AMD Athlon Tower

[John8520]

Got this from techfury90 a few days ago, for free, I guess it could be considered an early birthday present. (My birthday is July 18th, btw, so get your packages in the mail soon )

Anyways, it's a pretty hefty system. Specs are:

AMD Athlon x2 4600+ (dual 2.4Ghz)

epox motherboard, has 3x PCIe x1, 1x PCIe x16, 3x PCI, 4x DDR400 slots, 4x sata II, etc

ATI Radeon x300 PCIe, the heatsink fan was dead so I had to replace that

160GB sata HDD

CD-RW and DVD-RW DL, though the CD-RW is kinda flaky when it comes to burning

1gb (2x 512) in "ricer" ram, with heatsinks and everything

pci 3port FW card

pci tv tuner

Snazzy mostly screwless case

etc

It's bumped it's way right up to my 2nd machine and dispite a little turbulence of getting everything going it's running great, has win xpp on it now but I may put ubuntu back on it if I ever feel like getting around to it. I plan on putting in two more 512s within the month, but I'm not totally sure.

 

[QuadSix50]

Nice rig! I'm still on an Athlon XP 2400+ here at home running Slack 12.1.

 

[wthww]

Heh, I'm still using my Old P4 1.8 OC'd to 2.4 with a gig of ram, and I use SCSI320 disks, . Its more than fast enough for me, and Since I run Debian, I don't have the bloat of windows or the viruses

[/shamless linux plug]

Dake!

//wthww

 

[QuadSix50]

Heh, I'm still using my Old P4 1.8 OC'd to 2.4 with a gig of ram, and I use SCSI320 disks, . Its more than fast enough for me, and Since I run Debian, I don't have the bloat of windows or the viruses
[/shamless linux plug]

Dake!

//wthww

Nice! I have the kids set up with a 2.8 GHz Celeron D 335 and Ubuntu 8.04. They're pretty happy with it.

 

[John8520]

I ran ubuntu on here for a little bit, unfortunately the x300 isn't properly supported and there's nothing really intriguing about it, but I may use it again some time, just for kicks. Not to mention XP on a machine like this is /fast/

 

[QuadSix50]

I ran ubuntu on here for a little bit, unfortunately the x300 isn't properly supported and there's nothing really intriguing about it, but I may use it again some time, just for kicks. Not to mention XP on a machine like this is /fast/

Really? I thought my 9600XT card from Sapphire Tech wasn't supported well either until I found this page to help me tweak my particular card.

http://www.free3d.org

Just check for your chipset and set the xorg.conf file to those settings.

 

[John8520]

It's more of a "These, these, and these ATi cards are blacklisted and generally don't work well until we get better drivers" type thing. The card works fine, but there is no proper hardware rendering.

A new xorg.conf wont do a thing unfortunately.

EDIT: Also, that site is hilarious. They actually use glxgears as a serious benchmark tool. Hahaha.

But really, if I compile glxgears under some optimizations, I get 50fps, under others I get several thousand, with the same graphical output. Not a good tool to use for a benchmark.

 

[QuadSix50]

It's more of a "These, these, and these ATi cards are blacklisted and generally don't work well until we get better drivers" type thing. The card works fine, but there is no proper hardware rendering.
A new xorg.conf wont do a thing unfortunately.

EDIT: Also, that site is hilarious. They actually use glxgears as a serious benchmark tool. Hahaha.

But really, if I compile glxgears under some optimizations, I get 50fps, under others I get several thousand, with the same graphical output. Not a good tool to use for a benchmark.

Well, glxgears does show you whether you are getting decent hardware acceleration or not. I've used it to see how the card is rendering 3D and if it's being done by software instead of the hardware. According to the site, your card should do hardware rendering with the open source driver. Not sure if the same is the case with ATI's fglrx driver (I've never had much success with that). For the record, you shouldn't have to add anything in the "Section 'Device'" portion of xorg.conf other than to specify that you're using the "radeon" driver.

Graphics Card | CPU                     | X version   | Driver-Name | DRI? | GLX Server | Resolution | Depth | Notes | glxgears FPS 
===================================================================================================================================
ATI X300      | Intel Pentium 2.8GHz HT | X.Org 7.1.1 | radeon      | Yes  | v1.2       | 1280x1024  | 24    |       | 1550 FPS

Another thing I do is maximize the glxgear window. If it's being rendered in software, then the moment I maximize the window it would slow down tremendously. If I do the same thing and the hardware rendering is working, then it continues on at pretty much the same speed. Then again, you don't have to just use glxgears. There are other 3D based screensavers you can manually launch that are much more complex than glxgears. Sure, it's not a benchmarking tool, but it's a quick way to compare how quickly the hardware rendering is being done, if at all.

Also note the disclaimer on the page (which reaffirms what I said):

To gather the results in the table below, a simple shell script was proposed Henrik Carlqvist in a comp.os.linux.hardware discussion and subsequently revised by Michael Mauch and others. This script uses glxgears to get a frame rate for 3D rendering. We are aware this isn’t a particularly good benchmark. It’s been compared to bogomips for graphics cards. But it is readily available on almost every computer running Xorg and provides a handy baseline for comparing hardware. If you can propose something better that will run on as many systems without needing to download and compile special benchmarking tools, please let us know. But see the FAQ before emailing to complain that you think glxgears sucks as a benchmark.

 

[coius]

AMD Athlon x2 4600+ (dual 2.4Ghz)

epox motherboard, has 3x PCIe x1, 1x PCIe x16, 3x PCI, 4x DDR400 slots, 4x sata II, etc

ATI Radeon x300 PCIe, the heatsink fan was dead so I had to replace that

160GB sata HDD

CD-RW and DVD-RW DL, though the CD-RW is kinda flaky when it comes to burning

1gb (2x 512) in "ricer" ram, with heatsinks and everything

pci 3port FW card

pci tv tuner

Snazzy mostly screwless case

etc.

Awww man! You got this free?!?! This thing almost runs circles around MY computer!!! No fair!

Tell you what, to make it an even deal (and ease your guilt), send me yours, and I will send you mine

 

[John8520]

Huh well that's interesting then. ioUrbanTerror in ubuntu with maxed settings at XGA res got around 30-40 FPS, when in windows it got 90-110 at the same settings. Same game versions, and pretty much the same testing type enviroments for the game. Maybe it's just the ubuntu guys being screwy again.

 

[John8520]

Tell you what, to make it an even deal (and ease your guilt), send me yours, and I will send you mine

That sounds fair, you put yours in the mail to me, and once I get it and make sure it's fully functioning I'll send you mine. maybe

 

[QuadSix50]

Huh well that's interesting then. ioUrbanTerror in ubuntu with maxed settings at XGA res got around 30-40 FPS, when in windows it got 90-110 at the same settings. Same game versions, and pretty much the same testing type enviroments for the game. Maybe it's just the ubuntu guys being screwy again.

The Xorg open source driver has always been slower than the proprietary Windows ATI driver, part of the reason Xorg developers keep clamoring for more support from the video card manufacturers. Instead, ATI (and nVIDIA) would rather make a faster proprietary driver for one platform than help the Xorg guys make it work right for all GNU/Linux hardware platforms.

Nevertheless, the hardware acceleration support is there...just slower compared to Windows. Personally, I'll take "a tad slower than Windows" than "no acceleration whatsoever" any day.

 

[coius]

nice try. if you put a small word at the end, you *might* want to make sure it can't be supersceded by a browser that has a minimal font size (<3 Safari)

But seriously, you got a really nice machine. All mine has is a 3200+ Athlon x2 and a AGP GeForce 6200 w/ DDR2 RAM

I would get a really nice game and take her out for a test run. Call of Duty 4?

 

[John8520]

cod4 on an x300? are you kidding?

anyways, as I've said I've been using ioUT, as well as c&c g, bf1942, and a few other smaller ones.

 

[quinterro]

I'll trade - I have a 1ghz Celeron! [] ]'>

 

[John8520]

And you're even close enough to preform a reasonable trade with, so I'll have to consider it

 

[QuadSix50]

I'll trade - I have a 1ghz Celeron! [] ]'>

Put Debian Etch on that with XFCE and you'll be plenty happy. I did an installation of Debian Etch on a REALLY old Compaq Presario just for kicks. The specs?

AMD K6 at 300 MHz

64 MB RAM

S3 Virge video

4 GB hard drive.

I did a basic installation and then added XFCE along with Xorg. I was quite surprised at how well it ran for such a paltry machine. Of course, it did choke a bit with heavy "web 2.0" sites but that was no surprise. However on your average forum like this one, it did quite well.

 

[John8520]

If I want an old clunky PC, I can drag out my 500/celly and have a blast. Unfortunately aside from ancient computer such as my macs and sparcs, I like having computers with alot of muscle so I dont have to be so patient.

 

[bmacsys]

Heh, I'm still using my Old P4 1.8 OC'd to 2.4 with a gig of ram, and I use SCSI320 disks, . Its more than fast enough for me, and Since I run Debian, I don't have the bloat of windows or the viruses
[/shamless linux plug]

Dake!

//wthww

You can't get install video codecs or restricted drivers with Debian can you?