brassicGamer wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

The only reason I'm using a P4 is because the board I'm using to test a buttload of graphics cards and games has AGP and PCIe and is socket 478. It's a 3.2GHz HT CPU so it can handle most things of that era and was my main gaming machine for a long time (until DX10 happened).

Which board is that? I have an LGA775 board with both AGP and PCIe (limited to x4) as well as DDR and DDR2:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/4CoreDual-VSTA/

Pretty much same board except for the socket:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/VIA/P4Dual-880Pro/

Cool. I didn't realize they made a 478 version. This was my main board from about 2006-7 until 2012. I tried it as an XP retro PC a couple of months ago and just wasn't happy enough with it. CPU performance was measurably lower than most other boards and the x4 limitation on PCIe was a bottleneck for the 8800GTX I wanted to use on it. On the other hand, it was a decent overclocker--I ran a Pentium E2180 (2.0Ghz) at 2.7Ghz easily. There was almost no performance difference between DDR1 and DDR2 (DDR2 was maybe 1% faster). And that RAM chipset limitation was weird. It takes and recognizes 4GB, but only 3328MB is usable, regardless of whether or not the OS is 64-bit. Very neat, flexible board, as I imagine yours is too.

clueless1 wrote:

Cool. I didn't realize they made a 478 version. This was my main board from about 2006-7 until 2012. I tried it as an XP retro PC a couple of months ago and just wasn't happy enough with it. CPU performance was measurably lower than most other boards and the x4 limitation on PCIe was a bottleneck for the 8800GTX I wanted to use on it.

I was using a lowly 8500GT so if there was a bottleneck it wouldn't have been noticeable. It was all I could afford at the time (I'm always at least a generation behind). I read about the board in Custom PC and it only cost me £35. It was an upgrade from an SDRAM-based board so I could use the same Northwood CPU until I could afford a newer one.

As I'm not using it as a gaming machine performance isn't critical. I'm group testing my late AGP and early PCIe graphics cards so as long as I don't put anything too kick-ass in there, it will serve as the perfect 1-variable benchmarking system.

clueless1 wrote:

On the other hand, it was a decent overclocker--I ran a Pentium E2180 (2.0Ghz) at 2.7Ghz easily.

Definitely a strength of the ASRock boards. I think I may have killed mine running it too hot for too long as I had to recap it recently. Hourly they are of better quality!