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Kmart Blue-light PC

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First post, by coppercitymt

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Dose anyone here, have or had a Kmart blue-light PC made by LG It was like a Celeron 667 and around the year 2000-2001. Please let me know if you do and if you want to sell it, or have any photos.

Reply 1 of 68, by swaaye

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Oh my how I don't miss the days of these kinds of budget rigs with not even remotely enough RAM. They must have been trying to get high return rates and to turn people off of computers. 😁
http://www.pcworld.com/article/34006/a_blue_l … _kmarts_pc.html

Last edited by swaaye on 2012-03-24, 01:46. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 2 of 68, by coppercitymt

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Yes I owned one brand new back in the day, they did not seem to be very popular. And I recall yes it was painfully slow. I remember doing defrag that taking hours.

swaaye wrote:
Last edited by coppercitymt on 2012-03-24, 01:51. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 3 of 68, by swaaye

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It's reminiscent of the original eMachines boxes. Actually this kind of thing was everywhere back then. PCs with so little RAM they would be swapping to disk immediately upon boot.

Today's budget stuff is so much better because RAM is so cheap now.

Reply 4 of 68, by nemesis

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Wow, that takes me back a long ways... I remember walking into the electronics department and seeing one of those sitting on the shelf and being quite surprised to see one in the stores. I think it was on sale for like $400 or something. Had a Celeron 600+MHz (I can't remember the exact speed), and 64 MB of RAM bundled with a 17" monitor. Really it was a pretty good deal back then. Too bad we didn't have the money to buy it and my parents (yes I was a kid back then) didn't feel the need to buy a new computer yet.

One of our friends bought one, and though it was pretty weak compared to the high end systems of the day, they found it to be very quick compared to the budget systems.

Edit: A thought, did Kmart Australia carry these PCs?

Reply 5 of 68, by jaqie

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swaaye wrote:

Today's budget stuff is so much better because RAM is so cheap now.

I actually disagree. budget stuff isn't much better, mainly because it's still starving the system of ram bandwidth by the onboard video using system ram and bandwidth for it's tasks, to the point that even some things that are simple tasks now can choke the PC. Back then we didn't have OS taking GPU bandwidth and flash in browsers eating up lots of system time, but that's kinda part of how things are now, and the end result is more or less the same user experience as it was back then with budget systems... subpar. especially with intel GMA crap.

That having been said, I am typing this on a 3-4 year old toshiba pentium dual core 1867MHz with 3GB DDR2 and an i960 chipset, and the experience isn't that bad. This was no low budget system though, those are the likes of the netbook with 2gb ram and a single core atom.

Reply 6 of 68, by coppercitymt

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I use budget stuff everyday, my main laptop is a Acer Aspire One, and my desktop is a Celeron 2.6 dual core with Intel GMA. Both system do what I ask of them flawlessly. The desktop plays many of the newer games like NFS Undercover just fine.

Reply 7 of 68, by jaqie

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coppercitymt wrote:

I use budget stuff everyday, my main laptop is a Acer Aspire One, and my desktop is a Celeron 2.6 dual core with Intel GMA. Both system do what I ask of them flawlessly. The desktop plays many of the newer games like NFS Undercover just fine.

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS […]
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MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 3500+
RAM: 1GB MB RAM or higher (Windows Vista requires 2 GB RAM)
HDD: 10 GB free disk space or more
Graphics: 256 MB or higher (Pixel Shader 3.0, PCIe only) *
DirectX: Version 9.0c

RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS
OS: Windows XP/Vista
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD 64 X2 5200+ or AMD Phenom
RAM: 2GB MB RAM or higher (Windows Vista requires 3 GB RAM)
HDD: 10 GB free disk space or more
Graphics: 512 MB or higher (Pixel Shader 3.0, PCIe only) *
DirectX: Version 9.0c

ATI
Radeon X1600 series
Radeon X1800 series
Radeon X1900 series
Radeon HD 2400 series
Radeon HD 2600 series
Radeon HD 2900 series
Radeon HD 3000 series
Radeon HD 4000 series

NVIDIA
GeForce 7300 series
GeForce 7600 series
GeForce 7800 series
GeForce 7900 series
GeForce 8500 series
GeForce 8600 series
GeForce 8800 series
GeForce 9500 series
GeForce 9600 series
GeForce 9800 series
GeForce 200 series

***NOTE: Laptop versions of these chipsets may work, but are not officially supported.
NVIDIA GeForce 6000 series not supported.

yyyyyyyyyyyyeah you run that on a celeron with intel GMA and it performs well........
Where did you say that beachfront property you had for sale was? nevada?

Intel's GMA of the era of the core2 duo even has issues with running their flash required official site for this game.

Reply 8 of 68, by SquallStrife

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C'mon... Intel GMA today is light-years ahead of where it was, even just 2-3 years ago...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfJWpd_l0G8

Sure, it's no 580GTX, but it's by no means "crap".

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Reply 9 of 68, by SquallStrife

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jaqie wrote:

yyyyyyyyyyyyeah you run that on a celeron with intel GMA and it performs well........

"just fine" and "well" are relative....

It plays well..... compared to Crysis. 😜

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Reply 10 of 68, by jaqie

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We are talking about 2-3 years ago. check the post... celeron dual core, means most likely an 800 fsb core 2 duo with almost all L2 disabled, meaning a g31 or g41 motherboard...

Reply 11 of 68, by SquallStrife

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Swaaye said "today's budget stuff" which is what you were replying to with "GMA crap", which was what I was replying to, but that extra post popped up while I was....well....otherwise occupied.

Damn you, me-not-checking-thread-before-clicking-post!!!

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Reply 12 of 68, by jaqie

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oh, I see. I misunderstood, sorry.

I will always see any video without it's own dedicated RAM and the bandwidth that goes with that configuration as crap when someone talks about doing anything besides simple desktop work with said system. There is simply no getting around the bandwidth starving situation that happens when you share video and system ram on the same (rather limited) memory bus. If we start seeing ram bandwidth for motherboards in the vicinity of 256 bit gddr5 in the next year, I'll change my tune. Till that ceases to be a bottleneck intel's GMA and anything else that uses system ram and said bandwidth for it's video ram will be crap to me for anything but light desktop work. Try running gpu-z and checking the RAM bandwidth of those if you haven't already compared to even cheap discrete video solutions... I have a p3 1.13GHz laptop with a dedicated geforce2 MX which beats most even recent onboard video for RAM bandwidth, even though the fillrate and such are nothing compared. They have that kind of ram bandwidth on dedicated cards for a very, very good reason.... it's needed for any sort of gaming besides 'casual' or 'classic'.

I have an HD5450, $25 or so if you look new, 512MB dedicated, 19W TDP PCI-E v2.1 video card, and that thing will run circles around any onboard video.... why? it has it's own dedicated video ram, and the bandwidth that goes with it. It lets system ram alone to the CPU for what it was made for instead of leeching all of the performance out of the system. Hell, you even put one of those into a core2duo celeron based system with g31 or g41 chipset and even desktop apps rejoyce. Try this little experiment: run Prime95 64 bit on windows 7 64 bit or xp 64 bit on a core 2 duo with the g31 or g41 chipset in blend FFT mode... the system grinds to an absolute crawl, video barely responds and the system is entirely unusable because the CPU and GPU are duking it out for ram bandwidth and leeching the system completely dry, and dead zombie state. Then put in an HD5450 or even an old geforce 6600 DDR and the same test the system is QUITE usable and friendly to multitasking. this is why GMA and all onboard video is CRAP and always will be.

Reply 13 of 68, by SquallStrife

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You should know that memory bandwidth is a small part of a large picture.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy- … -2100-tested/11

The 5450 is pretty much equivalent to HD3000, at best it's a minor upgrade.

"run circles" is an exaggeration.

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Reply 14 of 68, by jaqie

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Not when you look at total system performance, as I have been saying the whole time. When do you run something that stresses only the video card, short of things like folding@home or bitcoin mining?

Reply 15 of 68, by SquallStrife

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http://i.imgur.com/ee87n.png

Prime95 Short FFT's, 4 threads, while playing back HD video stutter free, painless navigation (including Mission Control and Expose, which are GPU accelerated), Intel HD 3000.

But you'll probably find a reason not to believe it.

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Reply 16 of 68, by jaqie

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oh I believe it. that fits entirely in L2 cache so ram I/O is not even being used, defeating the whole point by not actually using a lot of RAM to CPU bandwidth.

That's the same thing I had to do on those systems I was talking about in order to actually be able to test them instead of them going into zombie mode.

I can do the exact same thing on this i960 chip pentium dual core laptop with small in-place FFTs. They fit in L2 cache by design.

Reply 18 of 68, by jaqie

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That I would have to see to believe that it was running as well as a system with a discrete video card would. That's like sharing a 1 inch water main with 100 other residents and saying you always get the same amount of water flow out of your tap... sure, you would if nobody else is using water.... but if 10 people started baths and another 5 people flushed their toilet youd all get a trickle and that's it. Yes, hydrostatics and hydrodynamics are far more complicated than ram bandwidth, but the point is valid, some other things (video card) are sucking away at available CPU to RAM bandwidth, and that is decreasing system performance when multitasking especially.

If you or anyone else is happy with their GMA, that's GREAT! I just bought this laptop from a friend, I keep talking about it as an example. I even play ut2003 on it and other older stuff, but I know it has severe limits compared to even a bottom of the barrel discrete video card because it has a leech for a video card in it sucking its bandwidth from the main system ram, and I treat it as such.

I'm not saying it's unusable, I'm not saying it's awful, Im saying compared to a real video card it's crap. Just like compared to mom's apple pie those frozen bake and eat pies are crap. They just aren't the same thing and never will be, because of how they are made.

Reply 19 of 68, by SquallStrife

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8GRhW0NMGU

As you can tell, I'm pretty bored today.

That whistling noise? That's my nose. My stupid annoying nose. 🙁

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