First post, by Munx
- Rank
- Oldbie
Many of you might have come across a system like this. In offices, large market chains, schools. They are cheap. They sometimes claim having 3D graphics. Sometimes lack of obsolescence. What they had was an AGPless i810/i815 chipset motherboard with a Celeron CPU and integrated graphics that leeched off the main system memory.
I got such a system ~2001, for schoolwork and playing games. 950MHz Celeron and everything integrated on the motherboard.
Needless to say, running games on this thing was not easy - sound would cut out from the CPU getting too loaded, tons of incompatibilities and error messages, etc. However I tired and many games were played. Until games like Mafia and Battlefield 1942 showed up. When I saw the screenshots in magazines I knew that I would never be able to run them. I could not even run Counter-Strike, a game that everyone was jumping into and I could not, as the game would lock up my system upon loading it.
Some time later I would finally get a gift - a Geforce2 MX400. A card capable of running these amazing new games! Only problem? IT WAS AGP! So I had to wait more, until even later, I got a cheap, yet still gaming capable Athlon system to put that MX400 in, which I re-built in this post!
Which kind of makes me wonder...was it necessary? Would have it been enough to just get a PCI card to play games in early 2000's?
So here is what I will be tryong to answer today:
Were these systems really a dead end and were not worth upgrading?
Lets find out!
The motherboard - Intel D815EGEW, i815EG chipset:
The CPU - a Poppermine based 950MHz celeron
Aaaand...thats it, really. 128 megs of ram, a 32GB HDD, W98SE, integrated AD1885 audio and Intel graphics.
Also, a small disclaimer - the benchmarks here are less about hard numbers and more about "is it playable?", so please don't go reading into this expecting 30x run averages, driver analysis, etc. 😵
This is a sloppy project to get a general idea
Let us begin!
Firstly, we'll be testing what the stock system is capable of.
some 3Dmark benchmarks:
1998/11251 3D marks in 3DMark99
809 3D marks in 3Dmark2K
And 506 in 3Dmark2K1 SE
Many of the games I played were still 2D and ran acceptably and showed no errors, like Stronghold and red Alert 2. There was some sluggishness, however these games were still playable. However I would not recommend playing these online on such a PC, as micromanaging units, especially in RA will become a nightmare.
One 3D shooter that i played to death was Unreal Tournament. And it ran!
On lowest settings I could even pull off 29FPS in DX mode!
Software renderer gives 24, so at least Intels integrated solution is not a deccelerator
IF you run it in lowest settings, that is. if the settings are turned up a bit, the framerate is actually very slightly better in software mode, AND it doesn't suffer from the sound stutter the DX version gets...
Hardware:
Software:
Next up is a game that I REALLY wanted to play and my system was within specs, however the game just wouldn't work. Counter-Strike.
AAAnd it's actually playable in software more. P6-based Celeron is flexing it's strong FPU here. Some nasty FPS drops to sub-20, but still playable. Don't try more than 5 bots, though.
DirectX renderer crashes the game, however OpenGL works. I expected the opposite. And it actually runs good! Again, some FPS dips, especially when playing with bots, however I would have been perfectly happy playing this way. If only I could get it working all those years ago.
Next up, a game that I could not get running at the time as well - Quake 3. Manages over 43 FPS!
IF you lower the settings enough to make it look like garbage, that is...
With proper settings, you get 14FPS. A build that I did a while ago, that had a cheap Savage4 and a 350MHz K6-2 managed 23 FPS on the highest settings
Next up in GTA3, which SHOULD run.
Give me some frames instead, please.
Mafia, the game that I drooled over?
Fun little fact - I knew the entire story to this game before even playing it. A friend from was playing it and sharing the story every day as he progressed. I could not help and be amazed by it, which only made me sadder knowing I couldn't.
I think we lost more that the tail. Pretty pathetic display.
Lastly, Warcraft 3, which even mentions i810 in the requirements, meaning it should run PERFECTLY!
It does not.
And that's pretty much it. Other popular games of the time needed full DX7 graphics hardware, which this thing did not have. Upgrade incoming!
My builds!
The FireStarter 2.0 - The wooden K5
The Underdog - The budget K6
The Voodoo powerhouse - The power-hungry K7
The troll PC - The Socket 423 Pentium 4