overdrive333 wrote on 2025-10-26, 06:04:

Dipshidian wrote on 2025-10-24, 22:05:

1024MBs of Corsair XMS Pro memory (2x512MB, both week 40 2003)

BH-5 ? I only found a Kingston CH-5. Now need to figure out how to supply 3.3V to it.

Nah, my currently installed sticks are CMX512-3200C2PRO (v1.1, 2336 timings) which look to be Winbond CH-5 also. I only have a single stick of CMX512-3200LL (v1.1, 2226 timings, week 6 2003), which IS using BH-5 but 512MB isn’t going to give me much RAM to work with for games that like to cache data a lot. Looking to find at least one more stick, although I wouldn’t complain about a third one for the DIMM2 slot on the K8T Neo.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-10-26, 06:51:

Another infamously unoptimized game from around that time is Deus Ex: Invisible War. It too ran like crap on period correct PC hardware, despite having its gameworld chopped up into tiny areas, so they could fit inside the OG Xbox's limited memory pool.

Yeah, IW can get a bit wild at times, especially during shoot-outs when muzzle flashes create extra shadows. Some years ago, I recall testing the game out on a PIII 733 MHz (Coppermine FSB133) + Radeon 9700 system and it would get somewhat choppy whenever you fired an SMG a lot. Aside from that, however, it was still possible to play it fairly well if you just walked around questing and used non-lethal or covert tactics. Didn’t even have to do anything radical with the graphical settings, other than playing with 640x480 pixels that is.

I wouldn’t say that it was a match to the Xbox version’s performance but it wasn’t as far off as one might have expected. I was also using either Windows 2000 or XP, maybe Win98 could have further improved performance. Still, a 1 GHz Coppermine should eliminate the worst unpleasantries during firefights. I know for a fact that when going from 733 to 1000 MHz in Butcher Bay on PC (which runs similarly to DE:IW) the choppy performance when shooting a machine gun goes away.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-10-24, 05:56:

Just a suggestion, but since we're all the way on page 12 of the thread already, you might want to edit the first post in the thread so that it has links to any posts that have important bits of information, and to whichever posts have benchmark results. I think a lot of people may be curious about this, but most aren't going to make it 12 pages before there are benchmark results.

Noted! I am going to put on page 1 relevant links!

I will be following this thread! This was my dream platform in 2003 when all I had was a 933 MHZ Pentium 3.

What I find interesting about Socket 754 is that it (and X86-64) was around in 2001! Not for sale of course, but as a test platform within AMD. I've always wondered about this strange Socket 754 engineering sample from November 2001 with only 800 MHz and 256KB cache. Does it use the final 754 pinout, or some earlier version of it? Does it have all features of the final release Athlon 64, such as NX bit? If it does, it would be the only CPU from 2001 that can run Windows 10!

After 3 days last night I gave up on NFS:MW. I can not get repeatable results; racing the same track again and again will lead to different results. Something is really strange, is the third NFS game that I test and the results are all over the place.
Also geforce 7800gs performance is terrible in both Quake 4 and FEAR!
Something to notice: when testing RAM utilization in both games is very low 1.3-1.4gb ; when actually playing the games it skyrockets to over 2gb! I will take pictures but clearly you need more than just 2gb of RAM if you want to play 2005 games.

How are you benchmarking Need for Speed Most Wanted? Through replay? You would need a saved replay to be consistent across GPUs. You cannot race the same track again. Maybe you could do it via racing if the track is straight and there are no opponents.

When I played the first mission of FEAR on my Athlon 64 it didn't crash due to out of memory error. I turned off swap file. I played with MSI afterburner which consumes quite a lot of memory. 2005 is Windows XP era, people had maybe 1GB RAM at that time.

Racing the first track in campaign mode or one of the challenges. They should be the same every time however they are not!.
Even the race when razor messes up your car is not repeatable.