Athlon 64 x2 bottlenecking?

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ChRoNo16

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 3, 2011
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Running an Athlon 64 x2 with the following config

Athlon 64 x2 3800+
2gb (4x512mb) DDR400 ram (Kingston hyper x i think)
GTX465 1gb graphics card
120gb SSD OS drive
240gb SSD Games/programs drive

Having a weird issue where im getting graphical slowdowns and a loss of FPS playing Diablo 2.

Yes, Diablo 2 that game plays perfect on old pentium 3's and old video cards.

Is it possible my video card is too much for this CPU? What card should I run? I do have an older GTS450 around.
 
Brian_B said:
Is it just Diablo 2, or does it occur elsewhere?

Nice rig btw
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Thanks! it's my throwback rig, runs in an Thermaltake Xaser III case.

Just diablo 2 it seems, have also played Quake 3 arena but had no issues that I can tell
 
Sounds more like a software issue. Which Windows are you running? Could also be something funky going on with page file.
 
For this rig I run Windows XP 64 bit. Its low impact on the hardware and takes advantage of the 64 bit capability
 
Got me there - I can't think of much else other than playing with nVidia drivers (not that you have a lot of choice there) and making sure your page file is working ok
 
That was my first guess. I tried XP 64 bit but ugh. I reverted back to 32 bit and there was driver happiness.
 
I agree with others. XP 64bit sucked th big one. D2 had d3D support. Hell I remember playing D2 on my old tbird system lol
 
Other people have already covered it, but I'll say roughly the same thing: If there's one thing I remember about the early 64-bit days, it's that XP 64-bit was a mess that almost never worked right. It seems like a waste, but go with XO 32-bit. With 2gb of system RAM and 1gb of VRAM, I don't think the ~4gb RAM limit is going to be an issue for you, but the vastly improved compatibility is going to make a big difference.

FWIW, I had an X2 3800+ from like... 2005 through 2008, and never ran a 64-bit OS on it. Didn't make that jump until I got my Q6600. But man, that Athlon was a beast in its time!
 
i'd use modern-ish video card and a new linux install and just wine/proton your way thru these games rather than run old versions of windows. But then, I wouldn't run old hardware just to run it. I'm not that nostalgic.

You'd do much better with that setup though than running xp.
 
That's such a old CPU, I still have my AMD X4 640 lying around if you want or it's $20 on ebay. 965 or 1090T are good options as well. Heck I have a 8350 laying around if u wanna buy it off me, lol.
 
fakeng said:
That's such a old CPU, I still have my AMD X4 640 lying around if you want or it's $20 on ebay. 965 or 1090T are good options as well. Heck I have a 8350 laying around if u wanna buy it off me, lol.
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I get the impression that the old CPU is a purposeful choice for a "retro" gaming system. But I mean, for D2 it's way more than what should be necessary. I played D2 on an iMac G3 back in the day.
 
Yes, the particular CPU was intentional for this system. I have an i7 gaming rig for modern games.
 
As others have said as a proceed to beat a dead horse. No x64. You're only running 2GB of ram. Zero reason to run 64-bit, especially on a retro gaming RIG.

We still build Server 2k8 32-bit VMs at work with 4GB of RAM or less to address compatibility with older software. < 4GB Ram is 32-bit for sure.
 
Depends on the software stack you're using. Building for 32bit is dying so unless you want to run old builds of software, having the OS be 32bit is far from ideal even with 2GB of ram.

It's hard to mix practical reasons for doing something in such an impractical choice of hardware but if all this old hardware is going to do is run old games, then it probably makes way more sense to just have it run a modern linux distro, install / build 32bit proton with dxvk. Use a new-ish video card with good vulkan support and have the benefits of modern advances in software and the low overhead to run all those old games at native performance without any of the security issues or having to air gap the system from the internet.
 
If you have an Asus M3A78-EM, that board was known to have issues with XP. I found Win7 was more fluid. Once I used a cheap 120GB Kingston A400 SSD, it's a much more tolerable machine (with my 5400+).
 
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