shamino wrote:I like XP64, but I know it didn't catch on so I definitely see the humor in using it for a "bad timing" mid 2000s build.
I don't think the Athlon64 fits that description though. On that point, the one thing that would make this even more "bad timing" is if it used one of those late, high powered 64-bit dual core Netburst "Pentium D" CPUs. Was there a bumpgate-prone nVidia chipset for that?
Add in the SLI 7950s, XP64, and maybe a Velociraptor hard drive. 😀
It's bad timing for 2006 specifically, because that's the year Core 2 Duo came out. I remember looking at AMD setups of various types, and then Intel came out with Core and blew them out of the water. I had an E6300 on an ASRock 775DUAL-VSTA, too bad that system was never stable.
Socket AM2 came out the same year, so an even worse "bad timing" build would be using an early 2006 Socket 939 motherboard and CPU. Performance is basically the same, but with no upgrade path (and you would have known you had no upgrade path in about three months).
Netburst would have been a bad choice, but Netburst was generally a bad choice at the time and we knew it. Buying the latest Athlon 64 thinking Core won't be *that* amazing and this one is already available... that's bad timing.
LHN91 wrote:I'm finally getting back to work on this build. […]
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I'm finally getting back to work on this build.
I've gone ahead and added an Audigy 2 ZS with the front panel - I know it's not directly era appropriate but it's a lovely sound card for EAX capable games.
I've also installed XP64, which seems to run really well on this machine.
I've run a couple things on it and it's been really stable so far. Mainly 3Dmark03 and 3DMark06, but also Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, probably one of my biggest flawed favourites. It runs fully maxed at 1920x1080 with EAX4 enabled, which is really nice to see - though this game isn't terribly hard to run, admittedly.
I'm looking for suggestion on games/benchmarks to run on this machine. As I do them, I'll post results.
Good luck finding one, but an Audigy 4 would be perfect for this machine. It was a very marginal improvement over the Audigy 2, virtually impossible to actually get, and launched within a few months of the X-Fi lineup. It is off by a year- that was in 2005, not 2006, but definitely has the same sort of feel.
I seem to remember the biggest XP x64 compatibility issues being with old/weird hardware and legacy software. It never had a problem with modern hardware of the time to my knowledge.
As for games... will it run Crysis?