AMD Catalyst and Windows XP: Unleashing performance with Intel Sandy Bridge

Radeon 6970

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we saw newer AMD Catalyst drivers mysteriously lowering performance in games on Windows XP. Those test were done on a no frills Core2 Duo system, resembling what many people ran when those games were new. But now we’ll set up a monster overkill XP gaming system with LGA 2011, a 3.6GHz six-core Sandy Bridge-E Xeon E5-1660 processor, quad channel DDR3-1600 memory, PCI-e 3.0, an SSD, and see if that changes things.

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Fix Windows 10 Slow Rename/Delete

When I installed Windows 10 on one of my LGA775 machines, the first thing that immediately annoyed me was that the PC seemed slow and unresponsive. And this was with a 3GHz quad core processor, 8GB RAM, and running off an SSD. Gaming and application performance was ok, and benchmarks returned expected results, but simple tasks like renaming a new folder or deleting items were unbearingly slow. And in fact, when looking at the Task Manager, it showed that Explorer actually became unresponsive for a few seconds when renaming or deleting files.  Continue reading

AOpen MX46-533V: SIS 651 review

aopen mx46-533v

Recently picked up an inexpensive mATX motherboard for testing AGP graphics cards – the AOpen MX46-533V. The specs are pretty good for its intended purpose – socket 478 for cheap Pentium 4 cpu’s, up to 533MHz FSB support, DDR333 memory support, Universal AGP, and drivers ranging from Windows 98 SE and NT4 to Windows XP. There’s even an integrated graphics unit  Continue reading