Dual Pentium III performance

[Matthew Renna]

This is just a discussion for fun. If I had a dual pentium III 1.4 ghz pc with the best agp graphics card I could get, 2 gb of ram and an ssd, how much performance could I expect out of it? Would I be able to browse the web on it, watch videos and play simple games on it?

 

[herrwizo]

I can tell you from my friend's perspective who has a similar rig, but with more powerful CPU.

Pentium D 3.4GHz (dual core)
2GB RAM
80GB SSD
Nvidia 9600GT AGP

He runs Windows 10 (32 bit) on that rig. And has a mixed experience.

He is limited to using Chrome for playing videos, because any video played in any other browser causes blue screens due to Nvidia's very old card and drivers being used in Windows 10.

For general operations, it is actually fast enough. But forget about any kind of multitasking, multiple tabs and so on - 2GB is the major limiting factor. Also, his CPU gets maxed at 100% quite often when playing videos, I can only imagine what would happen with 1.4GHz CPUs.

The rig you mentioned was good at its time. However, web has changed a lot. It now requires much CPU power and RAM for smooth operation. Gone are the days of pure HTML. I miss them many times

 

[captaincharisma]

your web experience would be crippled. knowing that it would be hard to get a modern OS stable on a computer that old. a pentium III may not even be compatible with windows XP and not much runs on windows XP anymore. basically it would be only good for playing old games you can't run on modern PC's

 

[Matthew Renna]

I have a Pentium 4 2.6 ghz with an agp HD 3650 with 4 gb of ran and windows xp and it can acually run war thunder at like 10 fps! It browses the webokay but once you have a couple of tabs open, the cpu is always maxed out.
But yes, I expected the dual pentium III not to run so good, I wish I had one to test it out.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

The system would struggle with basic browsing. The internet isn't the same place as it was in 2000. Does it even have an ethernet port? More likely to have a dialup modem. 2GB of RAM alone even on a new system would be almost unusable with more than a tab or 2 open at a time. You aren't going to have SATA ports or SSD support so you'd need to find an old IDE HDD. XP might possibly work but Windows 98 SE would be better and finding drivers for hardware that old would be nearly impossible unless you have them on disk.

Literally the only reason to build that would be for fun if you didn't have to spend any money on it. Then not even try to connect it to the internet and just use it for old games.

 

[InvalidError]

Anything with less than 4GB of RAM will be painfully slow with most modern software due to intensive use of the swapfile. 2GB may be usable if you use 10+ years old software on it but I wouldn't recommend using a 10+ years out of date browser and related addons.

 

[BFG-9000]

As it happens, I have a dual PIII-s 1.4GHz PC with Rambus. It's got two of the last 130nm Tualatin PIII with 512k cache, and has been running XP for 15 years. Surprisingly, it's faster than many P4 machines like Matthew's especially now, long after most software compilers are no longer optimizing for P4 (PIII is P6 like Core 2, and long-pipeline P4 heavily relied on optimization, with Northwood even lacking a hardware integer multiply unit). And that's with memory bandwidth lower than many SSDs today.

XP will update itself (and MSE definitions) until 9APR2019 with the POSready 2009 updates, which obviously do not include any updates for multimedia parts of the OS like Windows Media Player (so just use VLC player). Windows 7 32-bit will actually work until 14JAN2020 but I don't have enough RAM to be comfortable running it. Windows 8 32-bit is out of the question without XD/NX-bit.

You probably won't be surfing the web on it now because those chips lack SSE2 so cannot run the current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Flash, or Office 2013. The last Firefox for no SSE2 was 45.9ESR, and the last Chrome was v34. There is a recent version of Slimbrowser that uses iE8's Trident engine, but I don't know how actually up-to-date that really is. So the only current browser that would work is iE11 in Win 7.

 

[Matthew Renna]

As it happens, I have a dual PIII-s 1.4GHz PC with Rambus. It's got two of the last 130nm Tualatin PIII with 512k cache, and has been running XP for 15 years. Surprisingly, it's faster than many P4 machines like Matthew's especially now, long after most software compilers are no longer optimizing for P4 (PIII is P6 like Core 2, and long-pipeline P4 heavily relied on optimization, with Northwood even lacking a hardware integer multiply unit). And that's with memory bandwidth lower than many SSDs today.

XP will update itself (and MSE definitions) until 9APR2019 with the POSready 2009 updates, which obviously do not include any updates for multimedia parts of the OS like Windows Media Player (so just use VLC player). Windows 7 32-bit will actually work until 14JAN2020 but I don't have enough RAM to be comfortable running it. Windows 8 32-bit is out of the question without XD/NX-bit.

You probably won't be surfing the web on it now because those chips lack SSE2 so cannot run the current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Flash, or Office 2013. The last Firefox for no SSE2 was 45.9ESR, and the last Chrome was v34. There is a recent version of Slimbrowser that uses iE8's Trident engine, but I don't know how actually up-to-date that really is. So the only current browser that would work is iE11 in Win 7.

I know this thread was last looked at months ago, but I have some questions.
How much ram does it have, what gpu are you running, and how well does it browse the web?