Post
by Malachi » Sun Jan 26, 2003 11:15 pm
You guys are tooooo much, lol.
You'd think someone said something about your mom or something, hehe.
Here's the deal, and some people are gonna argue about it. I'm not mcse or a+ or whatever, the only thing I am is a certified system builder +, lol.
First off, 98se performs 0% better with any additional ram over 256Mb. It'll *use* it, but unless you fix your swap file or use a ramdisk, you seriously won't get any better performance.
Secondly, I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what game demands so much performance...the most impressive sprite display I've ever seen was Shogun, running on a PII 400 w/ a 16Mb Riva TNT, lol, and that was because Shogun has (to my knowledge still the record) for singular animations at one time, with somewhere around 2500 different characters all performing different things at the same time on the screen. It's pretty tight if you've never seen it...
Also, yes, there's 256 Mb ddr's out there, they're still expensive because no one's written a game yet that needs 128. Argue that if you will, go ahead. Games can't suck data off a UDMA 100 HDD fast enuf to utilize a 2.0GHz+ processor, 512 Mb of DDR (and is it 400 or 800?), and the nutzo chips that they're sticking on video cards these days, you'll only see the difference w/ a huge cache file, which would only serve to eat up your ram...
As for XP's overhead, try this: run services.msc and turn OFF anything you don't ever use. Then go into visual display performance and set it to "set for performance". It turns all the pretty stuff off and winds up looking like a KDE desktop. Additionally, 98se doesn't load and unload programs from memory very well, as we've all seen in BSOD's, so again, your nutzo ram is useless and no less likely to crash. Besides that, I'm pretty sure that 98se doesn't support anything faster than AGP 4x....so that's fun, and not to mention that card suppliers are already limiting support for 98.
And....as for your "4 Gig p4", lol, where did you get one? I mean, since Intel doesn't sell them....
I wish people would learn that right now the greatest limitation on the speed of a given person's laptop isn't the chip or the ram, it's the hard drive....a UDMA 100 is about 100x slower than the chip in my computer...it can't do jack w/ the data if it can't *get* the data.
As for stuff that comes on a computer, lol, there's this great function in the control panel called "Add/remove programs", try it--it's tight. 98se minimum install uses right around 350Mb. Additionally, if you're going for "performance" you're not going to have a 40 gig HD standing alone anyway, on 98 especially. You're going to partition it and stripe it across a RAID array (I mean, since we're going for speed here...) or at least partition it into <= 20Gb chunks, since 98se supports them but doesn't mount them correctly or report available space on them correctly....
Not to mention that anything DirectX over 8.0 is optimized for XP and MS wants you to upgrade, good luck having much success in the coming months with DX on 98...
For me, XP is a matter of stability. When I run my webserver or FTP, I use *nix, when I type or play games I use XP, since if I can get it to crash (hehe, its fun to try sometimes) it crashes the process and not the system.
This isn't meant as a flame, and it's more in response to mr. wolf than anyone else. In the future I would advise you to attempt to argue with facts and a point, and to avoid the paranoid assumption that someone is out to get you.
Use whatever OS you want to, and have fun doing it, I'm merely interested in the nitty gritty. OldNecro--you might really want to try turning off the eye candy on XP and trying it again, you might be surprized.
Here's a benchmark for you: I have a PIV 1.5 right now, and it's only got 256Mb od SDRAM. Oops, yeah. Anyway, encoding a DivX 5.1 movie at 100% original screen size, it only takes me about 5-10% longer than the length of the movie to encode the movie, and that's on 2-pass, using XP. The same attempt on 98, when it will stay stable, takes about 30-50% longer, and it's because of the way XP sends data to and from the chip. :)
Like I said, happy hunting. :)
~malachi
~Oh danny boy, the pipes the pipes are calling.~