Athlon II X4 is actually not that bad in IPC, it really depends on the clockspeed. If you can push it to 3.6GHz or above, it becomes fairly respectable. The X4 640 is actually around 20% lower than a Core 2 Quad Q8300. It's not even that bad compared to early i3s, but once you start treading into i5 territory it's about only half as fast as the second gen i5s in terms of IPC.

I find that it handles all games from the XBOX 360/PS3 era with ease though; paired with a Radeon 7850 or something thereabouts you would have respectable machine for games from 2012 and before.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Athlon X4's single thread performance is too slow for modern games. Around 60 percent of Core2 if I remember correctly. That would make a decent webserver or NAS though.

IDK why AMD didn't produce Win10 drivers for there older stuff. I think 6xxx series Radeons are the minimum. GF8xxx series or newer card has support from NVIDIA. This is what is keeping alot of otherwise decent laptops on Windows 7 or 8.

Doesn't affect me anyways. I'm not switching to 10 from 7 until I have to. I don't like there "windows as a service" standpoint. Forced updates and the data mining have to go before I'll consider it. They also need to stop trying to use the start menu to sell me stuff.

The Athlon II X4 is close to the Core 2 / quad series in FPU performance, and does better in ALU operations. It's only weakness is clock speed. If clocked high enough, an Athlon II x4 on a modern(ish) AMD 970 mainboard can play most modern games w/o issue. For daily use the X4 feels faster then most core 2 quads and it has the advantage of UEFI, PCI-E 2.0, DDR3, SATA3 and USB 3.0 when installed on a modern mainboard. There's just no comparison between the two. Some Athlon X4 SKUs will clock up to 4GHz and produce very little heat - also, unlike Phenom II X4 chips, Athlons are not running that half-speed L3 cache that can slow the CPU down in some games.

I use a Phenom II X6 1090T clocked at 3.6GHz / MSI 970-G43 Plus with 8GB of DDR3 and a RX 470 as my guest gaming PC and there's no game it can't handle. In fact it does better in a select few games then a Ivy Bridge i5 because of the extra two cores. Of course it performs worse in single threaded games. I did clock the Northbridge to 2600MHz to raise L3 cache speed and memory controller speed tough. It gets about 18900mb/sec read speed in Aida64 with Corsair XMS3 memory running at 1600MHz CL9 (the northbridge won't handle 1866 or 2133 stable).

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Athlon X4's single thread performance is too slow for modern games. Around 60 percent of Core2 if I remember correctly. That would make a decent webserver or NAS though.

IDK why AMD didn't produce Win10 drivers for there older stuff. I think 6xxx series Radeons are the minimum. GF8xxx series or newer card has support from NVIDIA. This is what is keeping alot of otherwise decent laptops on Windows 7 or 8.

Doesn't affect me anyways. I'm not switching to 10 from 7 until I have to. I don't like there "windows as a service" standpoint. Forced updates and the data mining have to go before I'll consider it. They also need to stop trying to use the start menu to sell me stuff.

Oldest Radeons with Windows 10 support/drivers are the HD 5xxx, Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx only supports up to Windows 8.0 officially, also no mentioning Radeon 9500-9800, x300-x850 and x1xxx only supports up to Windows Vista officially, AMD tends to drop OS support much earlier than nVidia excluding the Geforce FX which only supported up to XP officially on stable drivers.

in GPU OS support, highest officially supported OS are:
Pre-DX9 cards
Radeon 7xxx/8xxx/9000/9100/9200/9250 - Windows XP
Geforce 256/2/3/4 - Windows XP
Early DX9 cards
Geforce FX - Windows XP (stable drivers), Windows Vista (beta drivers)
Radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800 - Windows Vista
Later DX9 cards
Geforce 6 and 7 - Windows 8.1
Radeon x300-x800 and x1xxx - Windows Vista
DX10 cards
Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx - Windows 8.0
Geforce 8, 9, 100, 200, 300 series and Geforce 405 - Windows 10
Early DX11 cards
Radeon HD 5xxx/6xxx - Windows 10
Geforce 400 and 500 series - Windows 10

About Windows 10...

At this rate, you'll have to stay on Windows 7 forever or switch to Linux/Mac. Knowing MS, it won't change that much or even become worse and this is comming from a Windows 10 user. I know many people who decided to stay on Windows 7/8 (even after 2020 in some cases) or switched to Linux or Mac becuase of Windows 10

Carlos S. M. wrote:

Oldest Radeons with Windows 10 support/drivers are the HD 5xxx, Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx only supports up to Windows 8.0 officia […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Athlon X4's single thread performance is too slow for modern games. Around 60 percent of Core2 if I remember correctly. That would make a decent webserver or NAS though.

IDK why AMD didn't produce Win10 drivers for there older stuff. I think 6xxx series Radeons are the minimum. GF8xxx series or newer card has support from NVIDIA. This is what is keeping alot of otherwise decent laptops on Windows 7 or 8.

Doesn't affect me anyways. I'm not switching to 10 from 7 until I have to. I don't like there "windows as a service" standpoint. Forced updates and the data mining have to go before I'll consider it. They also need to stop trying to use the start menu to sell me stuff.

Oldest Radeons with Windows 10 support/drivers are the HD 5xxx, Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx only supports up to Windows 8.0 officially, also no mentioning Radeon 9500-9800, x300-x850 and x1xxx only supports up to Windows Vista officially, AMD tends to drop OS support much earlier than nVidia excluding the Geforce FX which only supported up to XP officially on stable drivers.

in GPU OS support, highest officially supported OS are:
Pre-DX9 cards
Radeon 7xxx/8xxx/9000/9100/9200/9250 - Windows XP
Geforce 256/2/3/4 - Windows XP
Early DX9 cards
Geforce FX - Windows XP (stable drivers), Windows Vista (beta drivers)
Radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800 - Windows Vista
Later DX9 cards
Geforce 6 and 7 - Windows 8.1
Radeon x300-x800 and x1xxx - Windows Vista
DX10 cards
Radeon HD 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx - Windows 8.0
Geforce 8, 9, 100, 200, 300 series and Geforce 405 - Windows 10
Early DX11 cards
Radeon HD 5xxx/6xxx - Windows 10
Geforce 400 and 500 series - Windows 10

About Windows 10...

At this rate, you'll have to stay on Windows 7 forever or switch to Linux/Mac. Knowing MS, it won't change that much or even become worse and this is comming from a Windows 10 user. I know many people who decided to stay on Windows 7/8 (even after 2020 in some cases) or switched to Linux or Mac becuase of Windows 10

AMD instantly dropped support for most ATI products when they bought up ATI way back when. I kinda feel like there lack of driver support is an attempt to force upgrades on older users. There's no good reason they couldn't have pushed out drivers for them.

Didn't exactly find in a dumpster, but I got these for free from a local recycling center yesterday. "Biggest" hard drive I have had. No idea if it works, but it was free.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

kiwa wrote:

Found a couple of interesting things on the street today […]
Show full quote

Found a couple of interesting things on the street today

tmp_25967-IMG_20170504_1548551412852262.jpg

tmp_25967-IMG_20170504_1547201358734593.jpg

Random samsung lcd, a sb awe64 and a tseng et4000 video card.

Literally just laying on the street? are the streets paved with Silicon where your from or something?

haha, yeah on the street, but its not uncommon to see that here, it was a lot of computers in a corner of a street, the things i found where apart from that, i did not get anything else because space, but there where a lot of pentium 4 and modern things.

Apologies for the stock photo but it best shows what I got. Friend had it in his attic (actually has two of them) and gave it to me for free. It's an absolutely giant case:

That entire lower segment is about the size of a regular PC case. I'll try and take some photos of the actual thing later.

How are you guys narrowing your trash searches so that you aren't spending your time just looking through trash?

🤣 what? It's not a search engine, you just get lucky sometimes.

I made some friends in the local recycling center and they call me if there some old pc hardware comes in that would normally go to electronic waste recycling.

awgamer wrote:

How are you guys narrowing your trash searches so that you aren't spending your time just looking through trash?

Well, for me at least, it isn't so much 'looking through trash' as it is looking where people trash electronics.
It almost sounds like you think we're elbow-deep in rotten banana peelings and empty milk cartons while looking for some old graphics card, hehe. That's not the case. 😀

What surprises me though is when people say they find vintage computers literally on the street. That's unlikely to happen here in Sweden.

A local computer shop was closing down and because I interned there the owner invited me over to help myself to what ever was in the storage room.

Some of the highlights of what I got:

• A crap load of IDE HDDS and some SATA as well
  A 60MHz Pentium (FDIV bug?)
  An OEM Geforce 2 Ultra
  An OEM Geforce 2 GTS
  A cool, compact AT keyboard
  A 17" Intel imac
  A lifetime supply of (mostly beige) IDE optical drives
  A big bag of RAM (I only grabbed all 256MB and greater SD modules and all Rambus modules.

The parts were all stored with pretty much no antistatic precautions so I am expecting a fairly high mortality rate. As of now I've started testing the HDDs as I plan to sell off high capacity SATA drives.
If the owner lets me, I might go back right before they close and grab the remaining expansion cards and maybe the rest of the ram. There isn't anything amazing left that I know of though.

Pictures
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4D2JORCiWs … d0NBTnhRUl93QzA

Gatewayuser200 wrote:

A local computer shop was closing down and because I interned there the owner invited me over to help myself to what ever was in […]
Show full quote

A local computer shop was closing down and because I interned there the owner invited me over to help myself to what ever was in the storage room.

Pictures
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4D2JORCiWs … d0NBTnhRUl93QzA

Like Gateway keyboards, they were pretty good quality, not like the crap ones that come with new Pc's these days

Gatewayuser200 wrote:

A local computer shop was closing down and because I interned there the owner invited me over to help myself to what ever was in […]
Show full quote

A local computer shop was closing down and because I interned there the owner invited me over to help myself to what ever was in the storage room.

Some of the highlights of what I got:

• A crap load of IDE HDDS and some SATA as well
  A 60MHz Pentium (FDIV bug?)
  An OEM Geforce 2 Ultra
  An OEM Geforce 2 GTS
  A cool, compact AT keyboard
  A 17" Intel imac
  A lifetime supply of (mostly beige) IDE optical drives
  A big bag of RAM (I only grabbed all 256MB and greater SD modules and all Rambus modules.

The parts were all stored with pretty much no antistatic precautions so I am expecting a fairly high mortality rate. As of now I've started testing the HDDs as I plan to sell off high capacity SATA drives.
If the owner lets me, I might go back right before they close and grab the remaining expansion cards and maybe the rest of the ram. There isn't anything amazing left that I know of though.

Pictures
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4D2JORCiWs … d0NBTnhRUl93QzA

The top of that expansion card bin.. the card with the fan and green heatsinks, that looks almost identical to my Geforce 2 Ultra AGP card.. we had one on ebay just go for about $250 last month on auction.

Gatewayuser200 wrote:

A local computer shop was closing down and because I interned there the owner invited me over to help myself to what ever was in […]
Show full quote

A local computer shop was closing down and because I interned there the owner invited me over to help myself to what ever was in the storage room.

Some of the highlights of what I got:

• A crap load of IDE HDDS and some SATA as well
  A 60MHz Pentium (FDIV bug?)
  An OEM Geforce 2 Ultra
  An OEM Geforce 2 GTS
  A cool, compact AT keyboard
  A 17" Intel imac
  A lifetime supply of (mostly beige) IDE optical drives
  A big bag of RAM (I only grabbed all 256MB and greater SD modules and all Rambus modules.

The parts were all stored with pretty much no antistatic precautions so I am expecting a fairly high mortality rate. As of now I've started testing the HDDs as I plan to sell off high capacity SATA drives.
If the owner lets me, I might go back right before they close and grab the remaining expansion cards and maybe the rest of the ram. There isn't anything amazing left that I know of though.

Pictures
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4D2JORCiWs … d0NBTnhRUl93QzA

the S-Spec on that Pentium 60 is SX835 and it does have the FDIV bug

Huge score from an electronics recycling center:

Lots of 3dfx stuff, some matching cards as well, including two rare provideo voodoo 2 cars. An MX voodoo rush, an Alliance rush, some V1 cards, a 6800 GT AGP, a 5950 Ultra (red one), some ISA video cards including a couple of ET4000 cards and a Paradise card, an 8 bit Pro Audio Spectrum, a GUS clone, a PCI sistem on board (looks like socket 370), several creative ISA cards including an AWE64 gold, some VLB controllers and video cards, and a few motherboards.

Now I just need to find the time to clean and test all of them - see what works and what doesn't, and what can be fixed.

kanecvr wrote:

Huge score from an electronics recycling center: […]
Show full quote

Huge score from an electronics recycling center:

Lots of 3dfx stuff, some matching cards as well, including two rare provideo voodoo 2 cars. An MX voodoo rush, an Alliance rush, some V1 cards, a 7800 AGP, a 5950 Ultra (red one), some ISA video cards including a couple of ET4000 cards and a Paradise card, an 8 bit Pro Audio Spectrum, a GUS clone, a PCI sistem on board (looks like socket 370), several creative ISA cards including an AWE64 gold, some VLB controllers and video cards, and a few motherboards.

Now I just need to find the time to clean and test all of them - see what works and what doesn't, and what can be fixed.

Teach me master! 😳

kanecvr wrote:

Huge score from an electronics recycling center: <snip> Lots of 3dfx stuff, some matching cards as well, including two rare prov […]
Show full quote

Huge score from an electronics recycling center:
<snip>
Lots of 3dfx stuff, some matching cards as well, including two rare provideo voodoo 2 cars. An MX voodoo rush, an Alliance rush, some V1 cards, a 6800 GT AGP, a 5950 Ultra (red one), some ISA video cards including a couple of ET4000 cards and a Paradise card, an 8 bit Pro Audio Spectrum, a GUS clone, a PCI sistem on board (looks like socket 370), several creative ISA cards including an AWE64 gold, some VLB controllers and video cards, and a few motherboards.

Now I just need to find the time to clean and test all of them - see what works and what doesn't, and what can be fixed.

The stuff you guys find at e-recyclers/on the street/in dumpsters makes me so jealous. 🤣

cj_reha wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

Huge score from an electronics recycling center: <snip> Lots of 3dfx stuff, some matching cards as well, including two rare prov […]
Show full quote

Huge score from an electronics recycling center:
<snip>
Lots of 3dfx stuff, some matching cards as well, including two rare provideo voodoo 2 cars. An MX voodoo rush, an Alliance rush, some V1 cards, a 6800 GT AGP, a 5950 Ultra (red one), some ISA video cards including a couple of ET4000 cards and a Paradise card, an 8 bit Pro Audio Spectrum, a GUS clone, a PCI sistem on board (looks like socket 370), several creative ISA cards including an AWE64 gold, some VLB controllers and video cards, and a few motherboards.

Now I just need to find the time to clean and test all of them - see what works and what doesn't, and what can be fixed.

The stuff you guys find at e-recyclers/on the street/in dumpsters makes me so jealous. 🤣

Yes, it makes everybody jealous! I mean I found pretty nice stuff in dumpsters, but this is WHOLE new level! 😲

Very nice, krivulak. Congrats.