A bit of a nice rig there. Windows 7 on Pentium 3s always performs nicely. Be wary of that RDRAM though, and if you do upgrade to a Tualatin you might want to do some extensive research about BIOS revisions for your XPS there. I know on my Optiplex GX110, they locked out "unsupported" CPUs after a certain BIOS update, probably just to prevent Tualatin upgrades. Also, get that Pro/1000 ASAP; PCI Intel cards are amazing to have and work in practically anything with any operating system (short of OS/2, but if you're using OS/2 without Token Ring, you're doing it wrong 🤣).

Dant wrote:

A bit of a nice rig there. Windows 7 on Pentium 3s always performs nicely. Be wary of that RDRAM though, and if you do upgrade to a Tualatin you might want to do some extensive research about BIOS revisions for your XPS there. I know on my Optiplex GX110, they locked out "unsupported" CPUs after a certain BIOS update, probably just to prevent Tualatin upgrades. Also, get that Pro/1000 ASAP; PCI Intel cards are amazing to have and work in practically anything with any operating system (short of OS/2, but if you're using OS/2 without Token Ring, you're doing it wrong 🤣).

Wait a sec... Windows 7 performs nicely on a P3? I've seen it struggle on much newer machines. 🤣

I'm a bit doubtful if this can handle Tualatin, due to voltages and the BIOS. If it doesn't, oh well.

RDRAM is worth its weight in pure Columbian cocaine, so I'm a bit aware. Finding a cheap pair of 256 MB was hard enough.

Windows 7 actually performs pretty well, until you get to browsers and contemporary games. Aero (rendering at 1080p) works faster, thanks to being accelerated by the far faster GPU. IE just limps, Firefox is... OK. I tried CS 1.6 and it was a slideshow., but casual stuff like Peggle works fine.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Wait a sec... Windows 7 performs nicely on a P3? I've seen it struggle on much newer machines. 🤣

Surprisingly, I tend to find that newer versions of Windows really only want more RAM and faster hard drives to perform well. Windows 7 on 1GB of RAM with a Pentium 3 almost feels smooth... Provided nothing else is running. 🤣

Also, dealing with Tualatin voltages aren't much of a problem. There exist socket adapters and even some modded Tualatins up on eBay just to deal with that.

I just set up Windows 7 on a Dual 1ghz p3 system for my mother to use as a Daily machine. 120gb SSD on a pci adaptec controller, 2gb of Crucial pc133 and an agp HD4670. Nice and smooth, even handles flash fairly well.

I wonder what you guys are doing that I wasn't? I experimented a bit with Win7 on a fairly tricked out PIII system (1.59GHz, 1.5GB RAM, 9800Pro/6800GT) a few years ago but I wasn't satisfied with the performance. The whole OS just felt rather sluggish, as if the CPU or something else was struggling to keep up. Simple tasks like opening Explorer windows and browsing through files had a noticeable (half second) delay to them, whereas Explorer in WinXP responded instantly. In my case, Win7 ran better with Aero disabled. Despite the GPU acceleration, all three web browsers really bogged down with Aero.

I've found that even Athlon XP has trouble keeping UI frame rate up in Win7. My Athlon XP 2800+ and Radeon X1950 Pro had a heck of a time keeping the UI smooth at 2560x1440. It's incredible how much faster an Athlon 64 with GeForce 8 feels running this OS. I believe having WDDM 1.1 display drivers really helps.