Took some time to install Windows 7 but once installed it's quite snappy. Browsing is reasonably fast but YouTube is choppy even at 360p. I only tried it with IE because I didn't have time for anything else. Will do some more testing on Monday.

One thing to do is download proper nVidia drivers and replace Microsoft drivers for the 6600GT.

Half-Saint wrote:

Curiosity because I never owned an Athlon 64 and this thread got me thinking:)

Same reason why i upgraded my socket A to 939,back in 2007 i jumped from socket A to 775,bypassing the Ahtlon 64 era,so now i wanted to have 1.

Half-Saint wrote:

Took some time to install Windows 7 but once installed it's quite snappy. Browsing is reasonably fast but YouTube is choppy even at 360p. I only tried it with IE because I didn't have time for anything else. Will do some more testing on Monday.

One thing to do is download proper nVidia drivers and replace Microsoft drivers for the 6600GT.

Single-core Athlon64 should not struggle with SD content *at all*, but the lack of drivers may be a problem - also if you haven't updated IE/Flash/etc that can have a detrimental effect. "Legitimate" 1080p (that is, from a Blu-ray or HD-DVD) may consume its resources and limit multi-tasking, but it should play them at least - lower bitrate stuff shouldn't struggle as much; I know my AthlonXP 3000+ (which is much slower than the Athlon64 3000+) could do 720p (and nothing else), or DVD + very good multi-tasking. My Athlon64 X2 3800+ had no issues with 1080p and multi-tasking (like browsing the web).

Anyways - very nice part selection, very much the "ideal" for a gaming computer from that era, and it should be very competent for a very wide variety of games, or just as a nice browser box. 😀

I would blame Flash. There was once a time when Athlon64s played Youtube no problem.

Try disabling Aero. I've noticed that it take a huge bite out of performance with old WDDM 1.0 video cards.
Also, if you're on Chrome, try FireFox or IE in full screen mode. Seems to help performance with older rigs. Edit: Never mind, I guess I should learn to read.

The CPU itself has more than enough power for YT at 360p. A much slower Athlon XP 2800+ can still do 360 and even 480p at 30fps. Edit: Under WinXP - haven't tried Win7 on it.

update your video drivers to load nvidia drivers, and try either firefox (latest release) or chrome (latest release) and update to the latest flash. If you do all of this then it should enable gpu acceleration for flash in win7, which will significantly drop cpu usage and should enable you to play higher content without issues.

kithylin wrote:

update your video drivers to load nvidia drivers, and try either firefox (latest release) or chrome (latest release) and update to the latest flash. If you do all of this then it should enable gpu acceleration for flash in win7, which will significantly drop cpu usage and should enable you to play higher content without issues.

Flash GPU acceleration on an AGP GeForce 6600? 😕

It doesn't appear on the nVidia HCL:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpus_supporting_adobeflash.html

And more about Flash GPU:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/adobe-fla … ion,2805-4.html

It's gonna lay solely on the Athlon64's shoulders here; but 360p should not even be a discussion about "will it run" or "I need a GPU to run it" and so on, unless YT/Adobe has done something magnificent to turn silly low-bitrate content into something more demanding than full-rate DVD. 😵

I didn't think flash was vendor specific. I was under the impression that flash just runs GPU acceleration on any video card in any system as long as you have 3d Accelerated video drivers loaded and the card can do 2D acceleration, just like any other standard Direct2D / Direct3D application.. as long as driver support is installed, it runs? I might be wrong though.

kithylin wrote:

I didn't think flash was vendor specific. I was under the impression that flash just runs GPU acceleration on any video card in any system as long as you have 3d Accelerated video drivers loaded and the card can do 2D acceleration, just like any other standard Direct2D / Direct3D application.. as long as driver support is installed, it runs? I might be wrong though.

Oh no - nothing at all like that. Flash is not a DirectX application nor is it capable of being rendered entirely on the GPU (see the Tom's guide for Adobe's explanation of that) - Flash using h.264 video can lean on the GPU to decode the h.264 component if the GPU is capable of it, which from nVidia requires a GeForce 8 or higher. GeForce FX through GeForce 7 have varying degrees of partial video acceleration across varying models (there is no universal featureset among them), however in general they require specific software to unlock those features, and the performance benefits may not be substantial.

In general video acceleration across the board isn't that generic - it requires specific hardware support and software that can take advantage of that hardware. Very modern PCIe cards tend to be able to do a number of things to help out CPUs, however modern CPUs are generally powerful as to not require such capabilities. See the links I provided for more information.

I clearly remember playing YT videos just fine on an Athlon XP-M 2400+. 720p didn't really work all that well but I thought that was more due to my slow internet connection. That's why I somehow expected YT wouldn't be such a problem for a next-gen CPU. When did it become such a hog?

Also... I'm impressed that Win7 is running so well on a 10 years old CPU 😀

Flash really started to gain weight when Adobe took over, and it's been getting slower every few months since then. Just a year ago a fast PIII could handle 480p with "only" ~80% CPU usage. Today, that same machine can only push 16fps in 480p. 360p, while smooth, almost completely monopolizes the CPU.

Heck, I've seen brand new AMD E1 dual-core laptops (which I believe run at around 1.5GHz) struggle with Flash video in Chrome. Chrome for some bizarre reason refuses to use hardware accelerated Flash decode, no matter what GPU is installed.

Among other things, HTML5 was supposed to save us from Flash's poor performance, but its video playback appears to be just as CPU-intensive on systems without modern video cards.

Half-Saint wrote:

I clearly remember playing YT videos just fine on an Athlon XP-M 2400+. 720p didn't really work all that well but I thought that was more due to my slow internet connection. That's why I somehow expected YT wouldn't be such a problem for a next-gen CPU. When did it become such a hog?

Also... I'm impressed that Win7 is running so well on a 10 years old CPU 😀

My XP-M 2400 at 2GHz could do 720p mkv files (and nothing else mind you 🤣); gotta love Adobe bloatware. 😲

I was using a 2.4ghz Athlon 64 754 rig with Windows 7 for a while. It had 1.5gb of ddr400 (refused to boot with dual 1gb sticks, thanks VIA)

OK, here's a long shot... could an existing installation of Flash somehow be tweaked to run better?

Yeah, by installing an earlier Flash 10 or 9.

leileilol wrote:

Yeah, by installing an earlier Flash 10 or 9.

This should work for MOST applications, but IME YouTube will cause the browser to CTD if you aren't running the latest or near-latest version of Flash. 😵

Can someone recommend games that would run decently on this build? I suppose XP would be better suited.

What do you think of this list:
http://www.game-requirements.com/?c=nvidia_geforce_6_6600_gt

Can't speak to all 300+ on the list, but mostly popular games from ~2007 or earlier shouldn't be a problem, although some of them shouldn't be expected to run with everything at maximum - for example Oblivion won't run with everything turned up to the maximum at high resolutions, but it should be fine at normal resolutions and with normal settings.

Just found a Point of View GeForce 6800GT 256MB in the dumpster in good working order. Not sure, if I'm gonna use it because the noise coming from its fan is awful! What's interesting to me is that it has two molex connectors for power.

Also found a case for this build so stay tuned for pics 😉