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Athlonium 64

22K views 357 replies 10 participants last post by  The red spirit 
#1 · (Edited)
I think, that my adventures with Athlonium 64 deserves a thread, so here it is.

For someone, who doesn't know, what Athlonium 64 is, go here: http://personalitycafe.com/video-games/92503-what-video-game-you-playing-currently-424.html

I have been running various benchmarks and tests for over 1 week now. I completely tired of all those below cinematic experiences. When I'm gonna finish benching I will post results here.

This is a short update, but currently rig looks like this:




(smaller card is 56k modem, because why not)

Visual representation of how much money I "wasted" on better parts:


I finally got graphics card and pics are after cleaning it (that dragon is so cool :kitteh:):



So my graphics card as I got it was pretty much in bad condition. Radeon looked like it had old thermal paste (brown) stuck and mixed with dust around the fan and plastic, it looked like clay. Also I thought, that it had some missing heatsink screws, but thank god it doesn't. Clearly someone before me has really has taken of the cooler and tried to apply thermal paste, but ho it got into fan I have no idea. On the other side, there were traces of another thermal paste, this time it's grey. So yeah, cleaning was really needed. Big chunks of dust were also stuck in copper heatsink. Besides bad first impression it worked. It's fast, real DAMN FAST! Everything graphics related ran smoothly, even web browsing became actually a good experience. It was like getting new eyes. Everything runs so fast. Sorry benching and testing will be done, when I'm gonna get all parts. Card looks stable, it passed 1 hour Furmark testing, but there is a problem with fan. It's noisy, but that's not the main thing what is wrong with it. I can hear, that it touches something when spinning, there is a grinding noise and I can't figure out from where it comes. I really want to take off heatsink and look better at that thing, but I currently don't have any thermal paste. I will get it maybe next week. Overall, I kinda expected problems with fan, it was used a lot, so it's no surprise, that it's worn out, maybe placing mobo vertically will solve that problem (graphics cards may have sleeve bearing fan). Drivers worked fine and overall my first time experience with ATI is good. I really expected so dodgy drivers or something bad software related, but I didn't found that. Also after some looking at system information, I can say, that card is reference design ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256MB. So I got what I ordered. And if someone wonders if it can run Crysis, I can answer that. Yes, it runs and is playable at low settings and low resolution. So cool!

I know, that soon I will get WD Raptors. Maybe tomorrow.

I want to invite those people to this thread, who were interested in Athlonium 64: @Crimson Ash @Skeletalz @Pifanjr @Judson Joist
 
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#4 · (Edited)
Finally, after loads of benchmarking (lots of benchmarks didn't work or crashed in progress or just were unsupported) I can share the results of those. Everything is done on original configuration of Athlonium 64, no upgrades. Here is my txt file of scores:
3dmark2005 269 3dmarks at default preset
3dmark2003 1434 3dmarks at default preset
3dmark2001SE 6392 3dmarks at default preset
Cinebench R11.5 0.45 pts CPU test
Cinebench R10 1768 CPU CB; 991 GPU CB (open GL)
Cinebench 9.5 326 CPU Rendering CB; C4D shading 282 CB; OpenGL SW-L 1336 CB; OpenGL HW-L 1552 CB
PCMark 2002 CPU score 6965; Memory score 6075; HDD score 825
PCMark 2004 score 3404; CPU score 3864; Memory score 2837; Graphics score 1032; HDD score 3587
PCMark 2005 CPU score 3156; Memory score 2659; Graphics score 787; HDD score 3642
Peacekeeper 1058
Geekbench 2.4.3 1599; integer 1613; floating point 2190; memory 966; stream 749
HyperPi 0.99b 1 million digits, normal priority 48.719 seconds; 32 million digits, normal priority 41m 12.453s
SiSoft Sandra 2013 SP2 Lite Overall score 0.46 kPT; Processor Arithmetic 7.12 GOPS; Processor Multi-Media 5.94 MPix/s; Cryptography 0.061 GB/s; .NET Arithmetic 1.70 GOPS; .NET Multi-Media 2.52 MPix/s; Memory Bandwith 1.841 GB/s; Cache and memory Latency 83.0 ns; File System Bandwith 25.322 MB/s; File System I/O 243.3 IOPS; Processor Multi-Media 5.93 MPix/s; Cryptography 0.062 GB/s; Memory Bandwith 1.816 GB/s; Peak Processing Performance 9.24 GFLOPS
Passmark Performance test 9.0 Passmark rating 55.7; CPU Mark 522.6 (Integer Math 707 MOps/s; Prime Numbers 0 Million Primes/s; Compression 794 KBytes/s; Physics 33 Frames/s; CPU Single Threaded 704 MOps/s; Floating Point Math 651 MOps/s; Multimedia Instructions 3 Million matrices/s; Encryption 105 MBytes/s; Sorting 537 Thousand Strings/s); 2D Graphics Mark 109.1 (Simple Vectors 12 Thousand vectors/s; Fonts and Text 28 Ops/s; Image Filters 46 Filters/s; Complex Vectors 168 Complex vectors/s; Windows Interface 116 Ops/s; Image Rendering 55 Images/s); 3D Graphics Mark 5.1 (DirectX 9 0fps); Memory Mark 279.3 (Database Operations 11 KOps/s; Memory Read Uncached 1713 MBytes/s; Available RAM 1059 Megabytes; Memory Threaded 1714 MBytes/s; Memory Read Cached 2364 MBytes/s; Memory Write 776 MBytes/s; Memory latency 78ns); Disk Mark 233.8 (Disk Sequential Read 33 MBytes/s; Disk Random Seek + RW 3 MBytes/s; Disk Sequential Write 27 MBytes/s)
CPU-M 11766
CPU-Z 1.81.1 x32 Single thread 0.3; multi thread 0.3; multi thread ratio 0.84
Furmark 400x300 preset (60000ms) score 6 1fps
Qwickmark 0.4 CPU flops 6 Gigaflops; Memory bandwith 706 MB/s; Disk Transfer 39 MB/s
Winrar 5.50 32bit 603 KB/s
wPrime (4 threads) 32M 88.062 sec; 1024M 2830.234 sec; (1 thread) 32M 87.172 sec; 1024M 2782.406 sec


Geekbench 2.4.3 scores:
Integer Performance
Integer 1613
Blowfish
single-core scalar 1380
60.6 MB/sec

Blowfish
multi-core scalar 1493
61.2 MB/sec

Text Compress
single-core scalar 1536
4.91 MB/sec

Text Compress
multi-core scalar 1478
4.85 MB/sec

Text Decompress
single-core scalar 1696
6.97 MB/sec

Text Decompress
multi-core scalar 1768
7.05 MB/sec

Image Compress
single-core scalar 1571
13.0 Mpixels/sec

Image Compress
multi-core scalar 1490
12.5 Mpixels/sec

Image Decompress
single-core scalar 1370
23.0 Mpixels/sec

Image Decompress
multi-core scalar 1387
22.6 Mpixels/sec

Lua
single-core scalar 2102
809 Knodes/sec

Lua
multi-core scalar 2089
804 Knodes/sec

Floating Point Performance
Floating Point 2190
Mandelbrot
single-core scalar 1606
1.07 Gflops

Mandelbrot
multi-core scalar 1639
1.07 Gflops

Dot Product
single-core scalar 738
357 Mflops

Dot Product
multi-core scalar 793
361 Mflops

Dot Product
single-core vector 3711
4.45 Gflops

Dot Product
multi-core vector 4258
4.43 Gflops

LU Decomposition
single-core scalar 359
320 Mflops

LU Decomposition
multi-core scalar 365
320 Mflops

Primality Test
single-core scalar 1848
276 Mflops

Primality Test
multi-core scalar 1504
279 Mflops

Sharpen Image
single-core scalar 2373
5.54 Mpixels/sec

Sharpen Image
multi-core scalar 2400
5.53 Mpixels/sec

Blur Image
single-core scalar 4539
3.59 Mpixels/sec

Blur Image
multi-core scalar 4532
3.56 Mpixels/sec

Memory Performance
Memory 966
Read Sequential
single-core scalar 1575
1.93 GB/sec

Write Sequential
single-core scalar 1147
804 MB/sec

Stdlib Allocate
single-core scalar 1210
4.52 Mallocs/sec

Stdlib Write
single-core scalar 397
842 MB/sec

Stdlib Copy
single-core scalar 503
532 MB/sec

Stream Performance
Stream 749
Stream Copy
single-core scalar 758
1.04 GB/sec

Stream Copy
single-core vector 811
1.05 GB/sec

Stream Scale
single-core scalar 779
1.01 GB/sec

Stream Scale
single-core vector 767
1.04 GB/sec

Stream Add
single-core scalar 714
1.08 GB/sec

Stream Add
single-core vector 808
1.12 GB/sec

Stream Triad
single-core scalar 764
1.06 GB/sec

Stream Triad
single-core vector 597
1.12 GB/sec


Dacris benchmarks scores:
CPU 5857 MIPS
Memory 1099 MB/s
Hard Drive 19.4 MB/s
2D Video 5.96 MP/s
3D Video 0.67 TTP/s

Category Grade Weakest Component Grade Description
Overall 5.86 CPU (5.61) Web browsing, watching videos, playing music, file sharing.
Software Development 6.02 Hard Drive (5.25) Using Visual Studio to develop software.
Gaming 2.24 Video Card (0.43) Playing the latest 3D games such as Crysis.
Web Hosting 5.50 Hard Drive (4.31) Running IIS or Apache, hosting web applications.
Database Hosting 5.49 CPU (4.58) Running SQL Server, hosting a large SQL database.
Multimedia 4.97 CPU (4.58) Producing professional, studio-quality music or video.
Graphic Design 5.22 CPU (4.58) Creating complex artwork with Photoshop.


Prime95 benchmark scores:
Compare your results to other computers at http://www.mersenne.org/report_benchmarks
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
CPU speed: 2309.62 MHz
CPU features: 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2
L1 cache size: 64 KB
L2 cache size: 512 KB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 64 bytes
L1 TLBS: 32
L2 TLBS: 512
Prime95 32-bit version 28.10, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 1024K FFT length: 43.225 ms., avg: 48.851 ms.
Best time for 1280K FFT length: 59.955 ms., avg: 60.155 ms.
Best time for 1536K FFT length: 69.973 ms., avg: 70.308 ms.
Best time for 1792K FFT length: 86.177 ms., avg: 86.512 ms.
Best time for 2048K FFT length: 93.103 ms., avg: 93.394 ms.
Best time for 2560K FFT length: 119.360 ms., avg: 120.072 ms.
Best time for 3072K FFT length: 143.376 ms., avg: 143.761 ms.
Best time for 3584K FFT length: 174.619 ms., avg: 175.018 ms.
Best time for 4096K FFT length: 192.499 ms., avg: 193.154 ms.
Best time for 5120K FFT length: 296.142 ms., avg: 296.753 ms.
Best time for 6144K FFT length: 400.527 ms., avg: 401.153 ms.
Best time for 7168K FFT length: 562.909 ms., avg: 564.227 ms.
Best time for 8192K FFT length: 566.808 ms., avg: 568.524 ms.


XtremeMark scores:
Threads executed: 1
Thread priority: Maximum
Quantity of operations: 100000000000
Average operations per second: 17482612,995

Time taken by Thread 1: 5714,422 seconds.

Total time spent: 5714,422 seconds;
Global time spent: 5719,969 seconds.


SYSTEM INFORMATION:

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (32 bit)
Available RAM: 1375,58 MB (1,34 GB)
Total RAM: 2047 MB (2,00 GB)


Everest Pro trial:


HD Tune Pro:






CrystalDiskMark:



Call Of Duty 2:

2017-10-22 11:19:44 - CoD2SP_s
Frames: 26119 - Time: 605859ms - Avg: 43.111 - Min: 8 - Max: 267

The winter war Demolition


Colin McRae Rally 2005:
2017-10-22 11:53:12 - cmr5
Frames: 7588 - Time: 278031ms - Avg: 27.292 - Min: 19 - Max: 34

1024x768 low preset advanced settings low


GTA III:
2017-10-22 11:41:18 - gta3
Frames: 7202 - Time: 252531ms - Avg: 28.519 - Min: 12 - Max: 42

1024x768x32 maxed out, frame limiter off


Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed:
2017-10-22 09:32:44 - Porsche
Frames: 6130 - Time: 285297ms - Avg: 21.486 - Min: 12 - Max: 33

1680x1050x16 maxed out Schwarzwald Porsche Boxster quick race


Quake 3:

2017-10-22 11:14:48 - quake3
Frames: 5438 - Time: 66250ms - Avg: 82.083 - Min: 26 - Max: 92

First mission


S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl:
2017-10-22 11:05:41 - XR_3DA
Frames: 2467 - Time: 105703ms - Avg: 23.339 - Min: 15 - Max: 104

800x600 lowest graphics + edited settings file for more fps (not so cheeki breeki experience :(, also lots of stuttering)


Unreal Tournament 99 GOTY:

2017-10-22 11:32:11 - UnrealTournament
Frames: 15576 - Time: 384125ms - Avg: 40.549 - Min: 26 - Max: 54

DM-Agony


Unreal Tournament 2004:

2017-10-22 10:04:41 - UT2004
Frames: 11183 - Time: 214406ms - Avg: 52.158 - Min: 32 - Max: 120

Five-way deathmatch (career)
 
#12 ·
@Skeletalz I will benchmark Doom 3 later and try Doom 1.

Today I got my two Raptors and Scythe Andy Samurai Master. CPU cooler arrived with bent metal fins and other stuff bent. One metal fin on one side doesn't hold. Heatpipes look slightly bend too. Bad impression, suck for me. It's a top of the line cooler of 2004 and too bad it didn't survive shipping well. A disappointment. At least it's clean and has some mounting parts with it.

I currently trying to test WD Raptors. I put one in my main rig and ran ATTO benchmark, then ran it with my "modern" Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 1 TB HDD. Results side-by-side (left Raptor, right Barbequda XD):


Not too bad, Raptor held up in the start, but later superior Seagate wins. I expected, that Raptor will be very noisy as it's 10k rpm drive, but it's actually quieter and less vibrating than my "modern" Seagate BBQuda (damn, I can't stop making puns lmao). Thumbs up for WD, they made a monster back then and it won't rape your ears. To put it into perspective, now it would be something like PCI-E SSD, in 2004 it was that high end. It was the fastest SATA drive then and only faster things were 15k rpm server HDDs with SAS connectors.
 
#13 ·
@Skeletalz I will benchmark Doom 3 later and try Doom 1.
Make sure you try the multiplayer in Zandronum or something, youll be hooked for life :angry:.

My favourite modes are Coop and Survival. Play some wads with vanilla weapons, the modern gameplay/weapon mods are total shit in my opinion. Complex Doom for example is borderline unplayable because of the ridiculous difficulty and speed of the enemies.

You cant go wrong with the older wads like Alien Vendetta or Sunder or Scythe or Plutonia. Some are more difficult than others, Hell Revealed for example basically requires you to have the levels memorized to not die. Youve also got total bullshit like Chillax with monster counts in the thousands at times, its pretty much Serious Sam with demons :D.
 
#14 ·
Hey everyone, sorry for being so slow with posting about Athlonium 64. Yesterday I had lots of stuff to do and most of that was with my PC. I got lots of parts. Finally! To keep timeline linear I will post pictures of HDDs and Scythe Andy Samurai Master.

HDDs are two WD Raptors. As you all know they work, so this is how they look:


Nothing too special tbh. Sender didn't put them so close like that, I just put them there to make it look like I just unboxed those two.

Later or rather on the same day I got Scythe Andy Samurai Master. I already said shit about what I got. Now you can see how that looks like:



I have something to say about Scythe as CPU cooler manufacturer. They make high quality products and sometimes the best of the year. Now I have Andy Samurai Master and Mugen 4 PCGH. There is the same problem with both. Their fins are very thin and they bend so easily. I had Cooler Master Hyper 103 in my main rig and compared to Scythe it was a rock. It's by far more robust. Stock AMD Cooler is even stronger. Also Scythes have problems with fitting into cases, not really with fitting, but with not leaving enough space for hands. Anyway, I really love Scythe products for their performance, quietness, good aesthetics and interesting naming. It's one of my favourite CPU cooler manufacturers of all time, same with Cooler Master.

Okay, so it doesn't look bad in pictures, that's because I was in rush yesterday and just took the pics to show that thing. It's not a big disaster as I said. When I ordered it, I didn't expect it to be so big irl. Also I said some shit about shipping, turns out, that some problems could have been seen in the seller's pictures, my bad. If someone wonders about fan, it works fine. Maybe owner has changed it, but it doesn't look like so.

That day I got parts, that were the best of 2004. Nothing could beat Raptors and Samurai at that time.
 
#15 ·
Now about yesterday. I got Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS and soon after that I went to local PC part shop to pick up my new parts. I got loads of stuff and my whole room looked like warehouse. I had to rush to assembly the PC to make my room livable and I had to prepare for history test too. So I started wit computer and left test destiny, because priorities.

So this is how pile of parts looked like:


Doesn't look like a lot, but it was a lot.

Now as I introduced my situation, let's get into specifics. PSU will be first:



Nice content of the box. This is the first time in my like I got my hands on the modular PSU. So happy! :kitteh:


Some splitters for molex, because nowadays no one thinks about retro builds and if I want to have enough molexes I should buy hella expensive PSU with enough wattage for quad SLI or Crossfire. So buying splitters is a better desicion.


These two for WD Raptors, nothing special.


In case I would need this for troubleshooting, also I think, I want to try putting SSD in that computer for experimentation (mobo is very picky with SATA support).


This one is for my main rig to fix my engineering "masterpiece":



On top of that my "masterpiece" hangs only on single screw XD.


This thing was useless for me so far. Fan controller killed it's purpose.


As the fan on CPU cooler works, I put one Kaze in front intake. I didn't use second one, because 1)I'm not fully convinced, that my CPU cooler's fan won't stop working soon 2)Ran out of fan speed controlled connectors and don't have molex adapter. At this point I may also be overloading that single line, because I put both splitters on same PSU cable



I didn't want to mess with USB Wi-Fi adapter due to it's instability and the fact, that I use it in my main rig too. For those reasons got this card.


"Completely blew away our expectations"? More like "Completely blew away my wallet" (summary of this rig)


Bracket for floppy drive to fit in 5.25" bay. Noways no one use floppies, so I had to use this thing for my floppy drive







Fractal Design Define R4. The case I once dreamed about getting for my main rig now gonna be used for Y2K4 high end PC. I have never seen something like it before. To be honest, never in my life I have ever see high end case. It's full of smart and simple solutions for putting your stuff into it. It has good style, it offers lots of space and to me it was completely different PC building experience. It was a bliss to put everything into it (except Scythe CPU cooler). So much stuff doesn't require tool to mount, lots of holes for cable management. I'm in love with it. It felt like from other world, it was THAT PERFECT. I definitely made a good case choice, too bad it's a shame, that my more modern rig has a worse case and I put my old geezer in such a masterpiece (some ricer logic here).
 
#16 · (Edited)
I had to split my posts into parts due to perC's picture limitations. So let's continue.

The building part. Due to time constraints I had to hurry a bit, so I didn't took lots of pictures and now to think about that, building PC is like a meditation, that puts one into zen state. Taking pics would be an interruption to that.

I found my CPU :kitteh::

This is how my AMD Athlon 64 3200+ looks like. It's a bit magical moment (seeing your CPU) due to it's rareness and putting your heatsink on it. You will put heatsink on and forget about it's existence for quite a while.


Shot of RAM. Honestly, I didn't examine how it physically looks like until changing CPU's heatsink.


Heavy scoundrel + mobo inside


That sad moment, when your graphics card is shorter, than your sound card. BTW I love color scheme of my sound card.

I'm putting FX5200 now, because I am going to clean X800 Pro and I didn't forget my promise to @Skeletalz to bench Doom 3 and try Doom 1



Everything is inside.


Another angle of everything's inside


Zoom-zoom! :laughing: (yep, a random Mazda pun)


Build finished.

Next post is going to be either about Dooms or about ATI X800 Pro disassembly.
 
#17 ·
Nest post is going to be either about Dooms or about ATI X800 Pro disassembly.
Instead of reconstructing old cars you do old PC rigs. :laughing:

Man, those pics bring back old memories when I used to help construct and repair at a PC shop.

Rummaging through the random part box for IDE to SATA converters, finding two inches of dust caked into the motherboards, testing a handleful of ram cards to see which ones work better.

Using only one screw for the HDD was common practice for some of my co-workers. I was paranoid though I always had at least two into the case for stability.
 
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#21 ·
@Skeletalz

Me: Soldiers, today you will enter the Doom. Line up and go through entrance
ATI: SIR, YES, SIR!
Me: Nvidia what are you doing in that corner?!
FX 5200: I'm looking for some extra cores or pipelines to run Doom
Me: Stop messing around and do what I say!
FX 5200: oh shit...

Doom 3 benchmarked:
Frames: 35479 - Time: 1083875ms - Avg: 32.983 - Min: 0 - Max: 62

800x600 medium preset + lowest advanced settings


Not too bad, it was really playable. Just that sometimes slowed down and dropped fps.

Everything you said about Doom 1 turned out being true. Well maybe except torrents. The small version is demo, the bigger ones are Ultimate Dooms or Doom install. I found install and hoped it's the original version. After install size looked alright, but I read license file and it was written, that it's pirated version. It works perfectly fine, just that it's not original. I didn't get it from torrents, I probably got it from emu paradise. Here it's folder:
 
#22 · (Edited)
:D

Most of the good wads run off Doom 2 though, there is less content for 1.

Try the mods. :D Really, theyre awesome, one megawad is basically a whole new game.

Heres what I think is the most thoroughly developed source port:

https://wiki.zandronum.com/Main_Page

You install it, put the doom.wad and doom2.wad and whatever else you can in its folder (I use the port directory for storing all wads, its probably possible to put them wherever you like). To play a wad or wads, drag them onto the zandronum executable. You have to drag them all at once, if you choose "open with" or "play with" or something then it one window for each wad.

Youll get a dialog screen where you need to choose the proper IWAD for the PWAD youre trying to play. There are some base level graphics options there too but setting up graphics is a long story, I wont get into that :D. Its not very complicated, theres just a lot of stuff to change, especially if you want to play in OpenGL. You eventually memorize the options menu.

With some wads, youre going to die a lot and your options are to either save a lot or to open the console with the "ˇ" key and to type in multiplayer, this will allow you to respawn but I think it also loads the multiplayer-only content when loading a new map which makes the map more difficult :D. In the options, under "Gameplay options" iirc, you can set items to respawn as well, this isnt always necessary but it does tone down the difficulty.

Here are some links for the most well recieved stuff:

Top 100 WADs of All Time | Doom Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

Cacowards | Doom Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia

Heres a tool for making random levels, there are a bunch of parameters you can tweak:

OBLIGE | Doom Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia
 
#26 · (Edited)
Yesterday I finally took apart ATI Radeon X800 Pro.


Bit dusty and dirty, but thermal paste doesn't look very old, so maybe someone before me has changed it.


Closer look at main graphics chip with old thermal paste


Heatsink looks dirty.


That moment, when your eyes are too watery and then you...


...rub them.


Closer look of the dirt on card.



Nice and clean, I love that.


Practically clean, even if it was under plastic cover. Honestly, it's a bit surprising.


Plastic cover isn't very clean and has some copper stripes from age (damn, it's not tri poloski)


After cleaning plastic cover looks a bit better, but I have no idea how to clean those stripes, so I left them be. They are practically invisible, when card is assembled, so it's no big deal.


Took off fan from heatsink and again it's surprisingly clean (I though I did just a mediocre cleaning work, when I cleaned card without taking it apart.



If you look carefully, you can see lots of dirt. I found that clayish thing I mentioned before was in the gap between fan blades and fan's board. I thought it made those horrible noises, that I heard before. This topic will be continued a bit later.



Clean fan is happy fan :kitteh:. Even fan's cable and connector were cleaned.


Now this card is very clean and looks like a new. I love clean hardware.


Replaced FX 5200 with Radeon X800 Pro to test out acoustics after cleaning. I hoped, that in horizontal position it might shut up, due to sleeve bearings being sensitive to position they are in. Also clay alike mass is now removed, so I had pretty high expectations, that everything will be fine. Too bad it wasn't...


In my video you can hear that broken sound coming from video card. It really sounds bad. I can leave it case a and forget until it breaks down, but for some reason I hate doing shit like that. Too bad, I don't really know what can I do with existing fan to fix it (@Crimson Rash any ideas?). Maybe lubricating bearing with oil can help here, but I'm skeptical about that. I think, that time for replacing fan has came. To be honest, I never saw fan failing and don't know symptoms of those dying, so changing it may not be the best thing to do. Except ebay, it's nearly impossible to find fan for such an old card and I really want to keep that sexy cooler with dragon (I love pictures on video cards and something like that is important in high-end rig, because it has to be high-end duh). It makes card look much better. I would only think of replacing whole cooler of this video card, if I could find Arctic Cooling ATI Silencer:

Or Zalman copper cooler for X800:

Or something like Sapphire's toxic cooler (imo it's one of the sexiest coolers of it's time), which is ATI silencer:

Or HIS ICE-Q cooler, which is another ATI Silencer rebrand:
 
#27 ·

In my video you can hear that broken sound coming from video card. It really sounds bad. I can leave it case a and forget until it breaks down, but for some reason I hate doing shit like that. Too bad, I don't really know what can I do with existing fan to fix it ( @Crimson Rash any ideas?). Maybe lubricating bearing with oil can help here, but I'm skeptical about that. I think, that time for replacing fan has came. To be honest, I never saw fan failing and don't know symptoms of those dying, so changing it may not be the best thing to do. Except ebay, it's nearly impossible to find fan for such an old card and I really want to keep that sexy cooler with dragon (I love pictures on video cards and something like that is important in high-end rig, because it has to be high-end duh). It makes card look much better. I would only think of replacing whole cooler of this video card, if I could find Arctic Cooling ATI Silencer:
That's a strange one. The only times I remember noises like that from cooling fans was when the fan was in contact with something, most often a wire when it was spinning.

Perhaps try testing it without the plastic outer cover and see if that changes?

Realistically you might be able to swing it with a different fan, but better first rule out everything else before moving towards replacing it.
 
#31 · (Edited)
Since I'm too lazy to mess with Atlonium 64, I will show you AMD sticker I found one week ago and now found it again (lol yeah, I forgot 2 times):


On the bad side my USB flash drive broke down. It's Corsair Flash Voyager 3.0. I previously had Flash Voyager GT 8GB and it broke down, then warranty replaced it with bigger and possibly faster Flash Voyager 3.0 16GB. I didn't like blue version as I previously had red one. I'm disappointed. Those flash drives are unreliable. Even my dad's A-Data 512MB USB Drive still works, I currently own it as my main USB drive. I suspect, that Corsair's flash drives are bad, because of it's rubber casing. While it's waterproof and nice to touch, internals have no rigid casing and connector is attached to PCB only by wires. That part is probably the one to crap out first.
 
#32 ·
Since I was lazy, yesterday I finally set-up RAID 0. RAID 0, because Windows RAID names are so confusing. So, ladies and gentlemens, I'm introducing you WD Raptor RAID 0 performance:


Only one benchmark, because most HDD benchmarks can only benchmark a whole HDD, but not a single partition. Honestly, I expected a bit more from RAID 0, it feels disappointing. There is only like 30% increase in overall performance and single modern HDD (7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5") annihilates that RAID 0 (except 4K):
 
#33 · (Edited)
@Crimson Rash
I finally fixed my graphics card fan, at least I tried so.


Here is that fucker disassembled.


Bit closer


Unpeeled


Rip and Tear :tongue:

I'm lazy to do that stuff, because it's very messy:



Some rust


Clean


Clean #2


Sticker looks like something was spilled on it.

So, I took apart that fan and found, that oil or whatever lubricator was used, was hard, not a liquid anymore. Technically nothing looked bad, aside from rust, some bent plastics and that sketchy sticker with traces of something spilled. So I used sewing oil to lubricate that fan and put it all together. Now sound is better:

@Crimson Rash what do you think? Does it sound good now?

Remember gap we were talking about? No, nothing can physically touch anything as fan blades can only move 1mm or less in perfect conditions. So, it can't touch plastic cover of the heatsink.
 
#34 ·
@Crimson Rash
I finally fixed my graphics card fan, at least I tried so.


Here is that fucker disassembled.


Bit closer


Unpeeled


Rip and Tear :tongue:

I'm lazy to do that stuff, because it's very messy:



Some rust


Clean


Clean #2


Sticker looks like something was spilled on it.

So, I took apart that fan and found, that oil or whatever lubricator was used, was hard, not a liquid anymore. Technically nothing looked bad, aside from rust, some bent plastics and that sketchy sticker with traces of something spilled. So I used sewing oil to lubricate that fan and put it all together. Now sound is better:

@Crimson Rash what do you think? Does it sound good now?

Remember gap we were talking about? No, nothing can physically touch anything as fan blades can only move 1mm or less in perfect conditions. So, it can't touch plastic cover of the heatsink.
Sounds pretty good now. I'm guessing it was the hardened oil that was possibly causing the noises earlier.
 
#36 · (Edited)
Moar pics of Athlonium 64. @Crimson Rash @Skeletalz @Pifanjr @Judson Joist Now building process is finished, work is left on software side. Work left: Windows XP (maybe 64 bit) on RAID 1; Reinstall all games; Reinstall benchmarks; Re-run all benches, that were ran before upgrades. For now let's enjoy pics of it:


Front


So many cards and stuff on the back


This pic is like a big middle finger to modern computing


Not very nice job inside, but limitations of cables and some other stuff prevented from Athlonium 64 being clean, but if we look back at 2004, then there was lots of worse cable management inside cases.


Team Red's dragon + big danksta's audigy 2 ZS = beauty. Overall color scheme of PC isn't too bad.


Horror of short IDE cable


I really wonder why HDD brackets aren't directed to other side to hide cables. Existing ones, can't be reversed.


"Hey dragon from doom, don't eat my sound blaster!"


I officially own two dinosaurs


We get this thing, when grim reaper has hobby


Gold!


The red essence of this PC.


Heatpipes of weed whacker... OH shit sorry, Scythe, my bad!


Uh, yellow stripe, black paint
Them ****** scared of it, but them hoes ain't
Yeah, uh-huh, you know what it is
Black and yellow, black and yellow
Black and yellow, black and yellow


Times, when ram wasn't ramming CPU coolers


Hitler would be happy to see nationalism inside PC


Desktop of year 2004's AMD and ATI beast.
 
#37 ·
It just came to me, why your fan is rattling. Forget about the blades hitting something, this could just be the rotor being out of balance. When something is out of balance, it starts vibrating. At certain speeds, resonance can occur with the things it is connected to, thats when you get strong rattling.

Or it could just be a bad bearing or something which allows the fan to vibrate at some speeds. Computer fans tend to have a certain speed where they develop this distinct rattling sound.

This is a highly pseudoscientific explanation so dont take it too seriously :D
 
#41 ·
Some extras of Athlonium 64:


I have this box of floppies, maybe 8 or 7 are there. 1 is used for Street Rod 2, other one is used for RAID driver


Stock Athlon 64 3200+ s754 cooler (that hologram is nice)


Box of 56K modem



DFI K8T800PRO-ALF motherboard's box from different angles


Mobo's manual


AMD's manual


Vintage offer


Sparkle's leaflet


RAM boxes


Previous RAM of Athlonium 64. Only 512MB.


Original Sparkle GeForce FX 5200 driver CD


Free software with mobo


More free software with mobo


56K modem's driver CD. Nice design.


Mobo's driver CD


Inside the motherboard's box


Original SATA + RAID driver floppy and on the other side DIY driver floppy, because original's WinXP files are corrupted
 
#44 · (Edited)
Before upgrades Athlonium 64 was very slow in web browsing. Now after upgrades it works really well with that. Crazy to think, that graphics card can affect web browsing experience so much. The only thing it can't do is Youtube over 240p. CPU then gets over-loaded.

Edit: Currently I'm not sure if it's even worth to re-install Windows XP on RAID set-up. It's pretty much not possible to install and create software RAID 1. Only option is RAID 0, but I'm scared, that those drives could fail soon. Going without RAID pretty much makes me feel dumb for buying 2 Raptors instead of one.

As to Windows, 32-bit version will be installed, when I will find inner peace with whatever choice I'm gonna choose later.
 
#45 ·
Oh shit, I did a mistake. Some posts before were results of RAID 0. They were of software RAID 0. Only today I found out, that I can do hardware RAID 0. So, I did it and benched it. Now I will post pics of hw RAID 0, sw RAID 0 and modern 7200 rpm HDD (Seagate Barracuda):




As you can see, hardware RAID 0 is much faster than software RAID 0. Also after this big discovery now I'm gonna make hw RAID 1 and see how it performs. Then the decision of which set-up to use to re-install Windows XP may become clearer.
 
#46 · (Edited)
So I ran benchmark on RAID 1 setup:


It's a big disappointment to be honest. This RAID setup is slower than single drive. I read in many places, that read performance will be increased, but testing shows, that it only matches single drive's speed. Write performance is even worse and almost the same as other WD 120 GB 7200rpm drive's. I truly didn't expect such a disaster. So now the question is, go hard with RAID 0 and risk everything or pussy out without RAID at all. RAID 1 is just not worth it. I might have considered it, if read performance was increased, because most of the time read matters more than write. Now RAID 1 doesn't seem seem like it's worth it.

Yesterday I checked how many hours all HHDs were powered on:
Samsung Spinpoint 80GB IDE 7200rpm (the original drive of this PC, was used for over decade) - 15004 hours
WD 120GB 7200rpm IDE (bought used not very long ago, past is unknown) - 32705 hours
WD Raptor 74Gb 10000rpm SATA (data is shown of both drives in one for some reason) - 53552 hours

Now the data of how many times they were powered on:
Samsung Spinpoint - 12167
WD 120GB - 8621
WD Raptors - 3116

HDD temperatures at idle:
Samsung Spinpoint - 23C
WD 120GB - 30C
WD Raptor - 33C

So, the data is very different for them all and it's hard to predict, which will last the longest. Now I will offer the data of my Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm SATA 1TB drive (the original drive of my main PC):
Hours powered on - 8220 hours
Times powered on - 6150
Temperature at idle - 27C

Now the data of another HDD I have in my main PC. It's 2.5" WD Blue 5400rpm 320GB SATA drive from grandpa's laptop. Here it's information:
Hours powered on - 12057 hours
Times powered on - 11772
Temperature at idle - 27C

I have no idea what sort of black magic has Samsung made back then, but their HHD is the coolest and even beats modern slowpoke 5400 rpm drive. What's amazing is that Samsung revs higher than WD's slowpoke and in tests it's um... well faster than modern drive. That kinda shows how WD Blue is worse in everything, except space.

Edit: in Athlonium 64 HDDs are now warmed up. All drives are idling. Temps are:
Samsung Spinpoint - 30C
WD 120 GB - 32C
WD Raptor - 36C
 
#56 · (Edited)
So I ran benchmark on RAID 1 setup:
I’ll quote this screenshot for comparison to my benchmark data.
As I said, I run 4 WD RED drives in a software based RAID10 setup through ZFS on my Ubuntu server. The drives have about half the rotational speed of yours, so we shouldn’t expect extreme performance from the volume.
I used fio to generate benchmark data, configured to CrystalDiskMark’s specifications. I have no idea whether CDM separates reads and writes, so I did what’s least beneficial to my system and told fio to perform 50% writes (that is: every other I/O operation was a write).

The first numbers I present are similar to what I see in regular real-world use. As I said, I’ve put 16 GB of RAM in the machine, mainly for the benefit of the file system, and I use some performance cheats ZFS brings into the game, for example LZ4 compression for written data blocks, along with asynchronous writes (I don’t wait for an OK from the disk for every written block). The latter is somewhat risky in case of a sudden power loss, but I figure the risk is worth it in my specific environment. There are other but more expensive workarounds as I will come to later if you want full data security from a ZFS installation.

Here are the numbers:
Seq Q32T1:
READ: 90.4 MiB/s @ 723 IOPS
WRITE: 90.04 MiB/s @ 720 IOPS.

4K Q32T1:
READ: 2.61 MiB/s @ 667 IOPS
WRITE: 2.6 MiB/s @ 666 IOPS

Seq:
READ: 771.19 MiB/s @ 771 IOPS
WRITE: 675.14 MiB/s @ 675 IOPS

4K:
READ: 3.84 MiB/s @ 984 IOPS
WRITE: 3.84 MiB/s @ 982 IOPS

So why is this cheating? A lot of this I/O traffic happens in the caching subsystem of ZFS. Especially the sequential I/O is pretty much a measurement of how fast the CPU can push/pull data to and from memory; not how fast the underlying disks are. What I’ve done is essentially to give my server similar tools as you find in mid-range professional SAN solutions (yes, the $100,000+ kind); the main difference is that I’ve scrimped on CPU power and bought extremely slow storage media rather than the 2.5” 10krpm or solid state drives you find in those expensive storage solutions. If my 16 GB of RAM wouldn’t be enough for my needs, I could complement them with a couple of small high-end SSDs to serve as buffers for reads and writes. That would effectively minimize the number of times the ZFS driver had to hit spinning rust for its I/O needs, along with allowing me to feasibly wait for confirmation after each write, which as I wrote earlier I have opted not to do in my specific setup.

By using a temporary file that’s significantly larger than my available RAM for benchmarks (meaning I intentionally cause a lot of cache misses), I can get the true performance numbers of my actual disks, which as predicted aren’t very impressive even compared to your RAID1 experiment:
Seq Q32T1:
READ: 83.96 MiB/s @ 671 IOPS
WRITE: 83.99 MIB/s @ 671 IOPS

4K Q32T1:
READ: 0.16 MiB/s @ 41 IOPS
WRITE: 0.16 MiB/s @ 41 IOPS

Seq:
READ: 84.1 MiB/s @ 84 IOPS
WRITE: 83.72 MiB/s @ 83 IOPS

4K:
READ: 0.2 MiB/s @ 50 IOPS
WRITE: 0.2 MiB/s @ 50 IOPS

Again: if CrystalDiskMark separates reads and writes rather than mixing them 50/50 as I have done, all individual datapoints I’ve presented are way too low.
 
#47 · (Edited)
You know, there are some amazing things in a life. Some, that shake you up from your roots. There are moments, that shock you and amaze you. Some magic some say. Some like that, some not. You know, I never ever had RAID 0 setup, let alone 10k rpm hard drives. That's a big speed bump going from 7200 rpm drive to 10000 rpm drive. When WD Raptors launched, reviewers pretty much agreed, that it's the only way to go for enthusiast PC builders as nothing was even close to that. That was in 2003. RAID 0 setups of these things were bleeding edge. I re-evaluated the meaning of Athlonium 64. It's supposed to be high end 2004 PC. The normal thing to assume is that it should get the best parts of that time. Too bad no one ever thought about, whether it should be very reliable or not. Can reliability be sacrificed for speed in high end PC? Questions like that just straight up suck on fundamental level. Why asker asks something so stupid? If the goal is to go fast, then why it's even a discussion about reliability? No one should give a damn about that and just choose the performance.

...year 2014... TRS bought his first SSD drive. Performance was amazing. The system worked blazingly fast, the upgrade is huge!

...year 2016... TRS upgrades grandpa's laptop with SSD. Again everything becomes so damn fast.

...year 2017... TRS's dad buys new laptop. It boots in less than 10 seconds, that's admirable.

...year 2017... Athlonium 64 rises from ashes at incomprehensible speed. TRS is in personal crisis of reliability vs speed

...year 2017... Windows XP re-install...

...year 2017... Windows XP successfully installed on RAID 0 setup.

You know I talked about shocking moments in one's life. RAID 0 on 10k rpm HDDs was one of them. I would have never have thought, that hard drives can be so fast, also I have never seen such a fast Windows XP installation. The speed is mental. Installation itself completed (without formatting) in about 20 minutes. Holy balls! First boot was so fast, that loading bar appeared and disappeared almost instantly. That's right, PC booted in less than 20 seconds. I have no words left. I can swear, that my main rig with SSD never ever booted so fast and it got it's ass beaten by more than 10 year old PC running on HDDs. Shocking! Amazing!

After driver install and minimal software install (web browser, antivirus), I tried to browse web. For some reason everything works blazingly fast. It almost feels like new machine altogether after all upgrades.

Installs, software, websites, everything works instantly and without any delays. The computer is on fire! (well more like cold fire).

Moments like that can really shake a person from the roots. It's really insane to see how fast such an old box can run.

Conclusion of today: all upgrades were totally worth it. RAID 0 was worth it, just to feel what 10k rpms weed whackers were worth. I can say, that I'm not disappointed.
 
#53 ·
Random points I just want to mention.

Not sure if it was only my misconception, but I thought Windows XP 64-bit was abandoned which is why it only went up to SP2. But I didn't realize it was actually based on Windows Server 2003, so every update available for server is the same for XP-64 bit. They are both completely insecure at this point but in terms of compatibility it shouldn't be too bad. The only problem I'm aware of was that some drivers will malfunction or not be there because most stuff was designed for XP 32-bit. Additionally, most applications for XP were designed in 32-bit only so you could only use up to 4GB in those anyway. There's also the fact that XP released with a minimum requirement of what 64mb or 128mb or RAM? I mean the latest version is more like 512MB realistically but you don't need anything over 4GB on XP anyway. It can't play most modern games that started pegging on those high requirements anyway.

There are also the other types of RAID that you may have heard of. I believe RAID 5 was for fault tolerance. But I'm sure you aren't interested in that. RAID 0 is pretty much not what anyone in a serious environment would use because if you lose one disk then you lose both disks' connection to the data. I guess it's good for this enthusiast purpose though. I don't really know why I professional would use it unless it's one of the other forms of RAID that might implement variations. I'm not an expert in RAID.

Windows 10 can use local accounts so you don't have to use the Internet. Remember it also has that hybrid shutdown like Windows 8 so it pretty much boots up faster than either XP or 7 on a hard disk I would say. Remember when I used my 10,000rpm HDD by itself, I got >20 seconds boot on Windows 8 but that was a fresh install.

A lot of computers at my school use SSDs and SSHDs so they are pretty snappy. But another element is all of the security policies and stuff that prevents bloat and extra services that you'd get used to in a personal configuration. Like I remember my elementary school computers definitely didn't have SSDs but they were a ton more snappier than mine at home.

I never really owned my own SSD, but I would believe it would help a lot with the slowness. My laptop has a 7,200rpm hard drive and it loads everything up somewhat slowly. But to a degree I also think that it's because I use power saving settings. So the processor runs at 833mhz at its lowest state which slows everything down. So it's usable but not much.

I'm getting a degree in the IT realm, so a lot of this talk about buying pricey rigs and gaming cases for PCs is largely irrelevant for the actual business world. Hardware was the first thing you learn then you get serious. So basically fault tolerance, security and such are much higher priority in our heads than getting a three GPU setup. The way our teachers talk about hardware is basically that it's good to know. One of them said, "I guess you can get one of those fancy glass cases but I don't know why somebody would do that." Then there's the other one who said, "The average piece of hardware in our industry goes obsolete after 6 months." And finally, if you're a networker and you consulting a company. If they show you their awesome i7 boxes at the desks and you walk into the closet and see 10 year old routers and switches those are essentially bottlenecking the potential for those new computers which is pointless and they don't have their priorities straight. The same thing with programming, if you have a favorite programming language and you only prefer it to others, then stop. Each language is just a tool. Literally the most far gone community I think is the whole Linux fanboy community. Some of my teachers will talk crap about Mac because it's basically paying for free software. But go on YouTube and look at these people customizing Linux Kernels and stuff on their PCs. In the professional world, Linux is for servers not for personalization and wasting time. Talking about Windows, in real world situations you don't go through the configuration and setup a hundred times for every computer. You copy one good one and paste it onto every computer. When something goes wrong you take the good copy again. So I can't vouch 100% for the accuracy of everything I just said, but generally computers are tools and equipment in professional areas so it's a completely different mentality. You look at somebody like Linus who is passionate about hardware and gaming, benchmarks, etc. Serious business you are talking about backups, security, fault-tolerance and load balancing, etc. Just a completely different mentality. So I don't know if you want to get educated in that field, but if you do just know that it isn't the same mentality at all. It isn't boring and stuffy as it necessarily sounds, but it isn't really roses and flowers like i7s everywhere. You could be dealing with somebody who hasn't upgraded from 10Mbps. It's not always going to be nice. I remember you were very strident about SSDs only, but I'm like the real world isn't going to be like that. There are people stuck in the past. I have an old computer and I personally enjoy learning from taking it apart. It wasn't so much that I wanted to play GTA V, but I learned a lot from the hands on stuff. It took my fear of touching insides away. Looking bad in a pure money sense, no I barely play games on it and it is not very useful. But it's what I learned that made it worth it to me even though I definitely went overboard with it.
 
#48 ·
@The red spirit:
Yep, I was going to suggest motherboard based raid0 when I saw your first benchmarks, but forgot to post. Those old CPUs don't have a lot of spare capacity to manage disk I/O in addition to running OS and apps.
(That said, I currently run a RAID 10 configuration in ZFS on Linux on my old Opteron based home server, and with 16 GB of RAM it's actually not that bad provided you have realistic expectations. It's good enough for a couple of moderately used VMs and still can saturate my gigabit home network in any direction with linear I/O.)

For many years I ran what must have been an Athlon K6-2 or K7, with 7200 rpm Raptors in RAID0 via its built-in ATA133 controller.
It literally took years before my friends' gaming computers could match mine for snappiness. Then again that machine ran Windows 98 and I refused to upgrade because it was so damn fast compared to the heavier Windows NT based systems of the time.
The problem with RAID1 is that the specific implementation decides whether or not you stripe your reads from both disks. Obviously your motherboard's controller doesn't, and in that case your only benefit is data redundancy.
 
#49 · (Edited)
Yep, I was going to suggest motherboard based raid0 when I saw your first benchmarks, but forgot to post. Those old CPUs don't have a lot of spare capacity to manage disk I/O in addition to running OS and apps.
I was a noob in RAIDs and still am.


(That said, I currently run a RAID 10 configuration in ZFS on Linux on my old Opteron based home server, and with 16 GB of RAM it's actually not that bad provided you have realistic expectations. It's good enough for a couple of moderately used VMs and still can saturate my gigabit home network in any direction with linear I/O.)
Do yo use that as your main PC? What are your HDDs? Could you post Crystaldiskmark's screenshot? I would want to see that.


For many years I ran what must have been an Athlon K6-2 or K7

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)


with 7200 rpm Raptors in RAID0 via its built-in ATA133 controller.
Was there less than 10k rpm Raptors? Wikipedia doesn't agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_Raptor


It literally took years before my friends' gaming computers could match mine for snappiness. Then again that machine ran Windows 98 and I refused to upgrade because it was so damn fast compared to the heavier Windows NT based systems of the time.
WD Raptor RAID 0 is something unreal, to be more accurate was unreal. To be honest, Athlonium 64 with Raptor RAID 0 beats my main PC with SSD. After week or two it will become much slower and close to realistic speed, but for now it's murdering SSD in that. Also thanks to that required login on Windows 10, which uses internet for passwords. It's mainly the thing, that slows down everything and can't be turned off (I don't need password as it's fucking desktop and I don't have crappy bros or sis, also I don't have any super secret information of FBI).


The problem with RAID1 is that the specific implementation decides whether or not you stripe your reads from both disks. Obviously your motherboard's controller doesn't, and in that case your only benefit is data redundancy.
Oh, so that explains everything. Thanks a lot, I didn't knew that.

Athlonium 64 currently reminds me of this old video:


Then computer becomes Prometheus against time.
 
#50 ·
You know after busting one meme with Crysis, I decided to bust another. Can Athlonium 64 run GTA 4? So what's the meme, it's "Hey Niko, wanna go bowling?". I expected to run it to run horribly slow on the lowest settings. Too bad it doesn't works. It requires Pixel Shader 3 and ATI X800 Pro has Pixel Shader 2, but that's not the end. I researched more and found a way to overcome the limitation. I found Swifshader, which makes game to render itself in software mode. Doesn't sound too good, but whatever, objective to at least run GTA 4 horribly. So the game started and loaded, but after loading always crashed. That's where I stopped. Research didn't help me. The conclusion is that this PC is incapable of going bowling with Roman. Well, that's actually a good thing.
 
#100 ·
Today I decided to test out is there a difference between Realtek onboard sound and Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. For testing I used Athlonium 64 and my main PC. Speakers are AIWA 2.0 SX-FNV70L. Testing songs were:
1)Forever Young - Initial D OST (Youtube 144p)
2)Still D.R.E. - Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg (The weed) (320kbps mp3)
3)Forgot about Dre - Dr. Dre feat. Eminem (320kbps mp3)
4)Still D.R.E. - Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg (1999-2001 24-96 vinyl) (flac)
5)Deep Cover - Dr. Dre introducing Snoop Doggy Dogg (single) (flac)
6)I need a doctor - Dr. Dre feat. Eminem and Skylar Grey (single) (flac)
7)Straight Outta Compton - NWA (Straight Outta Compton) (263 kbps mp3)
8)Boyz N da hood (remix) - Eazy E feat. NWA (Eternal E) (256 kbps mp3)
9)8 ball (remix) - Eazy E (Eternal E) (256kbps)
10)Real Muthaphukkin' G's - Eazy E feat. Dresta and B.G. Knocc Out (It's On Dr Dre 187um Killa) (160kbps mp3)
11)It's On - Eazy E (It's On Dr Dre 187um Killa) (160kbps mp3)
12)Nuthin but a G thang - Dr.Dre feat. Snoop Dogg (The Chronic Re-Lit and from The Vault) (flac)
13)Welcome to the jungle - Guns and Roses (Greatest hits 2004) (flac)
14)Ain't it fun - Guns and Roses (Greatest hits 2004) (flac)
15)November Rain - Guns and Roses (Greatest hits 2004) (flac)


Difference of discrete soundcard (comparing to remembered sounds):
1)Slight, but noticeable difference in clarity and bass thump is clear
2)It sounds so damn clean, difference is massive. I feel like I can hear perfectly again.
3)Everything is clearer and more accurate, voices and everything feel sharper (in a good way)
4)Not a big difference between 320 kbps mp3. Maybe slightly clearer, but that can be placebo. Anyway it sounds really good.
5)Not a big difference, slightly sharper and less noisy
6)Hardly any difference, less noise and a bit sharper, details are slightly better produced. The big difference in Dre's voice, it sounds so good. Clear and extremely realistic, much better than onboard audio.
7)Less noise, I started to hear something I couldn't before (more details). Beats, voices, scratches are better with Sound Blaster. Difference is big. The biggest difference in Eazy E's voice, it's much more detailed. Bass is with better pronounced thumps.
8)Difference is huge. So much more detailed, less noisy. So many things I haven't heard before, much less sound reproduction mistakes caused by sound card. Almost feeling like I'm not deaf again. Everything sounds more alive and I can feel the depth of sound. Drums are massively better.
9)Slightly more detailed and cleaner sound. Bass control is noticeably better. I can feel depth of drums better. Scratches feels a bit sharper. Overall slight-moderate difference.
10)Slightly more depth at the start, bit less noise. Details are better produced and are sharper. Dresta's voice is slightly better. Somewhat sharper overall. Overall difference is minimal.
11)From the beginning better reproduced details are felt and considerably less noise. Overall sharper. Much better detailed voices. Music feels much more alive. Beats don't lack depth. Difference is big.
12)Holy shit, it's so much better. I hear stuff I never heard before, everything is much better. Difference is huge. Snoop's voice sounds really differently. I feel like I can hear perfectly again.
13)Slightly better depth and more powerful bass. Guitars are bit clearer. Overall bit cleaner sound. I expected something better. Not too big of a difference. In the end difference between two sound cards becomes greater.
14)Holy shit I never truly heard this song. Drums are hugely better. Everything is so detailed and crisp. Depth is miles better. Intense parts are the clearest indicators of quality sound hardware. Creative doesn't disappoint. Difference is huge.
15)Drums feel perfect. Voices aren't very different. Guitars are noticeably more detailed and better sounding. Bass thump was perfect. The feeling of space is much better. Music is considerably more alive. Matrix part is much better. Piano parts are far more detailed. Difference is big.

Then I relistened some tracks and I calmed down a bit. The difference exists, truly exists. One observation of onboard sound is that it always makes mid range tones louder, probably to compensate something not so good.

Discrete sound card is defo better, especially at reducing noise, depth, drums, bass thumps. It's a moderate upgrade in sound detailedness, liveliness, sharp sound elements and feeling of space. Also you don't have to strain ears to hear all that goodness with discrete sound card, while with onboard audio you have, even at higher volume. The difference between those two audio devices truly exists and it's not a myth. Sound card is a good purchase for those who at least love music. Onboard sound is like integrated graphics. It does basic stuff fine, but beyond that it's not so good. It does basic stuff fine, but doesn't bring enjoyment. To me sound on onboard feels somewhat grey most of the time, while with sound card it becomes colorful. If you work with audio, then imo sound card is a must have. Also it's good to use lossless files instead of lossy ones, but that can't fix the inferior sound card. I can only recommend Creative Sound Baster Audigy 2 ZS, it's a great product and to think, that I spent like 30 euros of that and it brought a big improvement, means that it was worth it.

BTW I'm still benchmarking Athlonium 64
 
#114 · (Edited)
Benchmark results part 1
After upgrades + AGP aperture changed to 512M

3dmark 2001SE 19145 3dmarks
3dmark 2003 10225 3dmarks
3dmark 2005 5068 3dmarks
PCmark 2002 CPU score 7312; Memory score 7285; HDD score 1074
PCmark 2004 Memory score 3018; Graphics score 6056; HDD score 7382
PCmark 2005 CPU score 3226; Memory score 2820; Graphics score 3945; HDD score 7156
Peacekeeper 1359
Cinebench 9.5 Rendering (1 CPU) 332 CB-CPU; C4D Shading 341 CB-GFX; OpenGL SW-L 1453 CB-GFX; OpenGL HW-L 3241 CB-GFX; OpenGL Speedup 9.51x
Cinebench 10 rendering (1 CPU) 1833 CB-CPU; OpenGL Standard 2972 CB-GFX
Cinebench 11.5 CPU 0.51
Geekbench 2.4.3 1668; Integer 1674; Floating point 2257; Memory 1060; Stream 809
HyperPi 0.99b 1M digits, normal priority 45.266s; 32M digits, normal priority 38m 15.437s
SiSoft Sandra 2013 Sp2 lite processor arithmetic 7.41 GOPS; Processor Multi-Media 6.19 MPix/s; Cryptography 0.065 GB/s; .NET Arithmetic 1.79 GOPs; .NET Multi-Media 2.65 MPix/s; Memory Bandwidth 2.054 GB/s; Cache and memory latency 72.3 ns; File system bandwidth 86.622 MB/s; File system I/O 592.5 IOPS; Processor Multi-Media 6.22 MPix/s; Cryptography 0.065 GB/s; Memory Bandwidth 2.045 GB/s; Overall score 0.58 kPT
Passmark 9.0 Passmark rating 341; CPU mark 548 (Integer math 736 MOps/s; Prime numbers 0 Million primes/s; Compression 844 KBytes/s; Physics 35 Frames/s; CPU single threaded 736 MOps/s; Floating point math 681 MOps/s; Multimedia instructions 3 Mill. Matrices/s; Encryption 111 MBytes/s; Sorting 579 Thousand strings/s); 2D graphics mark 166 (Simple vectors 14 Thousand vectors/s; Fonts and text 58 Ops/s; Image filters 174 Filters/s; Complex vectors 181 Complex vectors/s; Windows interface 247 Ops/s; Image rendering 43 Images/s); 3D graphics mark 73 (DirectX 9 3 Frames/s); Memory mark 297 (Database operations 12 KOps/s; Memory read uncached 1836 MBytes/s; Available RAM 1141 Megabytes; Memory threaded 1852 MBytes/s; Memory read cached 2435 MBytes/s; Memory write 829 MBytes/s; Memory latency 71 ns); Disk mark 725 (Disk sequential read 105 MBytes/s; Disk random seek + RW 8 MBytes/s; Disk sequential write 86 MBytes/s)
CPU-M 1.6 12086; Benchmark score 13180 points
Furmark 400x300 preset 296 points 5FPS, 60000ms
CPU-Z 1.81.1 Single thread 0.4; Multi thread 0.4; Multi thread ratio 1.02
Qwickmark 0.4 CPU Flops 6 Gigaflops; Mem Banwidth 705 MB/s; Disk Transfer 123 MB/s
Winrar 643 KB/s
wPrime (4 threads) 32M 83.718 seconds; 1024M 2691.484 seconds; (1 thread) 32M 84.516 seconds; 1024M 2698.172 seconds

Geekbench 2.4.3
Integer Performance
Integer 1674
Blowfish
single-core scalar 1432
62.9 MB/sec

Blowfish
multi-core scalar 1533
62.8 MB/sec

Text Compress
single-core scalar 1598
5.11 MB/sec

Text Compress
multi-core scalar 1555
5.10 MB/sec

Text Decompress
single-core scalar 1801
7.40 MB/sec

Text Decompress
multi-core scalar 1837
7.32 MB/sec

Image Compress
single-core scalar 1637
13.5 Mpixels/sec

Image Compress
multi-core scalar 1595
13.4 Mpixels/sec

Image Decompress
single-core scalar 1391
23.4 Mpixels/sec

Image Decompress
multi-core scalar 1418
23.1 Mpixels/sec

Lua
single-core scalar 2141
824 Knodes/sec

Lua
multi-core scalar 2153
828 Knodes/sec

Floating Point Performance
Floating Point 2257
Mandelbrot
single-core scalar 1658
1.10 Gflops

Mandelbrot
multi-core scalar 1683
1.10 Gflops

Dot Product
single-core scalar 759
367 Mflops

Dot Product
multi-core scalar 817
372 Mflops

Dot Product
single-core vector 3816
4.57 Gflops

Dot Product
multi-core vector 4388
4.56 Gflops

LU Decomposition
single-core scalar 376
335 Mflops

LU Decomposition
multi-core scalar 398
349 Mflops

Primality Test
single-core scalar 1963
293 Mflops

Primality Test
multi-core scalar 1564
290 Mflops

Sharpen Image
single-core scalar 2428
5.67 Mpixels/sec

Sharpen Image
multi-core scalar 2456
5.66 Mpixels/sec

Blur Image
single-core scalar 4638
3.67 Mpixels/sec

Blur Image
multi-core scalar 4665
3.67 Mpixels/sec

Memory Performance
Memory 1060
Read Sequential
single-core scalar 1732
2.12 GB/sec

Write Sequential
single-core scalar 1244
871 MB/sec

Stdlib Allocate
single-core scalar 1351
5.04 Mallocs/sec

Stdlib Write
single-core scalar 432
916 MB/sec

Stdlib Copy
single-core scalar 544
575 MB/sec

Stream Performance
Stream 809
Stream Copy
single-core scalar 817
1.12 GB/sec

Stream Copy
single-core vector 876
1.14 GB/sec

Stream Scale
single-core scalar 839
1.09 GB/sec

Stream Scale
single-core vector 829
1.12 GB/sec

Stream Add
single-core scalar 770
1.16 GB/sec

Stream Add
single-core vector 879
1.22 GB/sec

Stream Triad
single-core scalar 820
1.13 GB/sec

Stream Triad
single-core vector 648
1.21 GB/sec

Dacris Benchmarks 8.1
CPU 5995 MIPS
Memory 1200 MB/s
Hard Drive 47.2 MB/s (wrong HDD was tested, Samsung Spinpoint)
2D Video 7.50 MP/s
3D Video 19.1 TTP/s

Category Grade Weakest Component Grade Description
Overall 6.44 CPU (5.67) Web browsing, watching videos, playing music, file sharing.
Software Development 6.74 Amount of RAM (6.64) Using Visual Studio to develop software.
Gaming 5.84 Video Card (5.93) Playing the latest 3D games such as Crysis.
Web Hosting 6.39 Hard Drive (6.49) Running IIS or Apache, hosting web applications.
Database Hosting 6.00 CPU (4.63) Running SQL Server, hosting a large SQL database.
Multimedia 5.29 CPU (4.63) Producing professional, studio-quality music or video.
Graphic Design 5.40 CPU (4.63) Creating complex artwork with Photoshop.


For Overall usage, please upgrade the CPU to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Software Development usage, you may wish to upgrade the Amount of RAM to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Gaming usage, please upgrade the Video Card to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Web Hosting usage, you may wish to upgrade the Hard Drive to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Database Hosting usage, please upgrade the CPU to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Multimedia usage, please upgrade the CPU to reach an acceptable level of performance.
For Graphic Design usage, please upgrade the CPU to reach an acceptable level of performance.

Prime95:
[Mon Nov 13 02:16:06 2017]
Compare your results to other computers at http://www.mersenne.org/report_benchmarks
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
CPU speed: 2309.61 MHz
CPU features: 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2
L1 cache size: 64 KB
L2 cache size: 512 KB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 64 bytes
L1 TLBS: 32
L2 TLBS: 512
Prime95 32-bit version 28.10, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 1024K FFT length: 42.676 ms., avg: 43.738 ms.
Best time for 1280K FFT length: 59.162 ms., avg: 59.617 ms.
Best time for 1536K FFT length: 69.200 ms., avg: 69.551 ms.
Best time for 1792K FFT length: 85.013 ms., avg: 85.520 ms.
Best time for 2048K FFT length: 92.104 ms., avg: 92.702 ms.
Best time for 2560K FFT length: 117.626 ms., avg: 118.070 ms.
Best time for 3072K FFT length: 141.266 ms., avg: 142.450 ms.
Best time for 3584K FFT length: 173.937 ms., avg: 179.690 ms.
Best time for 4096K FFT length: 190.227 ms., avg: 191.074 ms.
Best time for 5120K FFT length: 291.183 ms., avg: 293.168 ms.
Best time for 6144K FFT length: 395.525 ms., avg: 397.081 ms.
Best time for 7168K FFT length: 553.695 ms., avg: 556.303 ms.
Best time for 8192K FFT length: 559.942 ms., avg: 562.494 ms.

XtremeMark:
BENCHMARK RESULTS:

Test started at: 2017.11.13 02:52:50
Test ended at: 2017.11.13 04:23:10
Threads executed: 1
Thread priority: Maximum
Quantity of operations: 100000000000
Average operations per second: 18449439,887

Time taken by Thread 1: 5414,922 seconds.

Total time spent: 5414,922 seconds;
Global time spent: 5420,219 seconds.


SYSTEM INFORMATION:

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (32 bit)
Available RAM: 1330,12 MB (1,30 GB)
Total RAM: 2047 MB (2,00 GB)

------------------------------------
Strange thing is that everything seems to be improved, even CPU scores. I didn't mess with clock speed or anything in BIOS that could have affected it, but maybe it's effect of clean install (or sound card). Even RAM performance seems to be improved a bit. HDDs are like 3 times faster compared to not upgraded Athlonium 64. GPU is from 4 times to more than 20 times faster than Sparkle GeForce FX 5200 128 MB, greatly depends on type of benchmark. In latest 3D Mark Radeon was lots of times faster, but in 2001 3D mark only almost 4 times faster. Interesting thing is that in some 2D tasks Radeon can slay lots of modern GPUs and score surprisingly high (passmark). Somewhere in 96% percentile, that's truly amazing. I guess that it may have beaten GTX Titan or 1080 Ti. Usually Intel integrated graphics score high in 2D tasks, maybe some professional graphics cards too. Truly amazing for something so old and obsolete.
 
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