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Bought these (retro) hardware today

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Reply 7280 of 52357, by HighTreason

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havli wrote:
joe6pack wrote:

Picked up a Core 2 Duo E8500 (can these be considered retro yet?) ...

Sure, they are way to slow for current SW / games...

Rubbish, I have yet to find anything that won't run on a low-end Core 2 and a GTX460, settings can still usually be cranked north of medium and more than 30fps achieved.

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Reply 7281 of 52357, by havli

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Sorry, but I can't agree with that.
More than 30 fps and medium details are far from acceptable for me. That is more like 60+ (preferably 100+) full details with antialiasing, HQAF and stuff.
Not even Core i5 and Radeon R9 290 are fast enough to do that.

Try playing games like Crysis 3, Watch Dogs, War Thunder or even old Far Cry 2 and you will see how bad they run on core2.

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Reply 7282 of 52357, by HighTreason

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Crysis 3 and Cities Skylines were what I was referencing.

I can max those out on a Core i3, so I have no idea where your framerate is going. Make sure you don't have a bunch of crap stealing your cycles and drive time.

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Reply 7283 of 52357, by Lukeno94

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An i3 is considerably stronger than a C2D - to the point where my Sandybridge i3 2120 is better than most of C2Qs, unless you absolutely need 4 real cores. Not really a valid comparison. Watch_Dogs doesn't run well on anything; it will do more than 30 FPS on my i3 and GTX 670 rig, but it hardly runs smoothly, and it certainly doesn't stay at 60.

Reply 7284 of 52357, by Putas

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I still have Q9300@3.26 GHz in my main rig (16 gigs of ram btw), it is not enough to max out War Thunder. Framerate was really unstable in demanding battles, but with some details cut down I am at 60 most of the time. Still not enough motivation to upgrade.

Reply 7285 of 52357, by HighTreason

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Lukeno94 wrote:

An i3 is considerably stronger than a C2D - to the point where my Sandybridge i3 2120 is better than most of C2Qs, unless you absolutely need 4 real cores. Not really a valid comparison. Watch_Dogs doesn't run well on anything; it will do more than 30 FPS on my i3 and GTX 670 rig, but it hardly runs smoothly, and it certainly doesn't stay at 60.

Explain where I compared the i3 to the Core 2? And on that note, I think my calculator is stronger than a Core 2 to be honest, they weren't exactly a stable processor.

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Reply 7286 of 52357, by alexanrs

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I guess it depends on your expectations. I have a 120Hz monitor, so I usually aim for 120fps. If you are happy with 30+ fps you can probably settle for a S775 system... unless you are talking about awful ports that struggle even on Haswell.
Core2 are usually very overclockable, though. That can extend their life a little. I remember reading an article where, once OCed, a Wolfdale C2D could still outperform an Ivy Bridge Pentium Dual Core, and an OCed Wolfdale Core2Quad was still competitive against an IB i3. The i5, of course, still had a large margin against all the other processors.

BTW my Core2Duo has been absolutely rock solid, even at the hands of my PC-wrecking brother... once I learned to tame that god awful VIA chipset (and put a vídeo card that did not have issues with it). Also I never used it for vídeo editing and other production tasks (though I DID use it to run a few simulations in MATLAB without issues).

Reply 7287 of 52357, by Lukeno94

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HighTreason wrote:
Lukeno94 wrote:

An i3 is considerably stronger than a C2D - to the point where my Sandybridge i3 2120 is better than most of C2Qs, unless you absolutely need 4 real cores. Not really a valid comparison. Watch_Dogs doesn't run well on anything; it will do more than 30 FPS on my i3 and GTX 670 rig, but it hardly runs smoothly, and it certainly doesn't stay at 60.

Explain where I compared the i3 to the Core 2? And on that note, I think my calculator is stronger than a Core 2 to be honest, they weren't exactly a stable processor.

havli is the one talking about C2Ds, so I may have gotten a little mixed up. And the Core 2 was a very good processor; perhaps you just got a dud.

Reply 7288 of 52357, by sf78

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While the conversation is derailing fast, I'd also like to point out that I had a C2D E8400 with GTX 480 and Crysis 3 was almost unplayable at medium details. Once I switched to Phenom II X4 it was like a whole new game, same with Borderlands - The pre-sequel.

Reply 7289 of 52357, by joe6pack

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Whoops, lit a fire with that one. I know it's not exactly retro. I built this machine for 2 reasons: 1. To play IL-2 Sturmovik (which is an older game) and 2. To have a fast machine to use daily during the summer, as my FX-8350/R9 280X machine throws out a ridiculous amount of heat.

Reply 7290 of 52357, by dogchainx

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Retro means different things to different people. For example, Apple II and 8088 is just ancient-retro. I used to game with Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple IIc during my pre-teen years. 80286 is very-early retro and 386DX is the start of my definition of "Golden Age of Retro", continuing on to 486's and early PentiumMMX. Once you hit Windows 98-era hardware, IMO, calling it "retro" starts to lose its appeal. The hardware just seems very dated and slow. Its still retro, but is out of my "Golden Age of Retro" gaming definition. I stop after Pentium III's for calling anything retro. My last "official" retro system is a Dell Dimension Pentium III 933Mhz, and even then its hard to call that thing retro.

So there's a broad range of hardware eras in there, and to the people in their early 20's in here, I'm sure a Pentium III is ANCIENT. But to me, it was just yesterday that I had one writing up college papers and gaming Quake II. I'm sure there are people here who think that of their TI-99's!

And just to keep with the thread subject with hardware I bought.....I just got a package of an Iomega DITTO external tape backup, 800MB. I grew up with tape drives as backups, and kinda miss the fun of watching the tape backup for 6 hours, then try to restore it only to have it "fail" a minute before the last megabyte is written back! Oh those were the days!

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Reply 7291 of 52357, by havli

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HighTreason wrote:

Crysis 3 and Cities Skylines were what I was referencing.

I can max those out on a Core i3, so I have no idea where your framerate is going. Make sure you don't have a bunch of crap stealing your cycles and drive time.

C3 really needs fast (quadcore or more) CPU... so there is no way you can have decent framerate with an i3 let alone c2d/c2q. Core2 is usually a bit slower than Phenom II, so you can easily estimate how slow it would go. http://pclab.pl/art52489-9.html http://www.techspot.com/review/642-crysis-3-p … ance/page6.html

Other games will perform similar, the Core2 FPU is just too slow compared the Nehalem and derived architectures like Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge or Haswell. Core2 used to be good but that no longer applies for last 4 years or so. Most of the current software is optimized for Nehalem and AMD FX... architecture of these is very different from c2. After all - the Core2 si just a tweaked Core->Pentium M->Pentium III->Pentium Pro...

As for the stability problem - I never had problem running all kind of Core2 CPUs - Pentium DC/C2D/C2Q. All of them on intel (865G, 975X, P35, X38) and nvidia (nForce 730i) chipsets though. Late VIA chipsets are all rubbish, there is no point in using them.

Sorry for the OT. 😊

dogchainx:
True - what is/isn't retro is a matter of opinion. For me it is everything that is too slow for comfortable daily work and older than lets say 5 years (to avoid current lowend HW).

HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware

Reply 7292 of 52357, by RacoonRider

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I don't know what you guys are talking about, my C2Q seems a rocket to me 😁 I've got an early i5 in a laptop and a rather new i5 at work and they all seem just about the same speed against C2Q.

Reply 7293 of 52357, by Lukeno94

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RacoonRider wrote:

I don't know what you guys are talking about, my C2Q seems a rocket to me 😁 I've got an early i5 in a laptop and a rather new i5 at work and they all seem just about the same speed against C2Q.

For regular usage, yes, you're right. However, you WILL notice the difference in a modern game, particularly if you aren't GPU limited.

Reply 7294 of 52357, by smeezekitty

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havli wrote:
joe6pack wrote:

Picked up a Core 2 Duo E8500 (can these be considered retro yet?) ...

Sure, they are way to slow for current SW / games and the whole s775 platform is kinda obsolete (no USB 3.0, 8GB RAM limit, etc)... at least for me. 😀 Nehalem+ is in some cases twice as fast (single thread) and even faster in multithread capable applications. Haswell Pentium G3258 is very cheap and performance boost is huge (if 2 cores are enough for you).

Nehalem isn't twice as fast. There may be optimized programs it could get close to that but on average it is no where near it.
Socket 775 doesn't have an 8G limit (some chipsets do). Even if it did, 8G is plenty for almost everything. You can also get a PCI-e USB 3 card

Try playing games like Crysis 3, Watch Dogs, War Thunder or even old Far Cry 2 and you will see how bad they run on core2.

I don't have those games to try or I would.

That is more like 60+ (preferably 100+) full details with antialiasing, HQAF and stuff.
Not even Core i5 and Radeon R9 290 are fast enough to do that.

Seems a bit ... extreme. I don't mind dips down into 30 fps range and I certainly don't see any need to get over 60 FPS.
My monitor is only 60 FPS and I don't see the need for any more.

Reply 7295 of 52357, by easy_john

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RacoonRider wrote:

i5 in a laptop and a rather new i5 at work and they all seem just about the same speed against C2Q.

Mobile version of cpu is always about 1.5-2 times slower, than desktop ones.
You can find performance difference in this table by yourself http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

Pentium2 450/256mb/4gb/ati rage 128+voodoo2/SB awe32 8mb+db50xg/GUS PnP 8mb/TB Tropez 2mb
486 DX2-66/32mb/8gb/tseng4000 2mb/SB 16+WB/GUS 1mb/LAPC-I
286 12mhz/4mb/512mb/Vga 1mb/SB 2.0+Covox
PegasosII G4 / Amiga 4000 / Amiga1200 / Amiga 600

Reply 7296 of 52357, by kithylin

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Just weighing in my "Secondary computer" of mine is a 775 machine, although it's using a 12MB cache, HarperTown core quad core chip OC'd @ 3.75 ghz on custom water loop (cpu only, for now) and running a pair of GTX 260's in SLI.

I haven't tried it much in games yet (Just got the SLI part working a few days ago.. still restoring backups on to it today) but the very late late quad core cores for 775 (HarperTown core Server CPU's are at least 1 generation newer / later than the Wolfdale/Penryn Core2Quad desktop chips) are very competitive and this one here with only 4 threads is scoring faster than stock speed'ed I7-940 x58/LGA-1366 i7 chip, I haven't compared it to the new i5's yet.

It's just a "spare gaming computer" for me now, nothing really amazing, just something to use in case my big i7 craps it's self tits-up some day.

Also I can't play crysis 3 even on my pair of super overclocked +45% gtx 470's on my big overclocked 4.4 ghz i7 gaming computer, it runs like 20-25 FPS has visible "hitching" and "jumps" from frame to frame and isn't even 30 FPS, and is just horrible, even on low settings. Sorry.. but your claim of running it at-or-above 30 FPS on core2/775 anything and a single gtx 460 is just not possible.

Watchdogs is just impossible on this system even on minimum possible settings, both of these are some of the few DirectX-11 games I can't play even on this machine, a core2 anything has no chance if you're running a desktop variant, maybe possible with a higher-end server chip.

easy_john wrote:
RacoonRider wrote:

i5 in a laptop and a rather new i5 at work and they all seem just about the same speed against C2Q.

Mobile version of cpu is always about 1.5-2 times slower, than desktop ones.
You can find performance difference in this table by yourself http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

I think what you meant to link is the "Main List" over here: http://cpubenchmark.net/mid_range_cpus.html

Something of note here, the "Mobile i5", the brand new spring 2015 Broadwell core chips, "Intel Core i5-5200U @ 2.20GHz", even though it's only 2 physical cores with hyper-threading, is a whole 26 cpu's faster (in this list) than the desktop "Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 @ 2.66GHz" CPU. So the newer tech.. the new mobile chips are actually a decent bit -faster- than some desktop quad cores, a lot of amd 4 core desktop chips are below it in there too.

Last edited by kithylin on 2015-04-10, 17:18. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 7297 of 52357, by HighTreason

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Reminds me of when the first Crysis came out and everyone told me I wouldn't be able to max it out on my Pentium D... The joke was well and truly on them, not only did I run it, I then completed the second game in DirectX 11 mode on the same machine.

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Reply 7298 of 52357, by Skyscraper

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While the socket 771 Xeons truly are great they are not newer than Wolfdale/Penryn, they exist with the exact same core revisons, C0 and E0.

The great thing about them is the price and the extra multipliers in the case of X5460 and X5470, but mostly the price.

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Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 7299 of 52357, by Munx

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HighTreason wrote:

Reminds me of when the first Crysis came out and everyone told me I wouldn't be able to max it out on my Pentium D... The joke was well and truly on them, not only did I run it, I then completed the second game in DirectX 11 mode on the same machine.

CPU's aren't important these days when it comes to gaming. I had a 2GHz Pentium duo on my laptop and it ran Crysis just fine and the GPU was the bottleneck.

Only recently games started to take proper advantage of 4 cores instead of just 2.

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