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.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
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
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