Kinda slim on boards today but still.

- ASUS A7N8X-X, needs its KZG replaced but otherwise looks okay. Came with AXP 2600+ 400FSB
- EpoX EP-8RDA3I w/ AXP 2500+ - bad Teapos
- ECS K7VMM+ with a few broken traces
- 256MB PC133 stick

Today managed to get this wierdo

MSI 845 Pro, socket 423 w/ 845 SDR chipset. Had one and sold it. IIRC it might have Northwood support as well thru an 423-478 adapter. (might be wrong on this one but I remember mine had such an adapter, however I don't remember if it was a Northwood in there.)

PcBytes wrote on 2025-02-02, 18:46:

MSI 845 Pro, socket 423 w/ 845 SDR chipset. Had one and sold it. IIRC it might have Northwood support as well thru an 423-478 adapter. (might be wrong on this one but I remember mine had such an adapter, however I don't remember if it was a Northwood in there.)

Yeah thats socket 423 , never had one before . SDR chipset cuted down advantages Pentium4 has . But top tier of useless and bad decision build was Celeron Willamette paired with 845 sdr. Oh this combo was everywhere in internet cafe paired with geforce mx.
PS . There was pentium 4 1.5Ghz installed .

What are peoples thoughts on X79 and SandyBridge . .are they now old enough due to how fast tech is advancing to be mildly considered welcome here ? or is it like LGA775 and X58 . .still far to new and modernish. Its kinda silly since LGA 775 and X58 are now both approaching 20 years old which is roughly when people saw 1980 gear as retro.

I only ask because I just picked up a Sabertooth X79 board and its . .beautiful, I personally dont consider it modern so it would be out of place over in the modern hardware thread but its not old enough to be in the retro one (15 years is a long time in the technology field) ...does such hardware have a place here on Vogons even if its just for a talking point.

I have considered trying to find a place to talk about such . .acquisitions as Im sure there are others like me who do enjoy seeing good looking and interesting hardware.

No. The cutoff is pci-e. Pcie gen2 and newer is still perfectly viable as a basic home pc.

The problem with X79 is that it is exactly the same from an architectural, os, and capabilities standpoint as brand new hardware.

I would say the line between modern and retro is "do I need to emulate something if I want to do what x hardware did?"

And the answer to that is no.

Modern hardware/os can do everything X79 could without additional emulation. X79 can do everything modern hardware can do but slower.

It's all amd64, pcie, usb, and directx.

That's not to say there aren't bugs, or driver limitations. Iirc firewire was dropped a while back but in general, there is no barrier to firing up X79 era software on brand new gear.

When you're talking dos/9x isa, agp, glide, etc, there's a clear line of incompatibility.

But that's my opinion.

luckybob wrote on 2025-02-03, 05:25:

No. The cutoff is pci-e. Pcie gen2 and newer is still perfectly viable as a basic home pc.

Viable is debatable but I guess it depends on what you are doing at home, if its email, youtube and word then sure its viable but anything modern and PCie 2.0 is showing its age hard, and DDR3 is slower than molasses. You will also have issues with modern UEFI GPUs which will likely not work or only work partially in a PCIe 2 board.

Also there is no cut off point just different shades of the same colour here, but some shades are more welcome than others.

But Im glad to have some discussion here .. this place is far too stagnant of late...much like the retro hardware scene actually.

I do want to make it clear im not looking to change anything, finding out what people consider as retro right now is pretty interesting and if peoples views are changing as time moves on.

myne wrote on 2025-02-03, 05:30:

The problem with X79 is that it is exactly the same from an architectural, os, and capabilities standpoint as brand new hardware […]
Show full quote

The problem with X79 is that it is exactly the same from an architectural, os, and capabilities standpoint as brand new hardware.

I would say the line between modern and retro is "do I need to emulate something if I want to do what x hardware did?"

And the answer to that is no.

Modern hardware/os can do everything X79 could without additional emulation. X79 can do everything modern hardware can do but slower.

It's all amd64, pcie, usb, and directx.

That's not to say there aren't bugs, or driver limitations. Iirc firewire was dropped a while back but in general, there is no barrier to firing up X79 era software on brand new gear.

When you're talking dos/9x isa, agp, glide, etc, there's a clear line of incompatibility.

But that's my opinion.

So for you its not the age of the hardware but what it can and cannot do and how much work you need to do to get it to do things.

Pretty much.
Capabilities/compatibilities are the crux of what people care about.

X79 can do absolutely nothing from a function perspective that current gen can't and vice versa. Plenty of people run win 11 and modern gpus and games on X79 (xeons included).

myne wrote on 2025-02-03, 06:03:

Pretty much.
Capabilities/compatibilities are the crux of what people care about.

X79 can do absolutely nothing from a function perspective that current gen can't and vice versa. Plenty of people run win 11 and modern gpus and games on X79 (xeons included).

Thats changing fast, modern UEFI GPUs have a lot of issues on non UEFI hardware especially the PCIe 5.0 models and quite a few PCIe 4.0 GPUs wont post in 2.0 and non UEFI boards. Been seeing report the RTX 5000 series has a lot of PCIe issues with older hardware and even the Intel Battlemage cards have large performance penalties on older PCIe versions.

So Yes you can do mostly everything but that's changing fast and the performance penalties are piling up.

Im actually happy that PCIe has changed enough that it may be beneficial for them to move to a better method that support higher speeds and throughput. Similar to how the new CAMM 2 DDR that DELL uses that's now being moved to consumer PCs, its a unique design that should be better in the long run.

Right, but what can X79 do that current can't?

myne wrote on 2025-02-03, 07:24:

Right, but what can X79 do that current can't?

Support for Windows XP without having to jump through too many hoops is what I would have said a year or two ago... but it seems that people have come up with weird solutions to getting Ryzen systems working in XP these days despite having absolutely zero official support. No idea if there are any major downsides or limitations to those setups though (ACPI, USB 3, AHCI, etc.).

Ok cool.
What runs on xp that absolutely can't run on modern hardware?
I realise there are some quirky things, and layers like dxwnd exist for a reason, so perhaps my definition may be met, but generally speaking, most things just work.

Tbh I expect shims like dxwnd to fill the gaps going forward, rather than a movement for retro X79 hardware.

Maybe you're right though and I'm missing things that can't be worked around with less effort.

myne wrote on 2025-02-03, 07:52:

Ok cool. What runs on xp that absolutely can't run on modern hardware? I realise there are some quirky things, and layers like d […]
Show full quote

Ok cool.
What runs on xp that absolutely can't run on modern hardware?
I realise there are some quirky things, and layers like dxwnd exist for a reason, so perhaps my definition may be met, but generally speaking, most things just work.

Tbh I expect shims like dxwnd to fill the gaps going forward, rather than a movement for retro X79 hardware.

Maybe you're right though and I'm missing things that can't be worked around with less effort.

Very few games absolutely require Windows XP, thankfully, and most of the games that don't work great on newer versions of Windows (or newer hardware) have gotten fixes or updates over the years that allow them to do so.

In my opinion, the only major reason to use XP for games would be if someone wants to play lots of games that use hardware accelerated DirectSound3D (the only way to get EAX effects or more than flat 2 channel sound in most games made before 2006), since that was done away with from Vista on. To get all of those effects on a modern system, the game needs to be compatible with a modern work-around, but compatibility isn't necessarily guaranteed and I don't know how well those actually mimic the way it would sound on an original Audigy or X-Fi, since those processed effects with dedicated hardware. Maybe the modern solutions have been perfected at this point, I honestly don't know.

Some games also support OpenAL out of the box, so those can still provide EAX and surround sound but the computer would still have to have an appropriate soundcard.

As a big soundcard guy myself, that was a huge deal for me back in the day and it's the reason I dual booted XP + Vista for quite a while... but looking at the lists of games now, I have near zero interest in playing most of the games that actually utilized hardware accelerated sound during the XP era. Still, if other people are into that, the most reliable option is to build an XP system with an Audigy or X-Fi (which come in PCI-E flavors too).

But overall, yeah, mostly out of the box XP support is just a bullet point feature of platforms made before Intel 5th gen. It won't be required for most things, and few of us will ever actually NEEd a dedicated high-end XP build to run something. But it is something that there are several huge threads about here already, and it is a thing that people do.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-02-03, 07:38:

myne wrote on 2025-02-03, 07:24:

Right, but what can X79 do that current can't?

Support for Windows XP without having to jump through too many hoops is what I would have said a year or two ago... but it seems that people have come up with weird solutions to getting Ryzen systems working in XP these days despite having absolutely zero official support. No idea if there are any major downsides or limitations to those setups though (ACPI, USB 3, AHCI, etc.).

There are some seriously cluey people out there that are willing to jump in and figure out weird solutions, but like you suggest there are limits like there being zero XP drivers for modern hardware.

myne wrote on 2025-02-03, 07:24:

Right, but what can X79 do that current can't?

Likely not much but Im not going to run DX9/10 games on DX12 hardware if I can help it, A lot of DX12 hardware doesn't fully support DX9 any more and emulates most of it in a not great fashion.

Just look at the new Intel GPUs for an example of this, their DX 9 support is pretty hit and miss and no you cant throw the GPU on a X79 ..have tried this myself with X58 and the Intel card just isnt designed for old hardware.

So you can say that X79 can run DX9/10 stuff with no penalty on native hardware . .modern hardware cannot and has to emulate DX9 with large overheads involved. (We are talking truly modern hardware here, PCIe 4/5 DX12 GPUs none of this pre rebar stuff)

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-02-03, 08:17:

Likely not much but Im not going to run DX9/10 games on DX12 hardware if I can help it, A lot of DX12 hardware doesn't fully sup […]
Show full quote

myne wrote on 2025-02-03, 07:24:

Right, but what can X79 do that current can't?

Likely not much but Im not going to run DX9/10 games on DX12 hardware if I can help it, A lot of DX12 hardware doesn't fully support DX9 any more and emulates most of it in a not great fashion.

Just look at the new Intel GPUs for an example of this, their DX 9 support is pretty hit and miss and no you cant throw the GPU on a X79 ..have tried this myself with X58 and the Intel card just isnt designed for old hardware.

So you can say that X79 can run DX9/10 stuff with no penalty on native hardware . .modern hardware cannot and has to emulate DX9 with large overheads involved. (We are talking truly modern hardware here, PCIe 4/5 DX12 GPUs none of this pre rebar stuff)

Can you provide any links to articles or discussions about this being an issue with anything other than Intel's Arc A series? Those cards are known to not have full hardware DX9 support (they gambled wrong apparently), and it shows. I have not heard of any such issues with any other cards from Nvidia or AMD, even the newest Arc B series cards are much better with older games than the A series.

There are still tons of DX9 games out there that people play, and I feel like we'd be hearing about it all the time if there were any systemic issues with DX9 games on anything from RTX 30 series and newer.

Even if there are inefficiencies, as long as the output is accurate, and performing at a good level, most people won't care enough to seek specific hardware.

I question whether it is performing worse than era appropriate hardware. At some point, raw horsepower overtakes old hardware regardless.

So let's pretend a 4090 is getting 20% lower fps than the last, best dx9 card. 1080?
How much longer is it going to be worse? 3 years?

Besides glitches with DX9 or earlier you will probably have issues with new cards not supporting old motherboards without UEFI BIOS (and of course no analog outputs for classic CRT monitors).