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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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
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
In 2008, AMD released the 790GX chipset that included the most powerful integrated GPU at the time – the Ati 3300. Which had nothing to do with my plans. I already had a gaming rig with a socket 939 AMD Opteron 165 cpu, the hugely popular Geforce 8800gt video card, and life was good. But as more demanding games appeared Continue reading
Using the tried and true collective Internet wisdom that has never been wrong, I set off to resurrect two graphics cards using an oven. What can possibly go wrong?