First up is Bioshock! Totally playable if you increased the fps by a meager 400%

Next up is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Looking good!

Wouldn't be a 2007 build without Crysis. Just look how great this looks!

As I did not have the time to complete the benchmark, I've went ahead and ran it again at low settings:

Next was Doom3 @ 1024x768. That FPS. Nice.

Fallout 3? Actually possible to complete the tutorial vault missions. Here is proof of that:

FEAR @ 1024x768, max settings. We've hit playable framerates for a second! Nice!

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast? Just .1 FPS short.

How about the game that's right on the friggin graphics card?

How about a gritty remake of an old franchise? Those always turn out great! Turok!

Alright, maybe not...so how about an older game? I'm sure Unreal Tournament WILL FLY!

oh WHAT THE HECK. Whats going on here?

I bet it's because we're missing one crucial element. A second core!

Games from this period must be expecting two cores, so even though the 2 WHOLE GIGAHERZ Celeron is fast, it just cant handle the multiple threads these new games demand.
This is why I've upgraded this build with a THREE GIGAHERZ CELERON D 345!

No doubt the "D" means dual-core, just like the Pentium D series! With increased FSB (533) and more cache (256k), we're about to witness a huge performance leap!

Time to run some new benchmarks!

Bioshock sees a huge, nearly double FPS boost! Clearly thanks to twice the amount of cores!

Call of Duty 4? Huge boost! Some might call it playable!

Crysis? Unoptimized for multiple cores, no doubt.

Doom 3 showing nearly a double FPS boost. Dual core showing it's power yet again.

Fallout 3's vault tutorial is even easier to complete now:

FEAR hitting a buttery smooth 60 FPS!

And again, DOUBLE the FPS in Half-life 2

MORE than double FPS in STALKER:

Actually completed the intro in Turok!

Here is a soundtrack to go with the scenery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep_blZhvI2A

Alrigh, MAYBE we can still play Unreal Tournament?

Ok. I see what it is. We weren't getting bottlenecked by the CPU after all.

It was the crappy ATI card all along! This must be the reason why these games are still slow on a 3GHz dual-core system.
No worries, this can be fixed as well!

Enter the GTX 295!

Dual-core system deserves a dual GPU!

Aaaand...it's a black screen. Despite the rubbery plastic melting away, this is a confirmed working card and I already tested it on a newer motherboard with this same PSU. I guess THE POWER of dual GPU will have to wait until I can get a motherboard with a better chipset, as this one has trouble handling newer cards.

So...yeah. Pretty interesting platform to mess around with, though quite a few limits that are not apparent at first glance, like PCIe GPU compatibility.

The power-draw maxed out at 260Watts with the Celeron D and HD2900XT, which is quite a bit lower than I expected:

I believe I could have gotten noticeably more performance if i went with XP than with Vista, but then this wouldn't have been than much of a troll build. I tested an older version of HL2 with older drivers and a Radeon X1900 and it was still slow, so Vista is the culprit here. Though even with the 2GHz Celeron, Vista actually felt very snappy and responsive.

Let me know what you think!

This was a fun read awesome job!

This was funny (And I looked at your other troll builds too!) but why on earth do this to yourself?! 😁

LewisRaz wrote on 2021-01-20, 15:08:

This was funny (And I looked at your other troll builds too!) but why on earth do this to yourself?! 😁

Why not? If the parts are compatible, then they were meant to be combined! 😁

I like your style Munx. I've used preused/cheap/old components for a couple of decades and the worked well for me personally.

Moving over to a laptop based system with external LCD monitor from a P4 with 19" Trinitron crt a few months ago saved heaps on the power bill 😉

Love your troll builds. It's a dirty thankless job but someone's gotta do it I guess?

Heh, I always enjoy troll builds. I recently got a Pentium Dual Core 950 and I was tempted to test it against a c2d 6300 but haven't got round to it.

I've also got a 295 but I am too scared to use it most of the time! When I have used it, it's far too fast for dx10 gaming and the amount of VRAM it has, when supported, so it's not especially useful. Kind of cool though.

🤣. I like your ideas.
What's your next troll build idea ? Maybe a Pentium D 800 series or FX 4000 series build ? Or, maybe a Sempron 140/145 would be fun too.

nemo1217 wrote on 2021-01-21, 09:07:

🤣. I like your ideas.
What's your next troll build idea ? Maybe a Pentium D 800 series or FX 4000 series build ? Or, maybe a Sempron 140/145 would be fun too.

Probably will go backwards to mid 90s. Plenty of slow chipsets and 3D deccelerators to choose from, however hardware prices here are much higher, so it might take time 🙁

How can the first build only achieve 10fps in Unreal Tournament? I played it with a Athlon XP 2400+ and GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and it was much better than that. I find it hard to believe the Celeron 2GHz is *that* bad.

devius wrote on 2021-01-21, 16:35:

How can the first build only achieve 10fps in Unreal Tournament? I played it with a Athlon XP 2400+ and GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and it was much better than that. I find it hard to believe the Celeron 2GHz is *that* bad.

The benchmark I ran here is this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S4qCr77jJ8

It's quite CPU heavy and when I ran it on the same 2GHz Celeron in part 2 on Xp I got just under 30. I suspect the overhead in Vista is what killed the performance.

How can the first build only achieve 10fps in Unreal Tournament? I played it with a Athlon XP 2400+ and GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and it was much better than that. I find it hard to believe the Celeron 2GHz is *that* bad.

Pentium 4s have notorious L2 cache dependence. As example, that's why Northwood was noticeably better than original Willamette core. Celeron D is based of Prescott core, which added additional stages to rendering pipeline, combine that with small and more slow L2 cache (256kb vs 1 Mb) and you here you go - the worst P4 you can dream of (yeah, even original Willamette should be faster).

Then again. UT99 is crazy slow. How? Did someone deactivated the L1 and L2 cache by accident. This is unbelievably slow. 🐌

The SB 24bit Value is the worst SB ever.
It’s software mixing only.
Better grab a Audigy 2 ZS or something

matze79 wrote on 2021-01-25, 01:56:

The SB 24bit Value is the worst SB ever.
It’s software mixing only.
Better grab a Audigy 2 ZS or something

That's kinda the point it is a troll build.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-25, 15:58:

matze79 wrote on 2021-01-25, 01:56:

The SB 24bit Value is the worst SB ever.
It’s software mixing only.
Better grab a Audigy 2 ZS or something

That's kinda the point it is a troll build.

Indeed.

Nothing really bad about it, but certainly not something I would spend money on to replace on-board audio.

Trolling aside, I really wonder how would a Socket 478 P4 HT (regardless whether it was Northwood or Prescott) would have managed with a HD2900XT, or maybe even a HD4850.