Re: what SSD for XP ?

with a PCI-EX1 adapter

Total waste of money and time, unless it's PCIe 2.0. ICHx family of south bridges had only PCIe 1.1 support. So all you will get is WHOPPING 200 Mb/s, which is lower than SATAII. You need at least PCIe 1.1 4x for any real benefit.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:47:

Re: what SSD for XP ?

with a PCI-EX1 adapter

Total waste of money and time, unless it's PCIe 2.0. ICHx family of south bridges had only PCIe 1.1 support. So all you will get is WHOPPING 200 Mb/s, which is lower than SATAII.

I didn't remember that limit! 🙁

I was thinking SATAII vs SATAIII limits were more theorical than real but testing lately a SATA3 into a SATA2 board it seems like giving variable results and sometimes not really great. I was thinking to a way to overcome the 8GB board limit but it's a closed road already. I'll push this config as much as the GPU and the PSU will permit me (the PSU might be a problem with a cheap 500W one anyway..).

Best case scenario is to route M.2 SSD through north bridge (which has memory controller), to further reduce latency and bypass slow connection between bridges, but that option is available only on i975, some P35, X38, P45 and X48 motherboards.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-06-22, 17:00:

Best case scenario is to route M.2 SSD through north bridge (which has memory controller), to further reduce latency and bypass slow connection between bridges, but that option is available only on i975, some P35, X38, P45 and X48 motherboards.

They should have let users to use two 8GB modules on these boards.. I understand this was a cheap chipset but it's interesting there's a bios update in the 2016 (!) with this note "Support 4MB flash part.". What did they meant with that? The board had a 8Mb flash AMI rom as much as I know I don't understand what they included.
Lately I was wondering if "magically" late 8GB low density modules might work but I didn't want to buy one to try (they are not that cheap to just try).

It's a "crippled by design" thing rather than an underexploited by the maker sitch. 8GB total RAM is already a stretch for it, and duplexes the bus some how such that it performs less well than only 4GB total.

I don't see any real benefit in surpassing 8 Gb limit, unless you have a tendency to leave open more than 100 tabs in browser or still trying to do some serious work on such slow hardware. Games, which can work fine on Core 2 Quad, don't need 16 Gb.

I know that it seems like a lost quest but for example some tech games/demo that might at least run @ 20 or 30fps might benefit from at least a bit more than 8GB and the idea was to use this machine with a GPU like a 1050ti maybe a GTX1650 in future to at least try some games even if seriously limited by ram, chipset and cpu. I think modern games and bench are much more limited by GPUs than in the past considering cpu usage graphs. I've seen some Youtube videos of people running latest games into Socket 775 configs with obviously modern GPUs with impressive results.

To begin with some more GPU speed I'll upgrade my GT610 to a GT1030 DDR5 not enough I know but I'll wait to buy something more modern, nowdays prices even second hand gpus are too high.

but for example some tech games/demo that might at least run @ 20 or 30fps

Nope, no such thing.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-06-22, 20:02:

but for example some tech games/demo that might at least run @ 20 or 30fps

Nope, no such thing.

I was watching this Phil video "3.33 GHz Core 2 Quad still going strong in 2019?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AMF1utPSHc and I could live with that before upgrading the whole config, move the Win retail license again, upgrade PSU etc..etc..😀

Aaand? 6.7 Gb, including OS usage.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-06-22, 20:13:

Aaand? 6.7 Gb, including OS usage.

Yes that's true even if there're heavy tech demos that actually requires 8GB and more without any apps running in background I suppose because my actual vga doesn't have enough vram and probably using system one I don't know. I'll keep this cause I can't afford more nowdays but it's already a miracle to see these very old cpu running so well. I suppose my board can't run Xeon cpu but the Q9650 is supported and actually I'm running the E8600. 😀