First post, by RandomStranger
- Rank
- Oldbie
For the time being I'm finished with my XP/Vista dual boot PC and since I've never posted in this topic, I thought I'll commemorate the day. I was aiming to have a mostly period correct PC for games from about 2002 to about 2010.
Click image for imgur gallery
Motherboard: ASUS P5E-VM HDMI
- I wasn't all that picky with this one. I had only 3 conditions. It had to be micro-ATX, it had to have P35 or P45 chipset and it had to have a PCI-e 1x slot on the CPU side of the PCI-e 16x slot so if I add a sound card, it won't obstruct the air flow for the graphics card. I sadly got it without an IO shield.
Processor: Intel Core2Quad Q6600 2.4GHz with Zalman CNPS90F cooler
- I salvaged at work from a dead motherboard. It would have been thrown out, so I just replaced it with a Celeron D. The CPU is one with the later steppings. The cooler is not something I bought for this exact CPU, it intended it for a Q8200S with 65W TDP and was concerned that it won't be enough for the 95W Q6600, but keeps it under 65C° even under load and I'm not planning any OC so it does it's job.
Memory: Kingmax 4GB DDR2-800MHz (4×1GB)
- I could go with 2×2GB with the option of upgrading to 8GB, but I wanted to populate all slots and the games I'm planning to play on this doesn't require more than 8GB anyway. At first I used mismatched RAM sticks, Kingmax and Hynix, but one of the Hynix sticks died so I replaced it with another set of Kingmax.
Graphics Card: Gainward Geforce 8800GT 512MB
Initially I was using this with an 8800 Ultra, but I thought it was too hot, too loud and too valuable, so I replaced it with a GT. It's one of the later models manufactured on the 65nm process. Slower than the Ultra was, but not that much. At the resolution I'm shooting for the Ultra's bandwidth advantage makes little difference so the deciding factor is more the difference in GPU power.
Graphics Card: Palit Geforce GTS450 1GB GDDR5
- Came as a second upgrade. The 8800GT was too hot. I was looking for a time fore a fitting cooler, but I got a full working card with 30% lower TDP yet 25% higher performance.
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X-fi Extreme Music SB0460
- I just happened to be able to pick this up for cheap. I shot myself in the leg regarding airflow to the 8800GT, but with some fan control tweaking in MSI Afterburner, I can keep it just below 80C° under load most of the times. I'll probably replace it with a PCI-e 1x sound card at some point. For now it does it's job well.
Hard Drive: Hitachi HTS545032B9A300 320GB 5600RPM (Windows XP)
- It used to be the hard drive of the notebook I used during college, but the notebook fried itself. It really was a flawed design. However anything except the motherboard still useable. The drive is maybe a little on the slow side, but the PC is still responsive enough and the load times are decent so I'm not unsatisfied.
Hard Drive: Hitachi HTS725050A7E360 500GB 7200RPM (Vista x64)
- And this was the hard drive of my currently used notebook I instantly replaced with an SSD. Nothing much to say about it. Same as the other, does it's job with adequate speed.
Drive Bay: Chieftec CMR-225
- I was planning to use this in my desktop daily driver if I should ever need to dual boot Windows with Linux, but it ended up being unnecessary. I have no use for Windows. However it's still a neat drive bay allowing me to insert to 2.5" drives in one 3.5" slot with the advantage that I can physically disconnect the drive I'm not booting.
Optical Drive: Dell PLDS DVD+/-RW DH-16AES
- It was part of a Dell prebuilt office PC. I wanted to use the drive of my previous daily driver, but it started to develop mechanical issues so I picked up the one instead.
Memory Card Reader: Chieftec CRD-501 50in1
- I had this in my previous daily driver. I just find it useful to have one at hand, it fills a 3.5" drive slot, gives an additional USB port and a CF card slot so I can easily move data to other builds I'm using with IDE-CF adapters.
Case: Gigabyte GZ-M1
- Also from my previous daily driver. Not the most convenient, but it served me well for the past 12 years and I think it looks elegant.
Power Supply: FSP500-70EP
- I picked it up used for testing purposes, but it has plenty of power and 80+ bronze certification. Over all a decent budget PSU.
Monitor: AMW X1700DS
- I bought this for my mother some 10-ish years ago for about 60$, then after she got herself a bigger one I used it as a secondary monitor, then became my main retro monitor. It's a surprisingly decent one. 1280×1024 resolution, officially with 60Hz refresh rate (1024×768@75; 1152×864@72), but a lot of games allow me to use it in 1280×1024@75Hz. It has good image quality, DVI and VGA input, the built in speakers have surprisingly good sound quality (beats my 500$ Philips monitor I use for my daily driver by a LOT). Isn't prone to ghosting or screen tearing. I really like this monitor.
Keyboard: BTC 5139 E5XKBM10140
- An old AT keyboard I'm using with AT to PS2 adapter. Really high quality, comparable to the 100$ ASUS Strix mechanical keyboard I use with my daily driver.
Mouse: Genius NetScroll Eye
- A generic PS/2 optical mouse I had around. It's something I'm planning to replace with something higher quality, but not in the near future. It's reliable and does its job.
Speaker: Edifier R1280T
- The same I'm using for my daily driver. It has two audio inputs so I can connect two devices to it.
Experiences:
The past week I also made some performance tests on both Windows XP and Vista cross testing with some (title underlined) to see how do they compare. Vista has a really bad name as a bad Windows, mostly because it was buggy when it released, it was slow on outdated hardware and somehow Microsoft got hardware manufacturers with their pants down and it didn't have decent driver support. A lot of the times XP drivers with an arbitrary Vista compliant badge. Back in 2009 I was using Vista Enterprise SP1 32bit and I didn't have any issues with it. Though my PC at the time was on the lower end at the time (Athlon X2-5050e, 4GB DDR2-800, HD4670 1GB), it's leagues above what was low-end in 2006.
Codename: Panzers - Phase One (retail): Maybe a lesser known one outside of Europe. It's a World War 2 RTS from 2004. The graphics was really impressive back in the day. Runs exceptionally well on both OSs even the 1% lows are close to 100fps. It seems to favor Vista though the difference around 10-15% when your frame rate is above 200 doesn't make a noticeable difference in gameplay. Also being an RTS it wouldn't be sensitive to low frame rate anyway.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (retail): An old favorite of mine. Only tested on XP. The frame rate also averages close to 200 with good 1% lows. The fog effect however is broken. If turned on the game doesn't load the textures.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (retail): The average frame rate is high, It seems to dip below 60 on occasion, but it's because the game unnoticeably stalls for a moment when switches to cut scenes or you open the inventory. No effect on gameplay. What has effect on gameplay is that the game crashes to the desktop. A lot.
Call of Duty (retail): locket to 60, didn't try to unlock. The 1% low is just below that, but only because it stalls for a brief moment at autosaves.
Max Payne 2: The Fall of May Payne (retail): Locked to the monitor refresh rate. Stalls for a brief moment when it switches to cut scenes. No effect on gameplay.
Unreal Tournament 2004: It seems to strongly favor XP, but I tested the retail version on XP and the GoG version on Vista. I don't know how much difference is between the two release. Still XP being almost twice as fast is a huge difference.
Half-Life 2 (retail, vengeance crack): On Vista it was only willing to launch in XP compatibility mode, otherwise it gave me an error that my PC has less than 128MB memory. Aside of that, it's slightly faster on Vista, but both are well above 100fps
Doom 3 (retail): Favors XP, there isn't much difference in average frame rate, but on Vista the game is prone to stutter.
Battlefield 2 (retail): The game has a preference for Vista when it comes to speed, but allows to set 75Hz refresh rate on XP (it breaks the game on Vista).
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (retail): Favors XP with a bigger difference, but the game runs very well on both OSs.
GTA: San Andreas (retail): On Vista it only ran in Windows 98 compatibility mode. It didn't make a difference in the visuals (or at least I didn't notice). The game is a little bit faster on Vista with much better 1% lows.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (retail): Prefers Vista with a bigger difference. The game is above 60fps on both OSs, but the speed advantage of Vista can be useful.
Mass Effect (retail): Originally I also wanted to cross test this, but I couldn't get it to launch on Vista. I installed the latest update and the community patch, also experimented with compatibility modes, but no success. From what I found the issue might be related either to the copy protection or the way Vista handles sound cards. On XP, it can benefit from lowering the details.
Quake 4 (retail): Hardver accelerated sound breaks the audio on Vista. Also on XP I forgot to turn on AA and was lazy to retest it while on Vista I tested with 8xAA. Even then, the speed difference is negligible.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (retail): The two OS are basically within the margin of error. No noticeable or even measurable speed difference.
Joint Task Force (retail): Probably another lesser known RTS from 2006. The graphics still looks nice to this day. It runs a lot better on Vista, though it can't cure the drops when opening the objectives menu or at auto saves. No effect on the game play and also as an RTS with a pause function, it's not sensitive to low frame rate.
F.E.A.R. (retail): The in-game benchmark said the minimum fps was 70 and the maximum was 389. The average is the same 147 MSI Afterburner have shown me.
Tomb Raider: Legend (retail): Runs very well, but more demanding areas can make it go below 100fps. Far from being stuttery at any moment.
Prince of Persia: Prodigy/2008 (GoG): Can't reach 60fps on average, but reliably keeps around 50.
World in Conflict (retail): The in-game benchmark claims it runs at 15/30/50 (min/avg/max fps) , MSI afterburner shows a little grimmer picture with 1% lows below 10fps, but the game goes full throttle in the benchmark. During normal gameplay it shouldn't be this demanding.
Fallout: New Vegas (GoG): In more urban parts of the game world the frame rate can dip into the high 30s and I've seen spikes on the frame time chart that I didn't notice while playing. This is actually the first time I played the game on PC and even as it is, it still beats the Xbox 360 release.
Windows XP:
Codename: Panzers - Phase One (retail): A modest performance improvement over the 8800GT, 7.3% on average, 34% for the 1% lows. The game was already running well, now it won't go below 100fps.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (retail): 16.2% improvement on average, 88.7% on the 1% lows. A substantial and unneeded improvement, the frame rate now firmly in the triple digits.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (retail): This one however took a substantial performance hit. 36.5% on average, 54.5% on the 1% lows. The game already had frame time issues which just got worse. It's not the kind of game where this would make it unplayable, but it has an effect on enjoyment. The GTS especially dislikes particle effects. Note, it's an unpatched install.
Call of Duty (retail): A little bit of an unfair comparison, since this time I turned off Vsync. As a result even the 1% lows are close to 200fps.
Max Payne 2: The Fall of May Payne (retail): Same hare as with CoD. Almost never drops below 100fps.
Unreal Tournament 2004: Also one that is slower for some reason. -8.9% on average and -16.8% for the 1% lows. Still almost never drops below 100fps.
Half-Life 2 (retail, vengeance crack): And here is the compensation. The GTS brings +37.2% on average and +7.4% for the 1% lows.
Far Cry (retail): It's a new test subject, and performs well with the GTS. I expected a little more, but it won't hinder the enjoyment.
Doom 3 (retail): Mostly worked out the issues that kept the frame rate low. Now it's the frame limiter that keeps hardware utilization low. CPU utilization is often around 12%, GPU utilization is around 23%.
Call of Duty 2 (retail): Also a newbie and surprisingly slow compared to CoD4 (spoilers?). Not that it needs more power to be enjoyable, just weird.
Colin McRae Rally 2005 (retail): High frame rate, no issues.
Battlefield 2 (retail): There are some improvements, 5.7% on average, 11.5% on the 1% lows. The game seems to be locked to 100fps.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (retail): The game is CPU limited. No improvement on average, however 25.9% improvement on the 1% lows... which were already above 100.
GTA: San Andreas (retail): Modest improvements, 11.9% on average, 10.8% on the 1% lows. The game is CPU limited.
F.E.A.R. (retail): Last time I didn't test it on XP. However the game is slower than the 8800GT was with Vista. Also, there is still a mismatch between the built-in benchmarks frame counter and MSI Afterburner, though those numbers are also lower: 273(max), 111(avg), 57(min).
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (retail): The game must have been CPU limited on XP already. The average frame rate didn't budge, while there was an 11.4% improvements on the 1% lows.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (retail): Original unpatched March 2006 version. It runs well enough, but with this game I really feel the limitations of the HDD access time. Also, the game is CPU limited running only on one core.
Mass Effect (retail): +4.2% on average, +42.9% on 1% lows. Makes the game a lot more enjoyable, still leaves much to be desired.
Quake 4 (retail): As with Doom3 the issues are worked out and the new issues are exactly the same. Next to no CPU and GPU utilization.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (retail): This game really enjoys the GTS. +52.4% on average, +46.7% on the 1% lows.
Tomb Raider: Legend (retail): Also gave it a go on XP this time. The average is around the same as the 8800 on Vista, but the 1% lows are much better.
Joint Task Force (retail): +71.3% on average, +7% on the 1% lows. As with Oblivion, the biggest bottleneck is the HDD speed.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (retail): Last time I disqualified it, because it had the same performance issues as Doom and Quake, but on top of that it was limited to 30fps. Both issues are fixed. On average performs around the same as the other two, but because of the disabled frame limiter, it often goes above 100fps, especially inside buildings.
Windows Vista:
Coming soon.
