - do you mean XP gaming? 😊 There are plenty of 32-bit games (especially those released after 2007) that run just fine on 64-bit Windows Vista, Windows 7, etc (as a random example: Skyrim), and will benefit from modern or fairly modern (e.g. DX10+) hardware. IME I've yet to find a DX9+ game that actually won't run on 7x64 (I would assume this should mostly translate to Vista x64 and 8x64 too). However I've come across a few DX6-8 games that won't, but that work just fine on XP - and for all of those games even a top-tier Pentium 4 or Athlon64 is overkill, as would be a GeForce 6-9 (or equivalent Radeon), and in some cases you may even create compatibility problems with the whiz-bang new card (AGP bridged Radeons can be a problem for some folks, and GeForce 6+ dropped some legacy features that may or may not matter for you (paletted textures is often the one most people complain about, but it doesn't affect all games)). OFC that doesn't mean you should avoid such a machine - P4s are dirt cheap, as are nice PCIe Radeon/GeForce cards from ~2005-7 (afaik NOS Radeon 2900s are still $20-$30 on ebay), so I'd just go for it and crank AA/AF to the moon. 😎
Personally I use Windows Vista's release (2007) as the dividing line - games released post-Vista generally aren't Vista-only, but they usually have compatibility with Vista, 7, 8, etc in mind (again, Skyrim is a fine example of this). Games released pre-Vista may or may not be an issue; but pre-Vista is also generally pre-multi-core, pre-"I have to have 32GB to run a web browser" and pre-"I need a 3GHz GPU with 128 ROPs and 16GB just to play this at 5 FPS because its an awful port" too. It was truly a simpler time. 🤣 😵
I think this can all be represented by two machines (or multi-booting on one machine, depending on the specific hardware under the hood (if it can run XP drivers)) - ofc if you want to have 3-4-8 machines that's fine, but I don't think it's a requirement (vs if you want to support every novel feature/game from 1980 to 2000 you're probably going to need closer to a dozen systems).
j7n wrote:Web browsing sounds like it should be an easy task for a PC, but my experience is quite the opposite. Web page authors assume th […]
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Web browsing sounds like it should be an easy task for a PC, but my experience is quite the opposite. Web page authors assume that everyone has a modern gaming PC. Recently there was a thread touching slow web pages. I find sites like GameSpot or Google groups, as soon as you open a thread with a decent number of posts, too slow to be enjoyable with my current Conroe CPU. I get distracted and can't remember what I was looking for while the page loads.
HD playback on my system is done "for free" on a GT 610 video card, which according to device manager consumes only around 209 MB of memory space (out of 1 GB on board). The CPU can't cope.
In my opinion, there is no practical need for a site like Google groups to exist in its current form when the same can be accomplished by a forum like the present one, to change for the sake of change. But that is what they do.
Whether this top end video card will have an XP driver seems kinda irrelevant. Almost nobody bying it will care for old games. These games don't work well on Fermi or Kepler cards already, because functions which existing games rely upon are no longer present in the GPUs (ordered dithering, some kind of depth buffering issue that causes games to show flashing, corrupted video, or crash outright). Even if the card could be made to show the windows desktop and probably run DX9 games, it would be a "broken" mostly not working 2000/XP system, that looks like it should actually be "dying".
I've another Ivy Bridge system, which is relatively fast for XP it is running, also with a GT 610. But it supported older games well again when I plugged in an ATI X550. The PCI-E seems to be a very good, long-lasting compatible standard. I recall AGP with different voltages for each "x" rating, advanced and became incompatible more rapidly.
I have no issues with any modern web-pages I've hit on any of my 'modern' systems - the slowest of them is a first-generation Pentium dual-core (Conroe based), with a measly 2GB of RAM. I'm writing this on a Core 2 Duo 6550, which has no problems with HD video, modern Silverlight/Flash/etc pages, and so on. That said, I think it's pretty miserable that I *need* a Conroe-era (or better) multi-core CPU, a few GB of RAM, and a GPU that can do h.264 and other decoding magic just to tool around on the Internet without trouble. I remember even just a few years ago, a basic Pentium III running 2000 or XP with a simple IGP was AOK for basic browsing and office productivity; things have become far too top heavy in the last few years (and in a lot of cases it leads to broken pages/applications/etc because some purely aesthetic feature was implemented in a half-assed manner, and if the actual content on the page had just been put up with HTML not only would everything load faster, but there'd be less moving parts to break, and less nonsense to navigate through). In short: I agree with you but haven't had quite as bad time with Conroe and the modern web. 😊
Curiosity question:
What games do you mean ("these games") when you're mentioning problems with Fermi and Kepler? Or at least broadly what era of games? I haven't really put my Fermi card to any sort of gaming tasks, but Kepler has had no problems with anything I can get working under Win7 (I'd assume Fermi would be the same, since it uses the same driver, and has a relatively similar feature set, but I can't say this with any certainty).
As far as AGP - I never remember compatibility being a concern, and I seem to notice more discussions about AGP compatibility today than 10-15 years ago when it was current tech.