Comparing The Power/Performance Of A NetBurst Celeron & Pentium 4 To Broadwell's Core i7 5775C

[rice_nine]

I have a Pentium MMX @ 200MHz with 16MB in the form of 2 EDO SIMMs, yes EDO DRAM as in pre-SDRAM, running Win95. I believe it could still run Damn Small Linux-- barely. It's rather like my friend's machine I got started on in '97 (when I turned 18) only that one was pretty nice at the time before P-II: it had all sorts of overclocking options and even had a USB header (yes on an AT mobo) & 2 ports on an expansion back plate. But this is just a Packard Bell dumpster filler sporting a weird case and their favorite 16-bit ISA crappy sound/modem combo. On the other hand, the mobo has a composite video input and an old BTTV capture chip that will probably pull in something like 160x120@10fps for subsequent encoding to RealVideo or something equally as delightful When you realize that a whole OS and AOL 3 and various useful things actually *run* on that Pb-infused doorstop, maybe like me you'll wonder what went wrong since.

[s_j_newbury]

In our organisation most of our desktops are still P4 systems. Fast enough for web browsing, thunderbird and libreoffice. They have been running fine for 8+ years, getting these systems was probably one of the best decisions I ever made, they were relatively expensive back then.. We had to upgrade the memory, videocard and cpu fan during the years.

This is the point, as long as it's fit for purpose then it's not necessary to upgrade. This idea that new systems are more energy efficient fails to take into account the full life-cycle exergy. A computer has to run for YEARS to exceed the amount of embedded energy in the construction of the system, its components, materials, and fabrication facilities. Also, most people do not have their systems operating at anything like peak performance for any significant proportion of the time. Sure, some, like myself are always compiling something, whether it's a project I'm working on, or simply a Gentoo update, but I certainly wouldn't consider myself typical!

When you realize that a whole OS and AOL 3 and various useful things actually *run* on that Pb-infused doorstop, maybe like me you'll wonder what went wrong since.

This I think is also an important point, modern software has become unbelievably slow and bloated. I remember when I thought my overclocked 3x50Mhz VLB = 150MHz AMD 5x86 (i80486DX(5) clone) with VLB ATI Mach64 was fast! It ran Slackware then RedHat 4.2 (I think). What a machine... ;-)

[Gusar]

I have a Pentium MMX @ 200MHz with 16MB in the form of 2 EDO SIMMs, yes EDO DRAM as in pre-SDRAM, running Win95.

Nice!

I used to have a Pentium MMX @ 166MHz with the legendary 3dfx Voodoo accelerator. Man I wish I still had that. Not necessarily the whole machine, but definitely the Voodoo card, that'd be awesome to have.

[rice_nine]

Nice!

I used to have a Pentium MMX @ 166MHz with the legendary 3dfx Voodoo accelerator. Man I wish I still had that. Not necessarily the whole machine, but definitely the Voodoo card, that'd be awesome to have.

I could send you a Voodoo something-or-other, it's been sitting around for years in a (P-II or P-III) beige box that ran Smoothwall for a while. Would you like fries with that? And by fries I mean RDRAM sticks

[Veerappan]

If P4 tests make you feel old, you're not old at all. The oldest machine I have contains an AMD Duron 800Mhz CPU. It started out with with a Geforce 2 GPU, what's in there now is quite modern, Geforce FX 5200.

Oldest machine that I still have here is:
DEC Alpha PWS 500a (circa 1997)
640MB ECC SDRAM
Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold (ISA)
Voodoo 3 3000 16MB video (PCI), I have a radeon 5400 and/or geforce 8400gs to put in some day
PCI USB Adapter
Some form of IDE HD, although I have a few SCSI cards to pop in if a slot ever frees up

I keep trying to get Gentoo's Alpha port up and running on it every year or so, but I usually run into bugs or a lack of time and give up to do other things.

[Gusar]

Voodoo 3 3000 16MB video (PCI)

Voodoo 3? That's too new :P

The original Voodoo, that was the stuff. I still get a smile on my face when I launch Need for Speed II SE and see the 3dfx logo (the original one). Then you get to see wonders of graphics such as bilinear filtering of *really* low res textures, gouraud shading, colored fog, specular highlights and such . Of course this magic nowadays comes from using a Glide wrapper instead of an actual Voodoo chip.

Though even that is modern for me, I used to play the original Test Drive and Test Drive 2 on a 286 10MHz and Hercules monochrome graphics