Recent content by DrRamtop

There are, but such games are rare. The vast bulk of modern games perform best on 4-6 fast cores, 16 slow cores isn't going to get close. WM Xeons can be excellent gaming chips, and very good value, but really only if you overclock them - something the dual socket boards won't do. I have an...

Going from memory, a single Xeon X5650 (6C/12T/2.66GHz) is roughly equivalent to an i7-2600K in heavily threaded workloads.

It's really staggering how far processors have come over the decades. Starship will have more cores than the 6502 had instructions back in 1975.

The RasPi is an interesting option if you want to mess about with existing 8-bit software, or write your own. But a lot of people are involved with the homebrew scene specifically for benefits only real hardware can bring. I built 8-bit systems from scratch to teach myself digital electronics...

We already do. They're just called microcontrollers now, as they contain a bunch of useful stuff alongside the 8-bit CPU core. Atmel makes a whole range of them. They have general purpose programmable I/O pins rather then fixed-function address or data buses, but you can certainly hook the more...

I don't pretend to know every 8-bit processor, but certainly none from the major manufacturers had anything more than a 16-bit address bus. The thing that gets forgotten these days is that all the main 8-bit architectures were designed in early or mid 70s, when personal computers were still a...

It did. The penalty for that was performance, though. The Z80 took a minimum of 4 cycles (one 'T-State') to complete an instruction, which was twice as long as the 6502. On the flip side, it did mean Z80 code could be notably more dense than 6502. I've build and programmed both Z80 and 6502...

The only general purpose '8-bit' processors that could directly address more than 64K without bank switching or an external MMU were usually hybrid 16-bit chips with an 8-bit compatibility mode, like the 65816 with its 6502 mode, or full 16-bit chips with an 8-bit data bus (68008, etc). As for...

CPU: Intel Xeon X5660 @ 4.5GHz RAM: 24GB DDR3-1600 OS: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit encoded 1497 frames in 213.84s (7.00 fps), 4036.02 kb/s, Avg QP:26.24 Pretty good for a chip that's nearly 8 years old.

That's by no means a new capability. Some PowerPC processors implemented a system that could cut the processor's throughput without lowering clockspeed, essentially injecting a CPU-wide idle cycle. I remember playing with that system on a PPC750CXe, because there were instructions to manually...

Too hard to pick just one card for each category. Favourites: 1) VTX3D Radeon 7950 - a lovely card, came with a 10% factory overclock (800>880MHz) and the GPU running at just 0.96v under load. Cool, quiet and completely fuss-free. Hugely powerful when new and even today still a good, solid...

I had a Mystique before the Permedia 2. Lovely card for 2D, great performance and nice sharp signal quality. But yes, I think every 3D game I tried either crashed or looked like it was running on a Commodore 64. (this thread prompted me to go fetch the Mystique from my old parts box. It's the...

Lots of candidates for this one. i740 obviously, S3 Virge, Matrox Parhelia, etc. Kind of obscure now, but the single worst GPU I've ever come across was the 3Dlabs Permedia 2. Creative Labs decided it would be a great idea to sell a gaming graphics card, the modestly named Graphics Blaster...

UK energy costs average about 14p per KW/h, so you'd be looking at 4-4.5 months for the card to earn back its cost once electricity is taken into account. That assumes ether price and difficulty stay as they are today.

Yes, it's always going to be highly subjective. Some people can't stand anything but a fast TN, others are ok with a non-overdrive IPS or VA. I have a 4ms VA screen (BenQ BL3200PT) and find it absolutely fine for gaming. The one and only time I have any issues with it is in Elite Dangerous...