Also 9370/9590 FXs were a joke for their price, because AMD kept pushing core clocks without touching the NB frequency, which is tied to L3 cache speed.

Sleaka_J wrote on 2025-01-09, 10:50:

theelf wrote on 2025-01-08, 22:41:

SScorpio wrote on 2025-01-08, 22:05:

I'd avoid XP 64-bit. Too many compatibility issues.

Used for years and never had almost any compatibility issues. I still use XP x64 in my laptop rock solid, no problems at all at software level and exept some very old hardware with drivers neither

Wasn't it established on this very forum that EAX didn't work with XP x64?

That's usually the reason most people set up an XP machine (like the OP).

Interesting if true.
I certainly wouldn't bother with x64 XP if EAX wasn't properly supported.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2025-01-09, 11:13:

Also 9370/9590 FXs were a joke for their price, because AMD kept pushing core clocks without touching the NB frequency, which is tied to L3 cache speed.

True.
The 9590 I had was basically no faster than any 8350 I've ever used. They were the same chip.
Most any 8350 would hit 4.5-4.7 without a problem anyway.

SScorpio wrote on 2025-01-09, 00:30:

In newer OSes and with things that can use more cores, yes they will run better than a dual or quad core without hyperthreading […]
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Jasin Natael wrote on 2025-01-08, 22:48:

I've a fair bit of experience with the six and eight core FX chips so there are no real surprises there for me. I find that the […]
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I've a fair bit of experience with the six and eight core FX chips so there are no real surprises there for me.
I find that the refresh chips were really not as bad as some made them out to be.
Sure they used a lot more power than Intel chips, but who cares? Power is quite cheap where I live, and as far as performance goes I can't imagine I'd care about 160 vs 180 fps in game "x".
They were generally far cheaper to buy and overclocked well and were fun to tweak.
They weren't bad chips, just badly priced at launch with some questionable architecture quirks.
And as far as Windows 7/8/10 goes, I'd argue that at the 6/8 core models hold up better than the i3/i5 Sandy/Ivy chips.

In newer OSes and with things that can use more cores, yes they will run better than a dual or quad core without hyperthreading CPU. But that doesn't effect XP.

Compared to a stock clocked 2600, the FX edges out with massively parallel video encoding, and memory intensive situations with the faster RAM it was paired with. But sadly that site doesn't have the graphs for giving a 2600K that extra 1GHz that they can all hit, and some can go higher.
https://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/366/AMD_FX- … i7_i7-2600.html

In newer games with both overclocked, the 2600K gets roughly 15-25% more FPS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM89KR0beQ

I don't necessarily disagree. No real doubt that the overclocked i7's are faster in games, most especially of the time period.
Maybe the i5's are as well. But if di HAVE to choose one of these platforms as a daily driver with 10/11 I'd likely chose the FX and tweak it.
Obviously none of that is relevant to XP which was never really in question.

Long story short I know that a XP system with a bunch of threads and a lot of ram doesn't make any logical sense. But it is at least different from what everyone else is doing.

Plus my entire draw to "older" computing is the hardware and nostalgia for the hardware.
It's not that I don't enjoy the games, but the software is really just a convenient excuse to play with the hardware, for me at least.
I had a first gen i7 XPS back in the day, but skipped the rest of them up to about Haswell, other than providing support for customers I've no nostalgia for them.

Let's all hope WinXP's thread scheduler doesn't end up in hospital from metal illness due Bulldozer/Vishera nature and what one "thread" is capable off, and... is not.
Also ACPI is going to be... interesting depending on board used. Will be quite shocked if official/unmoded WinXP works on it.
Note, I ran XP on AM1 :

That's practically 25W mobile SoC CPU though. The same that was used in HP T620 and few other thin clients.

I don't think bulldozer's famously poor IPC is much to worry about for XP games. Even if XP is clueless at thread scheduling against it. All of the cores are going to perform at or above fast core2duo/phenom II levels which is plenty.

It is far and away not the fastest or most efficient CPU but it will do the job.

I have used unsupporteed chipsets with XP before by slipstreaming AHCI drivers. No chipsets drivers is probably fine. Some stuff like suspend to RAM and hibernate might not work, but that's hardly the biggest concern for a retro computer for retro gaming.

As someone who ran FX until 2020, I can wholeheartedly agree that it did age like fine milk. Win 7 was very snappy with a whole bunch of tasks running at once and the price was alright, but every game running at 45 fps no matter the graphical settings got tiresome really quick. If today you pitted an 8core FX vs a Sandybridge i5, you'd find that many games can still chug along ok on the Intel, while FX struggles. So much for the "fine wine".

That being said, FX is perfectly fine for XP era, if a little wasteful.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2025-01-09, 17:31:

That's practically 25W mobile SoC CPU though. The same that was used in HP T620 and few other thin clients.

Yeah, funnily enough I have a T620 sitting here on my bench that was also considering using as a potential XP machine as well.
I'm pretty ignorant on them though and don't really know how powerful the iGPU is.

It should be pretty close to Radeon HD 4550 - https://www.techpowerup.com/review/ati-hd-4550-passive

Munx wrote on 2025-01-09, 18:10:

If today you pitted an 8core FX vs a Sandybridge i5, you'd find that many games can still chug along ok on the Intel, while FX struggles. So much for the "fine wine".

Well, no. FX is consistently better than i5 CPUs without Hyper Threading. While i5 may show better max frame rate in modern games, they really struggle with 1% lows and frame pacing.

On XP absolutely avoid the FX series, it never got patched with the improved thread scheduling that 7 and newer did, I tested this with an FX 6300 vs X4 955, and the 955 walked all over the FX 6300, so did an emulated X3 @ 3.2ghz in gaming, I don't have an FX 8350 to test but I'd expect similar results, without that patch the OS is unable to use the flawed FX at least half decently.

What I did for Late XP

I7 4790k
Z97 Board
8gb DDR3 1866 2x4gb XP only sees like 3.2gb of it
Geforce GTX 780 Ti

does fine

Jasin Natael wrote on 2025-01-09, 14:07:

Sleaka_J wrote on 2025-01-09, 10:50:

theelf wrote on 2025-01-08, 22:41:

Used for years and never had almost any compatibility issues. I still use XP x64 in my laptop rock solid, no problems at all at software level and exept some very old hardware with drivers neither

Wasn't it established on this very forum that EAX didn't work with XP x64?

That's usually the reason most people set up an XP machine (like the OP).

Interesting if true.
I certainly wouldn't bother with x64 XP if EAX wasn't properly supported.

I found the Vogons thread I was thinking of.

EAX Support Seemingly Non-Functional under Windows XP x64?

Basically, EAX will only operate in games under XP x64 if system RAM is limited to 4GB, either physically or artificially. Someone in the thread mentioned modified drivers, but nobody had them and there are no links to them. I'm not even sure they ever existed either.

i always think of the early dual core like athlon 64 and core duo as being late xp, after that they always run w7 well (even machines built between vista and w7 release dates). If a machine can run XP though, it can be an XP machine. to have a multi core 64 bit cpu and 8gb ram for a 32 bit OS just feels a bit like a waste though - but ironically can be cheaper than seeking out 32 bit hardware from early 2000's now

Just remembering what "screwing around" kind of testing I was doing on 2 vs more cores in approx 2012.. meaning I didn't keep records of what exactly numbers per app/game were or even what particular ones. Anyway it was on Win7 but was on stuff that wasn't all that recent, maybe up to a year or two old at the time, and it was all probably stuff that would run on XP. Where 2012 may have been the cusp of where multicore support was improving for latest new stuff.

What kicked it off was swapping an X2 at 2.6ghz out for a Phenom X3 and being super underwhelmed. In theory I had a whole gigahertz plus extra CPU power but nothing was showing me that, everything was slower, everything. Now I knew that old old stuff would only use one core so no surprise on that, since the cores were 2.2ghz vs 2.6ghz. What I thought should have been decently multithreaded though, was only loading the first 2 cores and getting like 20-25% load on the third. When I got a Q6600 a few months later I tried the same things and "fully loaded" that was going to 100% 100% 25% 5%. So given 3 or 4 cores could only do 20-30% worth of a core's work beyond 2 cores, then if you get a dual core that's 10-15% faster clock than the quad or trip, it will perform about the same in pre-2012ish software. So you're doing better with a 3Ghz C2 or X2 vs a 2.4 Q6600 or 2.4 X4 ... Benchmarks though, were progressively more multicore aware at least 3 years earlier than anything else, so benchmarks will tell you "lies" meaning yeah that's the potential, but it's not what software the same age will actually get. Anyway early tens 2 vs 4 core thing very much like mid noughts single vs dual core thing.

These comments not meant to apply to "power user" heavy multitasking or productivity, movie editing, graphics work, compiling etc etc, which apps tended to be optimised early and different kettle of fish to gaming use.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-10, 16:07:

Just remembering what "screwing around" kind of testing I was doing on 2 vs more cores in approx 2012.. meaning I didn't keep records of what exactly numbers per app/game were or even what particular ones. Anyway it was on Win7 but was on stuff that wasn't all that recent, maybe up to a year or two old at the time, and it was all probably stuff that would run on XP. Where 2012 may have been the cusp of where multicore support was improving for latest new stuff.

I believe it was Battlefield 3 which was released in 2011 that was the first game that utilized 8 cores that I used. It didn't 100% all cores all the time though. That was a DX11 game with some DX10, so that makes it a WIn7 game that could run on Vista.

The Xbox 360 has three cores along with SMT support for up to six threads. While the PS3 had that one beefy cores with seven subcore/shaderish design. It was near the end of this generation that games really started massively multi threading to drag as much performance out of console hardware as they could. In 2013 the PS4/XBOne released with 8 core CPUs of which games could normally access six. That's when multicore usage really took off.

SScorpio wrote on 2025-01-10, 21:08:

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-10, 16:07:

Just remembering what "screwing around" kind of testing I was doing on 2 vs more cores in approx 2012.. meaning I didn't keep records of what exactly numbers per app/game were or even what particular ones. Anyway it was on Win7 but was on stuff that wasn't all that recent, maybe up to a year or two old at the time, and it was all probably stuff that would run on XP. Where 2012 may have been the cusp of where multicore support was improving for latest new stuff.

I believe it was Battlefield 3 which was released in 2011 that was the first game that utilized 8 cores that I used. It didn't 100% all cores all the time though. That was a DX11 game with some DX10, so that makes it a WIn7 game that could run on Vista.

The Xbox 360 has three cores along with SMT support for up to six threads. While the PS3 had that one beefy cores with seven subcore/shaderish design. It was near the end of this generation that games really started massively multi threading to drag as much performance out of console hardware as they could. In 2013 the PS4/XBOne released with 8 core CPUs of which games could normally access six. That's when multicore usage really took off.

See, this is where the FX series really shine in my experience. Xbone One games. The Jaguar based APU is a tweaked shitty FX chip and anything designed to run on them seems to run great on the FX chips.