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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In Part 1 of this series, we saw newer AMD Catalyst drivers slowing down the Radeon HD4000, HD5000 and HD6000 graphics cards under Windows XP. This time, we will look at how the Radeon HD7970 with the newer GCN architecture is affected by this problem.
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If you’re looking to build a Windows XP gaming system using a relatively overkill DX10 or DX11 AMD graphics card, you might want to avoid the latest official drivers. Read on to find out why.
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The years 2009 and 2010 were a unique time for computer processors, where you could physically get more cpu than you paid for. The quad core cpu was the de facto high end standard, but it has not become a mainstream standard yet. Continue reading
When it comes to choosing a graphics card for a budget gaming rig built on the LGA 775 platform, there is no avoiding of everyone’s favorite concept of bottlenecking. Continue reading
The Radeon HD 5870 was the first DX11 card, released back in 2009, and as shocking as it may seem, it’s been over 10 years since that date. I still remember buying Continue reading
The LGA775 platform has been around since 2004, and unusually for Intel, the socket remained unchanged even as new processor models and architectures were developed, Continue reading
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
I spent a good part of a day wrestling with an annoying problem found while testing the Matrox G200 AGP graphics card on my Pentium 4 test machine. For reasons unknown, the Matrox G200 was exhibiting crashing to BSOD or hard lockup/freezing/hanging in 3D games under Windows 98 SE, Continue reading
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