I have one of those Celeron Northwood 2A GHz way back, even at 3GHz it was slower than stock 2GHz Pentium 4 in gaming which I later upgrade to. If I'm not mistaken Celeron line socket 478 lacks floating point unit or something which makes them rubbish for gaming. But they do clock like a champ, and not very that hot as compared to it's bigger brother. I hit 3GHz on stock cooler. Ah, I miss those days overclocking on stock cooler and cheapo PSU. I have Albatron PX845E and PX845G back then, interestingly the 845G performs faster which I suspect it have a better memory controller for its IGP (it have higher actual bandwidth in SANDRA benchmark)
Too bad I already done repasting and cleaning. Thing is my PC being infected by virus and pegged the CPU at 100%. My wife being using it for a bit without noticing, I think that might killed it. I don't know how long its been like that since I rarely using it.
I believe it was due to the L2 cache that made the Celeron slower, having only 128k opposed to 512k in the P4.
Yup, the P4-class Celeron sure is "lost in translation" so to speak. Like I said, the original hard drive was shot, which was (apparently) enough for the previous owner to kick it out. He asked me if I want to take it for free or not, otherwise he was ready to load this thing on the back of his trailer & haul to the nearest recycling center. But really, there's nothing wrong with this thing, apart from the obvious... It's a nice little system that cleaned easily & made quite useful WinXP setup. I'm sure the mobo would (and could) support P4, I even have one or two S478 P4 chips laying around the room, not to mention entire S478 replacement motherboards, but I wanted to keep it within factory specs, as stock as possible.
So, upgrading the RAM (from 256 to 512MB, DDR266) and swapping out the Radeon 9250 for 9600SE were the only two significant modifications that I've done. And yes, I also replaced the optical drives & more recently the hard drive, but those are not affecting the performance so I didn't bother mentioning them
Time for more Athlon 750 & even more games!
Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator
Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, this used to be my dad's favorite game
Also, one of the very few games to be fully adjustable in the terms of graphics, ranging from the older "DOS" look all the way to "modern" design, even featuring 3D accelerated environment & complex models
F22 Raptor
Tomb Raider - The Unfinished Business
Tomb Raider 2
Tomb Raider 2, The Golden Mask
Tomb Raider 3
Tomb Raider 3, Lost Artifact
Tomb Raider 4, The Last Revelation
Tomb Raider 5, Chronicles
Need for Speed II, SE
Oh yeah, I still got it!
And so (I'm sorry to say), this is where the problems started out... I was going to boot up NFS 3 Hot Pursuit & NFS 4 High Stakes, but for some odd reason neither of these two games wanted to run on Athlon 750 machine. It simply fades to black when the icon is double-clicked & hangs like that, forever.
I have a sneaky suspicion that I'm dealing with the sound card issue(s) here, because I've been experiencing loads of other problems, mostly just crackling & echoing in games such as Half-Life for example, Tomb Raider 3 even hanged very similarly to NFS here, but at least the game developers had been kind enough to allow choosing of audio hardware. So I was able to pick the on-board sound for Tomb 3, where the Live! is set for all other games instead!
Anyhow, moving on... I'll deal with SB Live tomorrow, perhaps I can downgrade the driver?
Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed
Nascar Revolution
Quake
Quake 2
Quake 3 Arena
Quake 3 Team Arena
Dark Colony
Incoming
The Fifth Element
Speed Busters
Overboard!
Screamer 4x4
Indiana Jones & The Infernal Machine
Grim Fandango
Curse of Monkey Island
Alas, I STILL can't get super-special 3D SCUMM accelerated environment to work properly
Escape from Monkey Island
So... After those last couple of games, I installed few more additional ones, and was just about to wrap it up & call it a success. Apart from that Need for Speed thing of course, as it was still crashing (causing the system to hang actually). However, just as I was touching up on few last bits & pieces, things suddenly went downhill, to the point where I couldn't even boot up Windows 98.
And yes, just as I thought - all these issues turned out to be sound card related, which (after several re-installation attempts, driver tweaks & eventually system format) got replaced for another one. So instead of using chronologically correct CT4830 (1999), I'm now running one of those Dell OEM cards, SB0220 (2003)
Now, here's the weird part... This other card, CT4830 seems to be working perfectly fine. Yes, it was initially crackling & echoing in some games (Half-Life for example), but this fault went away easily - as soon as I downgraded Live driver to the one from 1999, the original LiveWare 3 release. And ALL these other games worked OK, apart from Need for speed. However, I've noticed that the system would sometimes hang upon the POST, boot & hardware recognition and/or would cause Win98 not to boot after NFS hanged & system had to be manually restarted. So the only working solution to get Windows back on the track was to take the entire case apart & physically remove the card from the slot and then shut it down, place it back inside & reboot back into W98 where it would then hopefully work OK again.
So I'm not sure what to think of this... Intermittent electrical signals maybe, failed audio buffer and/or simply a driver issue, incompatibility between the DFI board & SB Live? But here's the real million dollar question - if the card really is shot, then how the heck does it work perfectly fine under most other titles? Yet, at the same time there's that fact of SB Live randomly causing entire system to hang at the POST, which basically screams "hardware fault"... *shrug* IDK, what do you guys think?
