I cobbled together a PC using all the spare parts I had sitting around, and I'm just wondering how I can get the best experience here... Specs aren't bad overall, E5200 CPU and a 9600GT graphics card.. Just not happy with the 2GB ram. There are only two slots on the G31 board I found, and I don't have any 2x2GB DDR2 kits.. Would I get better performance in games by running Win7 or Windows XP? The most demanding games I'd run would probably be Fallout 3 at 1650x1080. I wouldn't want to buy DDR2 RAM at this point.. I have a Gigabyte P43-UD3L sitting around collecting dust, I would just swap everything into there and buy a DDR3 kit if the RAM would make such a big difference. Any tips?
~1.2GB free with Chrome and a few tabs + Steam downloading games on Win7, so it's not as bad as I thought.. Is XP much better than this?
7 does seem to scale well but you can expect to lose free memory as you install more and more in the coming months. When I dual booted My old 3GHz Athlon64x2 I found that most DX9 games ran faster in XP (although some weren't as stable) for some reason areas in Arkham Asylum that were perfectly playable in XP went below 20FPS in Vista and 7. My i5 sorted that out. I'd say if you test the games you want to play and are happy with the framerate/detail levels then stick with it, if you find you want more detail/performance then give XP a go.
Your computer is well above Win7 specification and is ready. XP does use less memory, with the cost of dumping everything on your HDD (as its designed to run with 128-256MB of RAM). It was never designed to support over 1GB of RAM, because Microosft never intended to have an OS for 6 years... Longhorn (Vista) was supposed to be out way before. So, - If you want more memory, go with XP - If you want a smoother and more responsive system, and take full advantage of your system, including your 64-bit CPU, then Win7 64-bit. BTW, at work, we run Win7 on P4 2.5GHz 2GB of RAM, and it flies compared to XP. We are happy with the result, despite less memory available. And as you noted, you have well over 1GB of memory free. You can't play games (same if you ran under XP), but it's plenty for office work, non-large scale programming project, and any light work, with latest version of software today.
Hello, maybe you are right xp is designed to run with 128 and 256 MB of RAM. But I don't need to complain about it, it boots quickly and all applications I use, run quickly as well (even games). best wishes from Germany
your pc is absolutely fine for win 7 BUT it depends what you want to do with it tbh, xp will feel a little bit snappier purely because it uses less ram so has more in reserve for more intensive stuff
Well, done with a night of gaming and I never felt the computer struggle. Works for me! I'll stick with Windows 7 for now, just wish it had better compatibility with some of my much older games
itll be fine for gaming no worries, more intensive stuff like video editing and photoshop will suffer
My old Athlon 64X2 with 2GB DDR runs Win7 (64-bit) fine, haven't used XP on it for years so wouldn't know if it was snappier or not. Win 7 over XP on that spec machine.
Either/or tbh. I used a similar C2D system with 2GB of memory for the best part of a year, and it was amazing with both Win7 (RC) and XP32. The reason I kept only 2GB of RAM is that even with 4GB installed, the OS could only see 2.5GB of it thanks to the greedy video card eating away nearly half of the address space.
XP is so old now that even on a low spec machine like a single core with 2GB you're still better off with with Win7, and it scales alot better than Vista. I can confirm from experience that an Athlon 64 3200+ with 2GB DDR runs Win7 x64 just fine. The optimal solution really (if even possible) would be to upgrade to 4GB though.
For DX9 gaming performance? For my old athlon64x2 rig with some games it was the difference between 30+fps all the way through with XP and less than 20FPS in some areas with 7. Both with the same game.
That is just a driver optimization. Manufactures don't really care of old hardware, so they just patch up a Win7 drivers for your old graphic card, motherboard, etc. to have Win7 drivers at the end. In result, there isn't any deep optimization, or sometimes little optimization done. That is why you have a lower performance. And it makes sense, assuming you make graphic cards, let's say, why would invest millions of dollars for your 6 year old product, especially that it doesn't give you any money. But that is one factor.. the other factor is due to Windows. What happened is that Microsoft took a good decision (really) in deciding to untie drivers from the kernel. This means, that now if a driver crash, you won't get a BSOD, but instead the drivers can now restart (if you have a BSOD related to a driver, it's due to the driver recover system failed to recover a drivers, probably because the card or the chip in question, itself froze). This give you less BSOD's, and less chances of loosing your work or part of it due to a crash. Other advantages is that you don't need to restart your computer after a driver installation or update or uninstall. The above system requires a layer to be implement, and that costs performance. Not much, but plays into a factor. This is stuff that should be implemented since day one, (including full GPU interface rendering), but was unable to do so. This is because we needed to maximize and optimize things down to the last drop with the little performance we had, and what we were asking form our systems. Now, we have more computer power, we can afford these luxuries.
So the drivers for 8800/9800 based hardware had better optimised drivers with XP than it did with Vista and 7 even with the same version number? this was a long time before Fermi was released. I figured it was down to the different implementations of DirectX9
The 9000 series was out (and it's not a rebrand of the 8800GT, sorry, it's simply not, despite the looks), and the GTX200 series. Oh, and re-read my post, I added another point.
It was my current 9800GTX+'s that I found the performance difference with. Thanks for the detailed explanations
