The 2025 Operating System Thread

[lti]

I see that multi-quote doesn't work anymore.

Most likely the low clock rate (and no turboboost) of the i3-2330M is slowing things down, my i3-4160 isn't too bad IMHO just because of its base clockspeed - it beats my Q9550. I'd still be surprised it's slower than perhaps my AthlonXP2200+ -- my AthlonXP is routinely beaten by my Pentium-M 1.6 and all my Core2 machines, so I'd say something is wrong...

It's much faster in Linux (but still not as fast as the synthetic benchmarks like Passmark say it should be), but I never tried compiling anything from Linux. I can only guess that the Windows drivers were totally broken in ways that made it look like the CPU was stuck at its minimum clock speed of 800MHz, but it was definitely running at the full 2.2GHz (with the associated heat, fan noise, and the bizarre throttling behavior - it suddenly drops to 800MHz for a second before going back to 2.2GHz, and for some reason, the i3 throttles at 85°C while the higher-end 2nd-gen parts throttle at 100°C). I did notice that having hardware video decoding (H.264 only, so I would need to install h264ify for YouTube) enabled or disabled made no difference to CPU usage, but I could see a difference in GPU usage. Even with hardware decoding, it still couldn't handle resolutions that Linux can do with software decoding (even AV1).

Even desktops with 2nd-gen CPUs seemed to perform poorly back then. Even in web browsing, an i7-2600 felt less responsive than a C2D T7500. It seems like a lot of people are still using them without any problems (even modern gaming), so I don't know what I did wrong. I do know that Matlab can have huge performance variations depending on CPU architecture (completely different from the benchmarks you usually see online), but that's an outlier (just one that I use a lot).

Yup, that sounds about right.
My 2.8 GHz P4 HT seems to load YT pages about 1.5-2x faster than the Atom. I can also watch in 360p without stutter... or 480p on websites with the video embedded and no other heavy scripts to nibble on CPU cycles. The Atom, I can't even get it to show 360p video without stutter. Even 240p tend to be choppy. LOL!
Then again, I feel the sad part about this is how bloated websites have become these days.

My parents were trying to run a 2.53GHz non-HT P4 back in 2018, and it couldn't even handle YouTube in 144p. HT (or maybe differences between Northwood and Prescott) must make a huge difference, or you're running something other than standard Firefox (latest release, not ESR). I tried to get rid of lots of background scripts with a custom hosts file, but I eventually convinced them to get something better (except they bought a "new" Dell with a 7th-gen CPU, so I'm going to trade them my i5-8500 in October - at least Dell circles the problem, just like Ford).

Strangely, my Athlon XP running Tiny Core could handle YouTube in 144p with some codecs, but not others. I think I was even using xvesa because it was running old S3 graphics.

[eccerr0r]

I'll definitely say my i7-2700 is faster than my C2Q by a long shot, not even close. My i7-930 however was not that much faster though not including HT benefit.

[momaka]

hmm... currently only have a 900MHz Athlon (100MHz FSB) on an abit board with ... bad caps ... on it. I have a Barton (166MHz FSB) underclocked on another 462 board (133MHz FSB) that has a bad onboard GPU or NB. Sigh.

Really dont get why some people want these machines anymore, but hey if they want it and willing to pay for it...

Because these systems were some of the last to officially support Windows 98 / Win9x, and without being too problematic with it either. Sure there are newer boards that can be made to work with Win98 too... but SATA and PCI-E don't always play nice once you have those.

And if you wonder why anyone would want to have a Win9x rig... well, that one's a more complicated answer. But a big part of it is certainly for nostalgia reasons. A lot of us that are now in our late 40's, 30's, and even 20's, probably grew up with these systems. So for some, it's just trying to re-live your childhood.

Not only that, but modern gaming (and OS-es too for that matter) with their constant updating and everything becoming (or attempting to) software-as-a-service rather than a standalone product is pissing off even some of the younger generations. Old games and OS's don't have that bullshit built-in - you just install something and you don't have to worry that it can be taken away at any moment when the software developer decides to shut down the supporting servers. Moreover, a lot of modern games are simply fancy visuals / high-end graphics, but very few of them offer anything more than the old games from back in the day. And it's continuing in that direction too for whatever reason. People care more about ray-tracing, 4k/8k up-scaling, DLSS, framegen, and etc. than they do about what the game may offer in terms of gameplay. So it's become like many other products in life now - fancy-looking on the outside, but with really shit internals and functionality.

Thus, old systems are becoming more valuable simply because they were from simpler times in computing history when the above wasn't as prevalent. So if you have any stuff that needs recapping, do that and then sell them. If you're not in a hurry to sell them, set the prices in your listings a little on the higher end and just wait. If everything is tested and demonstrated to work, it will sell. I did the reverse (i.e. set prices much lower than other listings and/or start with a $0.99 bid and let Ebayers determine the final price) when I was trying to clear some stuff for my move. Managed to make a decent chunk with a few vintage items and sold everything very very quickly too. In fact, I sold one old mechanical KB for $75 just 20 minutes after I put the listing up!
... anyways, then use the money to buy a more modern system. 2nd through 4th gen i-series OEM systems are at the bottom end of their price right now (at least the non-top CPU models), pretty much a smudge above scrap. OEM Core 2 -based systems would be even cheaper and/or possibly free giveaways locally. And even 6th and 7th gen Intel i-series CPUs should be getting cheaper soon, once MS drops support for Win10 and of people are forced off of their 6th/7th gen Intel or non -Ryzen systems.

I see that multi-quote doesn't work anymore.

Yup.
Talk about software regression, it's not just MS as we can see.
Multi-quoting (or lack thereof) is one of the main reasons I stopped posting on BCN as frequently (aside from personal matters too in the last 2 years.) It's just a pain in the ass to multi-quote, now that you can't open replies in a new tab like I could before.
My work-around is to open the same page in multiple tabs - as many as I would need to quote posts - and then type a reply in each. Finally, copy-pasta between all of these to make one final reply. If anyone knows an easier way, please share how.
I feel like this website's functionality after the update is akin to going from Lego Technic to Lego Duplo.

My parents were trying to run a 2.53GHz non-HT P4 back in 2018, and it couldn't even handle YouTube in 144p. HT (or maybe differences between Northwood and Prescott) must make a huge difference, or you're running something other than standard Firefox (latest release, not ESR).

Northwood has slightly shorter architecture and is therefore more efficient for older games. But when it comes to video encoding/decoding, Prescott (especially with HT) get considerably faster than Northwood. The extra L2 cache also helps it quite a bit too, along with higher RAM speeds. I tried OC-ing a 2.4 GHz Celeron Northwood to 3.x GHz, and it was still miserably slow.

Strangely, my Athlon XP running Tiny Core could handle YouTube in 144p with some codecs, but not others. I think I was even using xvesa because it was running old S3 graphics.

LOL.
I gave up on AthlonXP for online stuff a long time ago. It has a nice and efficient short architecture, much like that of the P3 and completely the opposite to that of the P4. But it's just soo outdated for online stuff, especially online video. On the other hand, Athlon 64 X2 are still holding up quite well. Can do 720p (30 FPS only) on my 6000+ downclocked (in order to under-volt it) to 4800+/5200+ speeds (2.4 Ghz). And the YT pages don't load too slow either. Certainly usable.

I'll definitely say my i7-2700 is faster than my C2Q by a long shot, not even close. My i7-930 however was not that much faster though not including HT benefit.

For sure.
2nd gen i7 is still a decent CPU.
1st gen i7 is... akin to a C2Q Extreme editions - just higher clock speed and with HT.
My Westmere Xeons (two E5649) feel the same way too. Due to their lower clocks (2.5 GHz nom., 2.66 turbo), they are actually slower than a C2D E8400 in single core performance. But since modern browsers can now make use of multiple cores, the make up for it with that. Still, I can feel their age at times. Somewhat modern games (GTA 5, for example), don't run all too well on it. The CPU cores get nowhere near 100% use (in fact, most core are idling), yet I am 100% CPU bound simply by the core's architecture / features, and latency from the memory controller.

[eccerr0r]

The i7-930 was not much of a performer, about the same as a C2Q, but my Westmere X5670 is notably faster than the i7-930 (Bloomfield). The X5670 seems to catch up with my i7-2700 though unsure if the chipset made a difference (it was not running triple channel however, both were running dual channel).

I was using a single thread gcc benchmark because I run gcc so much (penguin flock)... for a particular benchmark my i7-2700 took 133 seconds to finish, the X5670 took 132s. The i7-930 it replaced took 165s and my Core2 Quad Q9550 took 168s.

The laggards are my A6-3420M at 292s, my P4-650 clocking it in at 378s, and my poor Atom C2550 came in last place at 419 seconds. The venerable "first ever quad core" Core2 Quad Q6600 I have took 237 seconds.

[lti]

And if you wonder why anyone would want to have a Win9x rig... well, that one's a more complicated answer. But a big part of it is certainly for nostalgia reasons. A lot of us that are now in our late 40's, 30's, and even 20's, probably grew up with these systems. So for some, it's just trying to re-live your childhood.

I don't think many people in their 20s who grew up using Windows 98 would want to go back. They would have most likely been horribly outdated school computers (complete with CRT monitors that were totally worn out) than anything interesting. One of my younger coworkers had that experience.

However, the middle school I went to still had an Apple IIgs lab in 2007 (and probably later - that was just the year I finished middle school and started high school), so I doubt that many people can beat that.

I tried OC-ing a 2.4 GHz Celeron Northwood to 3.x GHz, and it was still miserably slow.

Celerons had so much less cache than P4s that you couldn't ever get good performance out of them. A lot of people tried.

LOL.
I gave up on AthlonXP for online stuff a long time ago. It has a nice and efficient short architecture, much like that of the P3 and completely the opposite to that of the P4. But it's just soo outdated for online stuff, especially online video.

I forgot to mention that I did that in 2017. It was still a lot more than I would have expected from it, especially since it was a mobile chip with a lower clock than any of the desktop parts (1.2GHz on a 100MHz bus). It undervolted so well that I want to see how it overclocks some day.

[stj]

intel's latest 13/14 gen cpu's self destruct,
they should just give the market to AMD who pretty much own the gamer end anyway, and put their research into BattleMage.
they have more chance fighting Nvidia than AMD so thats the product to work on.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

I don't remember running into this browser when looking for alternatives for XP (or maybe I did, but probably saw Chrome-something-something and abandoned ship --> shows how much I DISLIKE Google stuff.)

well i have been testing out supermium in a livecd session of win7pese this past week and i have to say its rendering speed is pretty fast. as good as or even better than 360chrome for xp. im leaving 360chrome behind now because it keeps giving me page loading errors every new session of win7pese i boot up. have to keep reloading pages till it fixes itself and i dont have the time nor patience for that. i think chrome based browsers have the fastest rendering speed for the modern web of html5 sites. opera worked great for html4 but its time to put it to rest. RIP!

the only issue is that its pretty bloated. its 700mb installed for the 64 bit version and 600mb installed for the 32 bit version. ah well... at least it loads pages fast so i'll cut it some slack for being bloated if it loads fast... no more being outbidded at the last second on junkbay because of the damn browser lagging!! lol!

Intel really upped the game with the 2nd gen i-series. 4th gen is even better, though not by the same margin. Still, an i7-4770 is plenty of computing power even for today's stuff. Probably would get more for it than you would for a 2/3/4th gen i-series motherboard with CPU. Some of these are at the bottom of the market now in terms of prices - pretty much barely priced above scrap... well, at least the OEM boards.

yea im eyeing a devil's canyon haswell refresh system sometime in the future and offloading my c2q cpus. im looking at the i7 4790k, the top haswell refresh cpu and also the pentium g3258 dual core with unlocked multiplier. the latter is dirt cheap. can be had for 5-8 bucks shipped.

the 4790k tho is a different game. its at least 50 bucks shipped. thats the same price as a core 2 extreme qx9650. a q9650 is even cheaper. can be had for 20 bucks shipped. a xeon x5470 modded to lga775 is 45 bucks shipped. so i'll probably get the g3258 first to tide me over while i wait for the 4790k to drop a bit more in price. still have to get a good z97 board i really like tho. im very picky when it comes to boards. even pickier than getting a gf or wife. she has to have a good board layout which is easy for me to access and service whenever a fault occurs as well as to add/remove components.

i already have the samsung non-wonder ddr3 ram for my phenom ii x4 system and the ram and cpu dont seem to like each other. cant get it to boot with the 1600 mhz multiplier. only 1333. from what i've seen on overclocking forums, samsung ddr3 ram seems to prefer high clocks rather than low clocks with tight timings so i'll probably use the samsung ram on an intel system instead.

AthlonXP is... pretty outdated at this point. It's a very good CPU for a retro gaming PC, though. If you have a working system with that, you should sell it.

Really dont get why some people want these machines anymore, but hey if they want it and willing to pay for it...

I gave up on AthlonXP for online stuff a long time ago. But it's just soo outdated for online stuff, especially online video.

yea same. i never warmed up to the athlon xp series. lack of sse2 support being the primary reason it suffers in modern web applications. many browser devs have said that sse2 greatly increases web surfing and web page rendering speed. because of this, athlon xp users are stuck with sse-only browsers meant for p3 and k6 systems that lack sse2 support.

On the other hand, Athlon 64 X2 are still holding up quite well.

the successor to the athlon xp, the athlon 64 however, gets plenty of luv from me mainly for two critical innovations in computing history. firstly, the world's fastest single core cpu can be found in this series, the fx-57. secondly, the world's first dual-core cpu can also be found in the athlon 64 x2 series, so that makes socket 939 systems a great collector's item!

however, i also know that agp boards for athlon 64 are all few and far between. most are crap and junk. if u want agp for athlon 64, u're stuck with either nfock 3 or via k8t800 pro chipsets. the former doesnt last long and isnt stable. the latter is slow and has compatibility problems. so if u want win9x/me on an amd rig, u're stuck with athlon xp which have much better and reliable agp boards.

Multi-quoting (or lack thereof) is one of the main reasons I stopped posting on BCN as frequently (aside from personal matters too in the last 2 years.) It's just a pain in the ass to multi-quote, now that you can't open replies in a new tab like I could before.

not only that. the private messaging system is also messed up. i cant make heads or tails of which message i last sent and which was the last message i read. wanted to message you (momaka) to thank u for the stuff u sent me and to catch up on our ebay acquisitions but decided against it due to the messed up new private messaging system not letting me tell what we last talked about and what hasnt been said before. so lets just say newer really is not better!

I don't think many people in their 20s who grew up using Windows 98 would want to go back. They would have most likely been horribly outdated school computers (complete with CRT monitors that were totally worn out) than anything interesting. One of my younger coworkers had that experience.

i dont think classroom junk computers is what we're talking about here! i think we're more talking about those 5,000 dollar dream pcs or even that 10,000 dollar dream pc we drooled over as kids but didnt have the moolah for as broke-ass & dumbass kids. we didnt have the moolah for those back then but we can relive and (re)possess what we drooled over as kids albeit a couple of decades late to the punch!

[m1ch43lzm]

You guys seem to like browsing the web with retro hardware, i'd just keep the old stuff around for some retro gaming if there's no way to make those games run properly on a more recent PC (anything after Win7 era), of course unplugged from internet
As ChaosLegionnaire said, for nostalgia reasons
Anyways, of the PCs i have:

1. Main PC, Ryzen 7 5700g/32GB DDR4-3600/RX6600/1TB SSD + some HDDs, running Win10 LTSC
2. The electronics bench PC, A8-3870K/8GB DDR3/256GB SSD, i got this one for "free" (minus the SSD) as the one of the high side MOSFETs of the CPU VRM shorted, luckily CPU survived, i was told to keep it, Win10 LTSC
3. Another PC, Ryzen 3 2200g/16GB DDR4-2667 (OC'd to 3000)/240GB SSD, this one is made from the "leftovers" when I upgraded my main PC, it's running Win11 LTSC because i decided to try it on an "unsupported" CPU (of course it becomes "supported" if i swap the 5700g on it..., just Microsoft not "supporting" 1st gen Ryzen/2000g series on Win11, same with 6th/7th gen Intel; even if the CPU already has TPM 2.0 built in; they can't claim "driver support" is the reason for not supporting 1st gen Ryzen, as the chipset drivers even for A320/B350/X370 support Win11)

I also have some parts around, Celeron D 2.8GHz socket 478 with ASUS P4S800D-X motherboard, 1GB DDR (2x512MB), 80GB IDE HDD, Radeon 7000 GPU
Pentium D 3GHz 775/Intel 945 motherboard/3GB DDR2/80GB HDD, later replaced with an SSD, it ran Win7 32bits, i retired it, it has bad caps, and a blown Ethernet port, a lightning strike fried the router that it was connected to, after that it was used with a PCI RTL8139 NIC until last year, replaced with #3; even with the bad caps it still worked somehow, just the stock Intel CPU cooler being annoyingly loud when doing anything (and the constant ramping up/down of CPU fan RPMs), and being slow at web browsing (trying to watch YT on it was painful, not even at 360p)

the successor to the athlon xp, the athlon 64 however, gets plenty of luv from me mainly for two critical innovations in computing history. firstly, the world's fastest single core cpu can be found in this series, the fx-57. secondly, the world's first dual-core cpu can also be found in the athlon 64 x2 series, so that makes socket 939 systems a great collector's item!

however, i also know that agp boards for athlon 64 are all few and far between. most are crap and junk. if u want agp for athlon 64, u're stuck with either nfock 3 or via k8t800 pro chipsets. the former doesnt last long and isnt stable. the latter is slow and has compatibility problems. so if u want win9x/me on an amd rig, u're stuck with athlon xp which have much better and reliable agp boards.

You forgot, the first consumer 64 bit CPU (on socket 754), the AMD64 instruction set that Intel "rebranded" as EM64T after making a cross licensing deal with AMD
The nForce 3 chipsets are incompatible with anything Windows after WinXP x64, especially when coupled with an ATI GPU (NVIDIA didn't write proper drivers for Vista, specifically for the AGP slot), i had an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard, and ATI (Sapphire) Radeon 9600XT 256MB, i no longer have that PC, i also had at the time an Antec 400W PSU which failed due to bad caps, remember those?, even the caps brand was "Fuhjyyu" or something like that pronounced like "F-you", that Antec PSU "killed" the Rubycon MBZ caps on the input of the VRM on that motherboard, but it still worked fine with another PSU...


momaka, ChaosLegionnaire for multi quoting i do it manually with the bbcode tags if i'm on a PC

[eccerr0r]

Well as said all my computers are in Tuxedos and since I end up building from source for them, they tend to be quite up to date and built with the instruction set they can handle (if they do not use hard coded instructions like sse2). So I haven't had a x86_64_v3 issue yet either, even if I figured out how to get my Prescott to stop hanging. My northwood probably will stay unused as it doesn't do 64-bit, alas it also has issues: keeps crashing with overheat indication and not sure why.

[lti]

however, i also know that agp boards for athlon 64 are all few and far between. most are crap and junk. if u want agp for athlon 64, u're stuck with either nfock 3 or via k8t800 pro chipsets. the former doesnt last long and isnt stable. the latter is slow and has compatibility problems. so if u want win9x/me on an amd rig, u're stuck with athlon xp which have much better and reliable agp boards.

There were some SiS chipsets with AGP, but nobody wants those. They actually got good reviews (I even saw some early 2000s forum posts where SiS chipsets were recommended over VIA for systems with heavy PCI bus utilization), but SiS was seen as the bottom of the barrel to most people.

i dont think classroom junk computers is what we're talking about here! i think we're more talking about those 5,000 dollar dream pcs or even that 10,000 dollar dream pc we drooled over as kids but didnt have the moolah for as broke-ass & dumbass kids. we didnt have the moolah for those back then but we can relive and (re)possess what we drooled over as kids albeit a couple of decades late to the punch!

It's possible, but I thought people in their 20s would have been too young to understand what they were looking at. Maybe something made around 2000 or 2001 would be memorable.

[eccerr0r]

IMHO for Intel, SiS > Via. All the Intel Via boards I've seen were awful.

For AMD on the other hand, Via > most others... I'm not sure how to make a judgement on nforce, the one I have has unknown history and is now bad...

[dmill89]

IMHO for Intel, SiS > Via. All the Intel Via boards I've seen were awful.

For AMD on the other hand, Via > most others... I'm not sure how to make a judgement on nforce, the one I have has unknown history and is now bad...

My general view on nforce is "they're nice when the work but aren't the most reliable" (especially the later ones during the "bumpgate" mess), the only nforce I currently have is a 610i (from the "bumpgate" era) and I've never had any problems with it, but it has always been well cooled (the MSI board it is on has a pretty beefy chipset heatsink for the era, and it was in a case with good airflow), and used with a dedicated GPU (so less load/heat on the chipset than if the integrated geForce 7050 was used).

[eccerr0r]

Also not entirely impressed with a 785G chipset for AMD. (AM3?). Crashing on me now when doing 3d graphics...

[momaka]

The X5670 seems to catch up with my i7-2700 though unsure if the chipset made a difference (it was not running triple channel however, both were running dual channel).

I don't think the chipset makes that much of a difference (it at all) on newer systems like that. But the RAM type and speed definitely does... and also, whether you have regular desktop type or Registered / Reg. + ECC. Any type of registered RAM tends to add quite A BIT of latency... so for gaming -type of workloads, these systems tend to do rather poorly.
I'm not sure where compiling stands with that, though I suspect it's more like video encoding/decoding - CPU is just number-crunching through a bunch of data, so possibly the high RAM latency is not that big of a deal.
[/quote]

The venerable "first ever quad core" Core2 Quad Q6600 I have took 237 seconds.

Those Q6600's easily OC to 3 Ghz at stock voltage, though... so roughly a 25% free increase in performance. This should bring the same compile job to around 190 seconds - basically just a little behind the Q9550.
Still, this goes to show how much those 45 nm Core 2 CPUs have improved in IPC compared to 1st gen Core 2.

I don't think many people in their 20s who grew up using Windows 98 would want to go back. They would have most likely been horribly outdated school computers (complete with CRT monitors that were totally worn out) than anything interesting. One of my younger coworkers had that experience.

Well, by people in their 20's, I meant late 20's (i.e. kids born in the late 90's.)
From what I gather from having read many random stuff online (e.g. info on CPUs... and surrounding conversations, such as comments on CPU-World), I've noticed that quite a few people used their Athlon XP and P4 rigs well up until the death of XP and/or Win 7 SP1 introduction.
So if you were born in the late 90's or really really early 2000's, you still might remember someone who still used an old desktop like that and/or possibly played games on it too. Thus, quite possible to include people in their late 20's to this list. But for kids in their early 20's - yeah, no chance, you're probably right on that one.

Celerons had so much less cache than P4s that you couldn't ever get good performance out of them. A lot of people tried.

Oh I know and that's exactly why I wanted to try it - to truly experience the lack of CPU power despite high CPU frequency.
Between a 3 GHz Celeron and a 2 GHz P4, I would sure take the latter without a 2nd though now.

well i have been testing out supermium in a livecd session of win7pese this past week and i have to say its rendering speed is pretty fast. as good as or even better than 360chrome for xp. im leaving 360chrome behind now because it keeps giving me page loading errors every new session of win7pese i boot up. have to keep reloading pages till it fixes itself and i dont have the time nor patience for that. i think chrome based browsers have the fastest rendering speed for the modern web of html5 sites. opera worked great for html4 but its time to put it to rest. RIP!

By Opera, do you mean the oldschool Presto engine one or the newer Chromium-based one?
The former is quite outdated now (even the latest/last versions - 12.18) in the world of browsers. Back before the BCN upgrade, this was the entire reason to still put it on my PCs, as I loved how fast and reliably it worked with BCN. But that's no more. And now with the 2nd update from a few days ago, I noticed that even more browsers are having issues with BCN - namely Pale Moon and anything based on it (i.e. New Moon, Mypal based on Pale Moon, and etc.) I forgot to check Supermium on XP, but I imagine it would be OK.
Anyways, yeah Opera is pretty dead anyways... and probably more browsers will go that way in the not-so-far future. It seems that everything in the tech industry is heading towards a duo/trio-poly at most.

the only issue is that its pretty bloated. its 700mb installed for the 64 bit version and 600mb installed for the 32 bit version. ah well... at least it loads pages fast so i'll cut it some slack for being bloated if it loads fast..

All modern browsers are bloated these days.
That said, I am pleasantly surprised by how well Supermium does memory management on systems with more limited RAM resources.
The other day, I was running the latest Firefox ESR on a 4th gen Pentium G system with 4 GB of RAM. After going past 3.5 GB of used RAM (almost all of it gobbed up by Firefox), the performance in FF really started to suffer, even after I closed nearly all of the tabs. Not only that, but the system started getting really slow too. In short, Firefox has become quite the memory hogging browser. Not sure how Chrome or other Chromium-based browsers are in that regard... but Supermium seems to be doing pretty well so far and does not suffer like FF does when the RAM usage gets high. Pretty much past 2-3 GB, I have to restart FF to keep it in check. Supermium, not so much.
But again, my complaint with Supermium is that it's video rendering on YT is pretty trash compared to FF's - stutter fest all the way.

the 4790k tho is a different game. its at least 50 bucks shipped. thats the same price as a core 2 extreme qx9650. a q9650 is even cheaper. can be had for 20 bucks shipped. a xeon x5470 modded to lga775 is 45 bucks shipped. so i'll probably get the g3258 first to tide me over while i wait for the 4790k to drop a bit more in price.

Probably not going to happen. The top-end CPUs for any socket always tend to keep their price high. If anything, as more and more hit the gold scrapper's bench and fewer are left, the prices will likely rise. So if you really want one, probably better to get it now.
(FYI, for the same prices as the 4790k, you can now get a complete OEM system with a 6th gen i5 which will yield about the same or better CPU performance as that 4790k. Just add in a low-power modern-ish GPU and you're set both to use as a semi-modern rig and somewhat retro one with Win7.)

I personally prefer to stick to the mid-range stuff - less demand and more supply, usually.

yea same. i never warmed up to the athlon xp series.

Oh, I liked the Athlon XP quite a bit. But just back then. For gaming, it was the best bang your buck could buy, and that's why it was so popular in the gaming communities. But alas, the P4, despite its inefficient architecture, came out as the longer-lasting product. Even when the Athlon 64 (754 and 939) could kick its ass, the P4 still did well in video encoding and decoding and online... so it held up better than anyone would think.

the successor to the athlon xp, the athlon 64 however, gets plenty of luv from me mainly for two critical innovations in computing history. firstly, the world's fastest single core cpu can be found in this series, the fx-57. secondly, the world's first dual-core cpu can also be found in the athlon 64 x2 series, so that makes socket 939 systems a great collector's item!

It was also the world's first 64-bit CPU (s754).
I don't know about the world's fastest single-core CPU, though. Was Core 2 Solo (remember those) simply C2D with a 2nd core disabled? If not, then the C2S might be the winner here, if it's truly a single-core CPU (by design.)

You guys seem to like browsing the web with retro hardware, i'd just keep the old stuff around for some retro gaming if there's no way to make those games run properly on a more recent PC (anything after Win7 era), of course unplugged from internet

Indeed some of us are.
But I plain *REFUSE* to have anything newer than Windows 7 as my main OS.
With Win 10/11, your computer is not really your computer anymore, and I'm NOT OK with that.
I also like to use things 'till their true end of life - it's both cheaper (well, up to a point anyways) and generates a lot less e-Waste in the long run. The latter is something I have always considered with everything I do in life. I try not to generate as much trash and I don't like having for someone to pickup after me where possible.

momaka, ChaosLegionnaire for multi quoting i do it manually with the bbcode tags if i'm on a PC

Well, NVM anymore, it seems to be working now after the last forum update.
I just click on "quote" on each post I want to quote something from, and then the "Post Reply ##" and it all magically appears.
Also, links in email are now clickable (they weren't before.)
So I guess the new update is not all too bad.
.

[m1ch43lzm]

I don't think the chipset makes that much of a difference (it at all) on newer systems like that. But the RAM type and speed definitely does... and also, whether you have regular desktop type or Registered / Reg. + ECC. Any type of registered RAM tends to add quite A BIT of latency... so for gaming -type of workloads, these systems tend to do rather poorly.
I'm not sure where compiling stands with that, though I suspect it's more like video encoding/decoding - CPU is just number-crunching through a bunch of data, so possibly the high RAM latency is not that big of a deal.

Since the Athlon 64 and Intel Nehalem arch (1st gen Core i-series) the memory controller is built-in to the CPU
Even Ryzen nowadays is a SOC by design, the "chipset" on desktop motherboards is AFAIK "just" an I/O expander for extra PCIe/SATA/USB...

All modern browsers are bloated these days.

All modern software are bloated these days.
Fixed it..., it's like the younger devs don't know how to optimize their software nowadays

Indeed some of us are.
But I plain *REFUSE* to have anything newer than Windows 7 as my main OS.
With Win 10/11, your computer is not really your computer anymore, and I'm NOT OK with that.
I also like to use things 'till their true end of life - it's both cheaper (well, up to a point anyways) and generates a lot less e-Waste in the long run. The latter is something I have always considered with everything I do in life. I try not to generate as much trash and I don't like having for someone to pickup after me where possible.

If only I could run Win7 on Ryzen... There's missing drivers, starting from the USB 3.0/3.1 among other things
Tried that on the 2200g, i couldn't install Win7 as the Windows setup didn't recognize the USB stick it booted from, once I found some USB 3.0 drivers on the MSI website for the motherboard and got past initial setup, some USB ports didn't work (don't remember if those were from the B450 chipset, or straight from the CPU)
Also the nonexistent Win7 GPU drivers for the integrated Vega 8 GPU....

It was the last "good" Windows after XP, in the "bad windows, good windows" cycle, starting with Win98 "good" , WinMe "bad", WinXP "good", Vista "bad", Win7 "good", Win8 "bad"... Somehow Win2k is missing from that cycle
Win10 is supposed to be the "good" one and Win11 the "bad" one, now with the forced MS account that I refuse to login on the OS as my user account, I prefer a local account
At least on WIn8/10 it's easy to skip by not connecting to the internet on setup, on Win11 you have to open a command prompt with Shift+F10 and enter some commands there
Also with the forced BitLocker/"Device Encryption", if you don't have the recovery key that's supposed to be stored on the MS account you're out of luck... As many people have no idea what a MS account is, as their PC was setup by someone else, be it a computer shop or a friend/family member: only the people who entered their MS account by themselves on their new laptop (as almost nobody except businesses buy OEM prebuilts from HP/Dell/Lenovo, etc, most desktop PCs here are built from parts by the computer shops/the owners themselves) know their login details

So i have to use workarounds when I (re)install Win11 for customers, for the local account and "PreventDeviceEncryption" registry key, as most home users don't need BitLocker IMO, that complicates things for PC repair shops/technicians if you have to replace the motherboard or just need to backup the data before wiping the drive if the OS doesn't boot...

How am I supposed to install the drivers/software/updates before giving back the PC to the owner if I'm not supposed to know their MS account login details? Also if I set up with a "test" MS account, the BitLocker key would be registered to my "test" account, which I don't want for obvious reasons

[ChaosLegionnaire]

By Opera, do you mean the oldschool Presto engine one or the newer Chromium-based one?

yea the presto one obviously. the new one with chromium is just chromium to not want to call it opera anymore...

But again, my complaint with Supermium is that it's video rendering on YT is pretty trash compared to FF's - stutter fest all the way.

didnt realize this until i started watching some news channels live on youtube. even in an embedded webpage, yt full hd video (1080p) uses like 60-80% cpu even on my 4ghz overclocked c2d e8600.

the gpu usage also kept toggling the gpu clocks between full 3d clocks and 2d idle clocks every 30 secs. the gpu temp graph now looks like a minor sine wave. dont think the gpu will last with all those heating and cooling cycles from all that constant clock adjustment thrashing.

in contrast, 360chrome only uses 20-30% cpu when watching the same video at full hd and the gpu usage remains constant without constant clock adjustment thrashing. looks like supermium still has plenty of room for improvement! and gone are the ie and netscape days where u could just make do with a single browser that does everything on the web...

I don't know about the world's fastest single-core CPU, though. Was Core 2 Solo (remember those) simply C2D with a 2nd core disabled? If not, then the C2S might be the winner here, if it's truly a single-core CPU (by design.).

i think for sanity's sake, im only talking about desktop cpus. core solo was only available as a laptop cpu and wasnt available on desktops.

[eccerr0r]

If not laptop CPUs, what about server CPUs then, lol...

Well, I don't have any machines other than my itanium that can take rdimms, though multiple can use ecc, so other than the itanium they all should have desktop-like latencies for a particular DDRx speed... I never really tested memory latency on the itanium. I don't even have the whole machine loaded up with DIMMs either, only have 4x1GiB DDR1 RDIMMs in it IIRC and I think it can take 4 more RDIMMs. Not sure what I'd do with a 16G 2xItanium2 box however, my 64G Xeon runs circles around it...