I only remember that it’s one of the worst « Intel » graphics chips of all times under Linux, it was really a thing NOT to buy back then if you wanted any sort of enjoyable experience. Good luck with it 😅

If the more advanced GMA3600 based on the PowerVR Series5 (SGX545) was a nightmare to run on drivers, games, compatibility or speed, the GMA500 (SGX535) was worse. The old GMA950 while requiring more power probably, at the end was much better considering also still supported nowdays with a forced "OpenGL 2.1" compatibility. I would not expect 98 drivers to exist when not even the time correct o.s. wasn't exactly the most supported scenario.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-01-24, 16:33:

but I gather that none of the earlier discrete PowerVR stuff works. But for the GMA 500 itself has anyone heard of ME or 98 compatible drivers? I believe XP drivers are around and can be massaged to work in 2000.

Kyro's had 2K/XP drivers. that's as best as it gets for earlier PowerVR and NT. 9x support was already very dead by the time of GMA500 so I have doubts

Also I imagine Intel was not writing directly those PVR GMA drivers and not even IMG Tech and beside compatibility there was probably a very thin space for improvements. These were really for mobile devices for lowest power requirements no other video chips on x86 could be compared. But they were scalable designs and a much faster config was possible meaning much higher power demand, SoC space, costs for the IP probably and the drivers writing.

Yeah if I was looking at netbooks there would be much better choices in stuff that more P4-ish in the chipset like N270..470 based, so while there were a handful of netbooks with poulsbo this wasn't really their thing. But might be referencing what works in them. Target I am stalking are smaller than netbook class, handheld stuff, that was a brief flash in the pan before ARM based smartphones ate their lunch. So that's why it got the sucky lowest power chipset/gfx. Now there's stuff with Via C7 that had possibly nicer Via Unichrome based graphics, or some AMD stuff that had radeon HD 6150, but those AMD Exx kinda burned me once since there's some stuff that isn't x86 hiding in that line and sometimes real specs ain't clear until you've got teh machine in your hands. Also it seems to separate out East and West, Asian markets got C7 based, western markets got Atom/poulsbo, there are exceptions, but it means a huge load of C7 stuff has Chinese or Japanese OS and firmware that I have no hope of making any progress with, even to reconfigure stock stuff. Anyway, looks like the larger part of what is available in this class in western markets is Atom/poulsbo/GMA500 ... though also there's some suggestion that the intel stuff has a more "normal" BIOS whereas the others can have non-PC style boot schemes.

Weirdly, if wikipedia is right, for XP you can have either a driver that does openGL or a driver that does D3D, however badly in each case. So guess I might be looking for way to switch drivers easily, without having to have two full XP installs since storage might be tight.

Anyway, think I'm gonna have to be digging up threads like this for dealbreakers...
Windows 98 games that won't run in Windows XP
Win9x games that don't work on XP
Though is there the opposite of those around? Vogons search not finding it for me at the minute. If I could see a few older than XP games that work on XP that I like it might be worth the hassle.

Though I'm not sure what this is now, middle aged games on not so new older gear which ain't likely lovable yet could operate well. MAGONSNOGWALLYCOW

Maybe the whole competition with smartphones and low power devices that needed to keep a low price anyway didn't help and Intel wasn't probably ready with a low power iGPU for DX9/10 or OpenGL 2/3.x. The choice of a PowerVR IP was good but probably just a way to take time and there might not have been real interests in improving these. Maybe IMG Tech could have done better if they wrote their drivers but both the SGX used were the cheap low end ones. If I remember correctly the SGX545 could have worked in a config with like 10x the pipelines number but obviously notebook like power demands. The AMD E3x0 never convinced anyway too because heat and power required were a lot. The CPU felt just as slow as a 300Mhz faster dual Atom while the Radeon GPU should have been a lower end config considering the 40nm design and already enough for any usage.

What about a HP 2133 for a small C7 based system?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_2133_Mini-Note_PC

Sounds fun, but well supplied with netbooks, HP mini, Acer Aspire One 531h and ZG5 and some emachine that's pretty much another acer. Looking for smaller. More along the lines of Toshiba Libretto 50 or IBM PC-110 kinda thing, palmtop, but those have gone up in price a lot and have plastics problems, so trying to dig up the newer, cheaper alternative. There's some new "micro PC" type units coming out recently, but fall in the hole of not being powerful enough to do everything emulated, and being based on hardware that you can't drag back far enough to do it native. ... well unless you have $1000+ you wanna spend for the fastest, the $400 ones are about middling desktop C2D speed. (Which I think with full machine emulation only gets you about the dx2 to slow pent you get with DOSbox on atoms... and 9x for the faster stuff isn't really a DOSbox strong point.)

Anyway, creative cheapskatery leads me to the 2008 to 2010 time window where there was all sorts of weird, what the hell is anything a PDA, a PMP or a phone? where are we going? the larger netbook was a relative success considering.

But also a great if not the last great time for mobile computing. All sort of phones designs, tablets, netbooks, still user oriented instead of what came later. Also there was some portable interesting devices like the AMD Geode based with XP. I had one with a resistive touchscreen, maybe like 6-inch screen similar to a portable console where even Half Life could run in software rendering. But also the year before where I had such a cool Celeron Mobile Sony ultra portable notebook.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-01-25, 15:52:

Yeah if I was looking at netbooks there would be much better choices in stuff that more P4-ish in the chipset like N270..470 based, so while there were a handful of netbooks with poulsbo this wasn't really their thing. But might be referencing what works in them. Target I am stalking are smaller than netbook class, handheld stuff, that was a brief flash in the pan before ARM based smartphones ate their lunch. So that's why it got the sucky lowest power chipset/gfx. Now there's stuff with Via C7 that had possibly nicer Via Unichrome based graphics, or some AMD stuff that had radeon HD 6150, but those AMD Exx kinda burned me once since there's some stuff that isn't x86 hiding in that line and sometimes real specs ain't clear until you've got teh machine in your hands.

I have both an Atom N270 and N280 eee PC. But for my uses I would prefer anything based on AMD E-350 or similar, with HD 6xxx series graphics. I have Foxconn Nettops based on that chip. They work well with Windows XP x86 as the OS. Newer AMD chipsets ditched XP driver compatibility, as intel already did earlier on.

Here some old benchmarks of the GMA3600 PowerVR next to the AMD E-350 and C-60.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190306101347/ht … view-benchmarks

The Radeon GPU into the E-350 clearly is another world but requires so much more power itself imho; it's like a notebook GPU versus a smartphone GPU which requires like 2-3 watts. The E-350 SoC seems quite a difficult package to keep temps low considering how large is the core. But of course the Radeon driver support would already win itself not to mention the Linux situation.

386SX wrote on 2024-01-25, 20:17:

The Radeon GPU into the E-350 clearly is another world but requires so much more power itself imho; it's like a notebook GPU versus a smartphone GPU which requires like 2-3 watts. The E-350 SoC seems quite a difficult package to keep temps low considering how large is the core. But of course the Radeon driver support would already win itself not to mention the Linux situation.

I tried to find some numbers. Here are some. Note that since this is for nettops, it excludes screen power usage.
https://nl.hardware.info/artikel/2239/3/foxco … view-benchmarks

Foxconn Nettop nT-A3500 (AMD E-350 with HD 6310)
idle: 17 Watt
3D mark 2006: 25 Watt

Foxconn Nettop NT535 (Intel Atom D525 with GMA 3150 (Pineview 2/0 cores @ 0.2 GHz))
idle: 12,5 Watt
3D mark 2006: 21 Watt

IIRC my N280 eee PC maxed out at 15 Watt, when I measured it, a long time ago.

gerwin wrote on 2024-01-26, 16:13:

I tried to find some numbers. Here are some. Note that since this is for nettops, it excludes screen power usage. https://nl.ha […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2024-01-25, 20:17:

The Radeon GPU into the E-350 clearly is another world but requires so much more power itself imho; it's like a notebook GPU versus a smartphone GPU which requires like 2-3 watts. The E-350 SoC seems quite a difficult package to keep temps low considering how large is the core. But of course the Radeon driver support would already win itself not to mention the Linux situation.

I tried to find some numbers. Here are some. Note that since this is for nettops, it excludes screen power usage.
https://nl.hardware.info/artikel/2239/3/foxco … view-benchmarks

Foxconn Nettop nT-A3500 (AMD E-350 with HD 6310)
idle: 17 Watt
3D mark 2006: 25 Watt

Foxconn Nettop NT535 (Intel Atom D525 with GMA 3150 (Pineview 2/0 cores @ 0.2 GHz))
idle: 12,5 Watt
3D mark 2006: 21 Watt

IIRC my N280 eee PC maxed out at 15 Watt, when I measured it, a long time ago.

Maybe the Atom D525 being a 45nm (instead of the usually 32nm of the later SGX-Atoms) with HT and the more demanding slow GMA3150 was more a SoC oriented to industrial-pc so the power demands were also a bit higher. I have the E-350 in a lower power ITX design with unusual SODIMM modules instead of the full sizes and with new fresh thermal paste, there's an awful amount of capacitors, fan speed noise but also the speed the temps increase like after boot, imho are related to a SoC having maybe too much inside; the core itself is quite big for this type of SoC not to mention when compared to the usual Atom.

386SX wrote on 2024-01-26, 17:10:

Maybe the Atom D525 being a 45nm (instead of the usually 32nm of the later SGX-Atoms) with HT and the more demanding slow GMA3150 was more a SoC oriented to industrial-pc so the power demands were also a bit higher. I have the E-350 in a lower power ITX design with unusual SODIMM modules instead of the full sizes and with new fresh thermal paste, there's an awful amount of capacitors, fan speed noise but also the speed the temps increase like after boot, imho are related to a SoC having maybe too much inside; the core itself is quite big for this type of SoC not to mention when compared to the usual Atom.

It figures there is no free processing power without power draw and heat dissipation. Especially in 2009..2011.

Here are the insides of the nT-A3500. Quite clean IMO.
Show off your tiny PCs
It serves as an internet radio.
In the warmer summer: it still does radio duty quite well, but will start to lag and increase the fan speed, when doing more with it.

What about an S1-AT5NM10E?
Atom D525 with Nvidia Ion 2 (I think it was 2) graphics. No clue about W98 drivers, but everything works under XP if I recall correctly.

sdz wrote on 2024-01-26, 18:13:

What about an S1-AT5NM10E?
Atom D525 with Nvidia Ion 2 (I think it was 2) graphics. No clue about W98 drivers, but everything works under XP if I recall correctly.

Lets see if that can take on the E-350....
Nope.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-e-35 … -2,2905-19.html

Of the two platforms we tested here today, AMD's E-350 has more potential to play a couple of new titles, and it looks like it can better handle the vast majority of previous-generation games.

gerwin wrote on 2024-01-26, 17:38:

It figures there is no free processing power without power draw and heat dissipation. Especially in 2009..2011. […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2024-01-26, 17:10:

Maybe the Atom D525 being a 45nm (instead of the usually 32nm of the later SGX-Atoms) with HT and the more demanding slow GMA3150 was more a SoC oriented to industrial-pc so the power demands were also a bit higher. I have the E-350 in a lower power ITX design with unusual SODIMM modules instead of the full sizes and with new fresh thermal paste, there's an awful amount of capacitors, fan speed noise but also the speed the temps increase like after boot, imho are related to a SoC having maybe too much inside; the core itself is quite big for this type of SoC not to mention when compared to the usual Atom.

It figures there is no free processing power without power draw and heat dissipation. Especially in 2009..2011.

Here are the insides of the nT-A3500. Quite clean IMO.
Show off your tiny PCs
It serves as an internet radio.
In the warmer summer: it still does radio duty quite well, but will start to lag and increase the fan speed, when doing more with it.

Imho the problem for Intel was most probably the lack of a time updated own GPU which let the early Atoms totally alone without a better GPU acceleration even for the new 2D GUIs before 3D gaming. Also if I remember correctly some SGX version didn't even have the old style 2D acceleration but more oriented to OpenGL ES smartphone UI. But the later Atom cut power demands quite a lot while the old GMA + southbridge platforms required much more power than the CPU itself, it was really pointless to put that in any mobile devices.

The E-350 went too far with its Radeon iGPU and with a very weak CPU anyway that is strangely too slow, maybe for the lack of SSE4 instructions but as an out of order architecture some was expecting more. The fan noise in my brand new ITX industrial config is something impossible to even accept. It was too slow for any notebook like platforms and too power demanding for a netbook/smartphone like device.

gerwin wrote on 2024-01-26, 18:57:

Lets see if that can take on the E-350.... Nope. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-e-35 … -2,2905-19.html […]
Show full quote

sdz wrote on 2024-01-26, 18:13:

What about an S1-AT5NM10E?
Atom D525 with Nvidia Ion 2 (I think it was 2) graphics. No clue about W98 drivers, but everything works under XP if I recall correctly.

Lets see if that can take on the E-350....
Nope.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-e-35 … -2,2905-19.html

Of the two platforms we tested here today, AMD's E-350 has more potential to play a couple of new titles, and it looks like it can better handle the vast majority of previous-generation games.

Does it need to take on the E-350?

386SX wrote on 2024-01-26, 19:07:

Imho the problem for Intel was most probably the lack of a time updated own GPU which let the early Atoms totally alone without a better GPU acceleration even for the new 2D GUIs before 3D gaming. Also if I remember correctly some SGX version didn't even have the old style 2D acceleration but more oriented to OpenGL ES smartphone UI. But the later Atom cut power demands quite a lot while the old GMA + southbridge platforms required much more power than the CPU itself, it was really pointless to put that in any mobile devices.

The E-350 went too far with its Radeon iGPU and with a very weak CPU anyway that is strangely too slow, maybe for the lack of SSE4 instructions but as an out of order architecture some was expecting more. The fan noise in my brand new ITX industrial config is something impossible to even accept. It was too slow for any notebook like platforms and too power demanding for a netbook/smartphone like device.

I agree about the Atom situation, as it was back then. It was a nice idea, but they never got it right in the Windows XP driver era. After that I lost interest. Though in some limited use-cases these Atoms were fine anyways.

As for the E-350. The CPU is weak compared to the Graphics indeed. But it is a nice hobby box for some open-source game projects, which expect a certain OpenGL-version and the power to actually use it. I also found it working well as a SNES emulator. Besides, connecting it to a TV with 1920x1080 screen already puts some demands on the GPU.
That fan noise, would it be fair to hold against the E-350 in general? It is actually the system designer at fault. Surely a system can be designed to dissipate the heat reasonably. Or maybe it is because of BIOS and/or OS power-saving support?
Passive PCIe cards of the similar Radeon HD 6450 were sold. I must admit that these could get too hot when used in ITX-sized PC cases. ( NVidia GT 710 remains cooler, and is faster. GT 710 is three years more modern, but still supports Windows XP as well. )