Ancient Hardware

[xSOSxHawkens]

Not really 3DMark related, unless you all want me to run 3DMark '99 on it, but I recently pulled out my mothballed Pentium machine and thought this community might appreciate some bechmark numbers more than others...

So far the only benchmark I have run (and one of the few that support this old of a machine) is the WinRAR compression bechmark.

The test rig is as follows:

Motherboard: Abit AB-PX5 Baby AT (not ATX)
CPU: Intel Penium 233Mhz w/MMX, external cache enabled.
RAM: 128MB SDRAM, PC100, 2x64MB (upgraded)
RAM: 256MB PC66 because of chipset limitations of the 430tx via a single 512mb stick PC133
GPU: S3 VirGe 325, 2MB 4MB* (corrected)
HDD: Maxtor DiamondMax 60GB in compatibiliy lock to 30GB, plus an IBM @ 3.4gb.
Sound: SounBlaster AWE64 - ISA* (corrected)
NIC: 3Com Etherlink XL 10mb, PCI (corrected and then upgraded)
NIC: Intel Pro 100Mb Fast Ethernet, PCI
OS: Windows 98SE with unofficial patch AND Windows XP SP3 in dual boot on the 30GB drive in a 20/10 patition format.* (updated)


In Winrar the system scored 64KB/s compression with ~20MB crunched in 5 minutes time

By comparison my 4790k at stock pulls over 9,000KB/s and crunched ~2.7GB in the same 5 minute window.

I plan to try comparison runs on any software that can run on both 9x and windows 10 if any of you have a specific benchmark you want to see compared on such old hardware. Might try Fritz' Chess Benchmark next.

I am also playing with the idea of tossing in a PCI Radeon HD2400 and installing Windows XP for some newer tests as well.

Let me know if this interests any of you, and feel free to post any numbers if you guys also have old mothballed machines that still run!

:D

[Saint Laurent Don]

Jesus....my gpu has 11 gb of memory. It will never cease to amaze me how far we've come.

[xSOSxHawkens]

I have yet to do it, but I downloaded 3dmark 99 MAX and 3dmark 2000 and plan to run them on the system, as the GPU is actually the 4MB version not 2MB version.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Very interesting.

I will be working on building a more modern'ish white box system soon using an old Socket 939 DFI-Lan Pary board with an nvidia chipset and an s939 athlon64 x2 4800+. Will have 4GB ddr-400 and an 8600GT in it.

I plan to benchmark it with this eddition of 3dmark under windows 10 when I ahve the system running.

[xSOSxHawkens]

On a side note, with no SSE to speak of, even when booted to a full SP3 install of 2indows XP, the pemtium only has 18 processes running at idle.

Goes to show how many back ground services can be trimed and still allow the system to run, and it *can* all be trimmed by the system automatically,.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Originally posted by ZM | Dr. Dro:

I wouldn't run SP3 XP on a MMX, personally... it's not like the machine has a lot of use for it, the original, unpatched RTM XP from 2001 can boot on 24 MB of RAM and it's actually kind of usable with 32 MB onwards, at most i'd grab that and install SP1a and be done with it. The updates introduced with SP2 are fairly big and weigh on the OS when you're so resource limited, an alternative is also to just install WinFLP which is specifically trimmed for this kind of machine.

939's are cool, but i'm a 775 guy... have this one on a crappy G41 currently, but once I recover from my upgrades a little I'm going to see if I can find a P45 or X48 for this puppy:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=932861652

Very nice.

As a personal recomendation. I used a Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3P board to get a Q6700 (non x edition) from 2.6Ghz to ~3.6ghz (slightly above) with a FSB over 1880mhz. I couldnt push the core much past where it was. Could hit 3.7 enough for boot and validation but not 24/7 use. But I was able to push the FSB well past the point used had I stayed at normal max multiplier, and in fact pushed my FSB further than the core resulting in the chip being limited to a lower than max FSB. This was all using patriot DDR3-1333 ram as the 45T edition of the board supports DDR3. All on the trusty old 212+.

Overall it benchmarket out at *roughly* the same performance as a stock i7-920 when they hit the market. I felt good about that given its age already at the time.

Had it paired with an HD4890. Was a great machine. Highly recoment the board for S775 overclocking.

[xSOSxHawkens]

indeed. Definently push that FSB hard after you reach core limit. I got a rough 10% overall boost once I pushed my FSB beyond the core.

In raw CPU power my system still lagged, but in gaming prowess my CPU kept me in striking distance of any similarly configure i7 flagship system of the time...

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm06/14062450/3dm06/15710308

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dmv/2257395/3dmv/3777581

[xSOSxHawkens]

On a side note, nforce chipset wont work under windows 10 huh? Hadnt heard that... Bit of a bummer as I was planning to get windows 10 on my lanparty machine. Guess 7 will have to do :/

[xSOSxHawkens]

Originally posted by ZM | Dr. Dro:

Wow, that result is 7 years old

Nice

TY :)

I miss that machine, it was a good old beast for its time.

[xSOSxHawkens]

This is the same q6700 ealier in its life when I had it running with an AGP card...

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm06/6830188

^^Wrong score, thats the p4 and 3850 before the upgrade.


EDIT
right score

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm06/10126750

Had a shiny new AGP HD3850 in a p4 3.0E @3.9 setup when the mobo died so I got a frankenstien of a board called an AsRock 4CoreDual-Sata2...

Socket 775, with PCI, AGP and PCI-e, along with both DDR and DDR2 support on a via chipset.

Horrid overclocking, but interestingly flexible board that kept my agp 3850 in service longer than it would have otherwise...

[MancSoulja]

Originally posted by EtherBreather:

Jesus....my gpu has 11 gb of memory. It will never cease to amaze me how far we've come.

I'm old enough to remember the 16K Spectrum which boasted 16KB of RAM.

[Bad_Conduct]

I ran a ton of benchmarks on my old PC Gaming rig, with a ton of videocards

ASUS P2B-D
2x Pentium III @ 500 mhz
1 GB SD RAM (4x256)
2x 60 GB Maxtor HDD's, in Windows RAID for gaming, using a PCI IDE card
1x 40 GB Seagate HDD for OS
Soundblaster Pro PCI card

Best GPU I could run in there was a Geforce FX5940
There's three different AGP slots, the latest AGP cards don't fit in the old 1.0 and 2.0 slots, they have different voltages. This basically prevents these old systems from running any videocards that support DX9.
I had a GT6200 PCI working, but the card eventually died. Potentially from voltage, I'm not sure. Old ebay card.
I did get Skyrim to start and load, but the image just scrambled after. Still not certain it was just the card though.

I find the biggest flaws with these old systems are really two things:
- Old videocards that do not run DX9 are worthless in any modern OS, they crawl. You can't even run a new Linux GUI on a DX8 card, they need a newer version of Open GL
- Old processors mostly get hammered by simple applications because they lack modern instruction sets, not so much the CPU performance itself.

Windows 2000 was a lot more stable than XP, but you couldnt run Steam. ME was garbage, 98SE with some of the modern patches (like CPU Idle) was a lot better.
Performance wise, the FX 5950 absolutely bottlenecks on the CPU. I think the 440MX (I believe rebranded Geforce 2) was probably the best bang for the buck. I didn't test many AMD cards, they generally weren't backwards compatible with the old AGP slots.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

Originally posted by EtherBreather:

Jesus....my gpu has 11 gb of memory. It will never cease to amaze me how far we've come.

I'm old enough to remember the 16K Spectrum which boasted 16KB of RAM. :tgrin:

Very nice. Oldest system I have personally used would be a Commodore 64 original,

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

I ran a ton of benchmarks on my old PC Gaming rig, with a ton of videocards

ASUS P2B-D
2x Pentium III @ 500 mhz
1 GB SD RAM (4x256)
2x 60 GB Maxtor HDD's, in Windows RAID for gaming, using a PCI IDE card
1x 40 GB Seagate HDD for OS
Soundblaster Pro PCI card

Nice system, though loads faster than the one I have up and running. Yours reminds me of a newer version of a workstation I once had, an Integraph TD-30 Desktop Worstation. Even finding technical details or pics of this model are hard now days, and I am exceptionally sad to report my fully functional model went to the dump in my highschool days when my parents kicked me out and ransacked my room.

Ran dual P54c Pentiums 133mhz, no MMX

Each CPU had its own bank of 256MB RAM in 30 pin moduals for 512MB total.

Had ~3gb SCSI HDD and CDROM, Had a unique 2 in one standard floppy and IDE-Based PCMCIA slot in a single height 3.5bay allowing you to put a pcmcia card into the front of the machine while also useing a floppy from the same area.

Was an amazing little oddity...

[DarkMatter]

Compile a new kernel on linux and it ain't too bad, but need to make list of instruction sets and chipsets of the hardware before commencing build. Get disc controlers info, CPU instructions, chipset supported stuff, video card, audio card, memory controller, any chippies on mobo. Set recommened for stuff you don't know and drop support for any crap and unsupported instruction sets not used by your hardware.

Make it a IP Masquarading/Firewall boxy or something useful and keep it up to date. Red Hat had good support for old hardware once but heaps of good distro these days with support for old underwelming systems. Don't forget to run hdparm again after kernel compile.

[Bad_Conduct]

Originally posted by DarkMatter:

Compile a new kernel on linux and it ain't too bad, but need to make list of instruction sets and chipsets of the hardware before commencing build. Get disc controlers info, CPU instructions, chipset supported stuff, video card, audio card, memory controller, any chippies on mobo. Set recommened for stuff you don't know and drop support for any crap and unsupported instruction sets not used by your hardware.

Make it a IP Masquarading/Firewall boxy or something useful and keep it up to date. Red Hat had good support for old hardware once but heaps of good distro these days with support for old underwelming systems. Don't forget to run hdparm again after kernel compile.

It's a fun hobbie computer, but I don't think I'd run mine full time as anything. In all honesty, I could run a full time VM on my main PC and get 10x the performance with 10% of the power consumption, and very little impact on gaming or anything.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Originally posted by ZM | Dr. Dro:

10x performance is an understatement even if you're on a mainstream PC without VT-d, lol

10x the peformance might be nice.

But it doesnt give me the same feels as loading up K-Melon 1.5 on Windows 98 SE and using my first generation petium machine to post a "Hello World" status update to facebook.

The last time I had that machine fully confiigured for internet usage on 98SE was back in ~2002 before I mothballed it into storage.

To be able to post on facebook from the machine that I once connected using a 14.4k modem in elementary school was litterally surreal.



On a side note, I got Decent: Freespace - The Great War installed on it and running again too. Plan to play some Co-Op missions with my girlfriend tonight. She will use one of our modern PC's but I plan to play on my pentium using my Thrustmaster brand Official "Top Gun" flight stick. Paramount Pictures licensed ;)