Little insight required about "modern" computer industry
 

Okay, here is the deal: my computer is slowly dying. There might still be a few years left in it since it was very high quality when I bought it... But it is already 10 years old and it won't get younger. So, long story short, I went to my preferred local shop (which happen to be the same one than where I got this computer) and began chatting with the guy for a new replacement.

So, knowing that I'd still want to play old games with my computer and knowing all the problems which can arise when trying to play 32 bits games on a 64 bits machine, I decided to go with a dual boot install with two distinct HD. Then, knowing XP would not really work well with multiple cores, I asked for a powerful single core. I expected at least 2 Ghz minimum...

Turns out that there is not even single cores left in the "modern" industry anymore? What's this? I'm simply astounded to realize it. The best I seem to be able to get right now is a two cores 2.9 ghz... Considering the computer I'm typing on right now is 1.8ghz and that 2.9ghz divided by 2 is 1.45... It actually appears to me, as far as my knowledge is concerned about the whole thing, that I'll never be able to replace my computer up to the same level than the one I bought frigging 10 years ago!

Something must be wrong here. There has to be something I don't understand which make up for it. This is where I hope the tech savy people around here will be able to help. A little help understanding this please? :unsure:

Thank you.

First of all, the advertised Hz rating is per core of course, so 2.9 GHz with two cores is 5.8 GHz total. And that's probably very obsolete (which series is it, Pentium D?): its power usage will probably very high (overheating). And you could end up paying the vintage price of a Rolls Royce for a Zastava Yugo.

A single core makes no sense whatsoever, it's like wanting a steam car. Clock rates can't be increased indefinitely because of heat, and the way to get more speed is to put more cores. Not to mention it allows parallelism, and this means user interfaces can respond to user interaction while they're performing long tasks in the background. It's very long ago that the industry moved away from single cores; and the later single core CPUs had hyper-threading.

You seem to go to extreme lengths to ensure compatibility with old games, and it's your choice. But what you want is a "new old" computer and that doesn't exist, single cores aren't being made any longer, you're very late to find out; I wonder if they're still making CPUs with only two cores instead of four at least, but I wouldn't bother buying them anyway. If you want something like what you have, repair your current computer; whatever's wrong with it, that's by far more doable than what you propose.

My opinion is that what you propose is absurd, for games and of course for every other purpose that you'll use the computer for. Issues when running old games can be worked out. And if you want an old PC besides your main one for old games, get an old one (or keep the one you have), because "new old" computers aren't sold anywhere.

Actually, I was surprised by the very low cost which got out. Something like 800$ with a lot of fluff added in because I do wish the computer to be able to work a modern OS like... Huh, what's the last one out already? Windows 7? I asked for a powerful computer with good graphic card, lots of memory, etc. The total.

You also need to factor in the extra HD, extra tech time for the install, etc. It doesn't sound costly to me at all if that computer last me another 10 years... That's only about 80$ a year.

Of course if it really mean that both cores would run at 2.9ghz then it change things a bit. It would make more sense too because the way I was looking at it, the computer industry actually looked like they were going backward instead of forward.

I understand the interest of having multiple cores for modern computers. But that's for computer which can actually use more than one core! Old games from Win XP era and older (which I have a ton and a half of games) simply will never work with two cores no matter what I do so that's why I want to be able to rely on a powerful single core if I need to.

Edit: Here is the specs I got for the computer I got quoted for. See anything funny in it?
I already realized that they only gave me 4gigs ram for this computer. I guess it would be best to up it, unless XP would go funny if there was more ram than it could handle?

Euuurrhhh, nope, you got something wrong here.
XP works swell on multiple core PCs.
Drawback is that you lose a lot of speed as XP isn't build to take advantage of spreading the workload over multi cores.

Example, ripping a DVD movie to high quality MP4 on my quad core:
Win7 : approx 10 minutes.
Xp (same PC!) : approx 22 minutes.
Ubuntu: approx 13 minutes.

On the other hand, I wouldn't run Win7 on a single core, there XP wins as Win7 is always busy with a lot of things on the background, much more then XP.

Me thinks that Japo's advise probably the best, buy a new PC if needed, but keep your old one for 'old games' and stuffs, that's also what I do.
If your old one isn't worth keeping in working order, look around, there are plenty really cheap sacond hand fast single cores to find.
Last I bought 4 (yes 4) HP-Compaq d530 office desktops for 100€ (25€/PC !! ), 2.9Ghz single cores, makes lovely gaming XP PCs after cranking up the RAM to 2GB and putting an AGP vidcard in them.....

XP will not 'go funny' on plenty RAM, but if you want that your OS can use more than 4GB you will need a 64 OS, XP or Win7 will only only take advantage of more than 4GB if 64b OS.
A 32b OS will work fine on even something as let say 16GB, but can't use the extra RAM.(page file restrictions)

If you are fit with computers, you can handle the situtation very easy. Split your resources and turn a little bit your knobs.

I bought my little treasure 4 years ago. Is an Acer Aspire One 150L, surprisingly much faster than the best equipped one (normal size laptop) of the same year. :perv: Maybe they put to much stuff in it. :perv:

Well on this little fellow.. I have put different versions of MW on it to run older and newer programms, games etc. and it's working out pretty well. Often you can run a old game properly if you shut graphics, and what else is needed, a little bit down. Futher you can get out of the internet these nice tools and applications which are allowing you to run the rest. Or run the right windows mode, sometimes it is helping, too.

There are so many ways to handle a new computer to make it work with older stuff.



I am happy, because of (hobby) programmers of today. They are creating games to suit everyones need. You can find from DOS to ..... everything.




my adventure will hopefully run from windows 98 till 7 (32 / 64 bit)

Actually not obvious. Some unscrupulous a**holes have been known to advertise 2x1.45 gHz as 2.9 gHz "because it's the same" (to them).

I didn't know there were cases of Hz ratings advertised in total instead of per core, but I guess only the shadiest dealers try to fool people with that; I've never heard of it. At least if you look the model at AMD or Intel's websites they will have the rating per core. And CPUs under 2 GHz per core aren't being made any longer either, except for netbooks and tardpads.

The point's that the multiple cores don't create compatibility uses, and one of the four cores of a modern CPU will be more than enough for any old game. Old single-threaded games will simply use one of the cores only. At any rate the bottleneck with games is very seldom the CPU, but insufficient RAM or the GPU. Actually because of this, games have been very late at adapting to multicores, many games made even today don't use more than one core (including DOSBox so far, which is too bad because that for one is CPU intensive).

I've actually heard about the Dark Engine (System Shock 2 etc.) giving trouble in multicores, but it can be fixed with a community patch. And AFAIK it can only be due to something like the game creating multiple threads (which was possible long before multicores existed) for whatever reason, but then relying on them running in a single core or else a race condition would arise; this would be a bug. I'm not aware of any other game having trouble because the number of cores, it shouldn't have any effect, except that you have the rest of the cores free for other background tasks.

Since you can't find a single core--and it wouldn't make sense to want it--there's no reason not to choose a quad core. It's true, though, that games even nowadays aren't often the programs that benefit most from the number of cores, or core speed for that matter.

I assume the Windows 7 you're getting is 64-bit? 32-bit OSes, including all editions of XP except Pro x64, will have no problem running if you have more than 4 GB of RAM installed, except that they won't use it. Actually they won't use anything above 3 GB or so because of the space reserved for other hardware memory. Don't confuse this limit to physical memory with the 2/3 GB limit to (virtual) memory accessible to each program.

Programs for Windows 32-bit work just fine in 64-bit (WoW64). If there are compatibility problems they're more likely caused by the Windows edition (7 vs. 9x or XP) than by bitness. But it's true that 16-bit programs won't run at all in Windows 64-bit; but in Windows 32-bit NT/XP they run in emulation (NTVDM) anyway, not natively. It's not worth it to stick to obsolete 32-bit because of compatibility, considering the RAM ceiling (which is the reason to move to 64-bit at all).

For compatibility you can have, besides DOSBox and Virtual PC, which is what I stick to, multiple boot with XP or 9x, and you'll continue to be able to use 4+ GB of RAM in your Windows 7 x64.

Those specs you're considering aren't high in my opinion, not only the CPU. 4 GB is indeed the minimum computers pack nowadays, and anyway I bought DDR3 1333 MHz at under 10 €/GB one or two years ago. If you want more RAM plan ahead now, otherwise you may be sold more sticks with less GB each that will use up too many board slots.

500 GB isn't a big HD nowadays; I've just happened to buy a 2 TB HD (cache 64 MB) for 110 €. (If you wanted more than 2 TB, only Vista or higher would be able to read the disk.) I know practically nothing about graphic cards, I can only tell you I have this one which is nothing fancy while having 1 GB, and it cost me 56 €.

I don't know about Canada, but I can give you this Spanish price (in euros) from a flier I happen to have at home, and I don't think they should be very different in Canada except taxes (sales tax alone is 21% here).

399 € including taxes
Intel Core i3-2120: 2 cores, 3.3 GHz, 3 MB cache, 65 W TDP
6 GB DDR3 RAM
500 GB HD
nVidia GeForce GT620 1 GB dedicated
Windows 7 Home Premium
Keyboard and mouse included

As mentioned before, current processors do have full backward compatibility with older Intel architectures, all to way to the old 16-bit ones, the compatibility problem is in the OS.

Another thing, the parallel world is advancing rapidly, and won't be long until single core programs can be automatically rewritten to better use multi-procesor resources, so I wouldn't ignore this possibility.

Thank you all for your input. This will help me a bunch.

So I confirmed with the guy that it is indeed 2.5ghz per core (thanks Capo) and asked him a new price with 32 gigs of ram instead.

500 gigs hard drives might not sound like much for you guys but like I said I'm going to have two of them (because of dual boot) and I'm used to my 82 gigs HD on this computer... And still have something like 15 gigs to spare even though I have plenty of games installed. This won't be a problem for me. :)

About this current computer... The motherboard is slowly dying. I don't think it would be worth the trouble to try to "repair" it... It is simply starting to fail only because it is too old. 10 years is probably about 8 years too much in regard to the normal life expectancy of a computer nowaday... :p

I am second about virtual machines. They are maybe still bad with video emulation (I never heard about VM that can emulate even GeForce2 up to "acceleration" level, and I would be glad to know about that), but otherwise they are quite trustworthy. So it's don't needed to have anything "real" older than XP.

XP itself can work with multiple cores - but it's programs that must use it. Any modern program can utilize multi-core on XP, but if, say, System Shock 2 was never aware of several cores, it will not use it, no matter what. :) Same for other games for that era.

Otherwise, it looks fine. Slightly low HDDs, as for my tastes (I have 2Gb as main disk and 1Gb for backup - and it's too low! Low! :), but can be just fine for you, I suppose. :)

That's a LOT! Almost only very very high end computers devoted to some specific professional pack more than 8 GB even nowadays. But if you want so much good for you, I always say nobody can have too much RAM. In the medium or long I'd certainly recommend 16 GB. As I said it shouldn't be much more than $10 per GB. But that means 32 GB could cost over $300!

What I heard about SS2 was that it tends to crash in computers with multiple cores, and it could be solved by confining it to one of them in the task manager, or with the Ddfix community mod/patch. I don't know if it's true, and if it were, the only way a program can be affected by the number of cores is by creating several threads on purpose.

The multi core problem on XP for SS2 is true, and is valid for several other old games also, like Fallout 2, among others. I don't know the exact reason also, however it seemed to be related to an error in how XP handled work distribution among the cores.

This problem is even older than multi-core: hyperthreading also started to interfere with older games. I recall using "set affinity" option in Task Manager (WinXP) for Thief, which otherwise hanged.

The reason why I asked for 32 gigs of ram is because I'm planning for the long run. I want another computer which can last me another 10 years.

If it gets too costly the guy who is doing the research for me will inform me. I trust the guy, he's the one who got me this computer I'm typing on ATM.

Yeah, and I seen answer on this question above: SS2 don't know about multiple cores, but it uses multithread. And (guessing) as WinXP tries to "parallel" multithreading processes - when it's must be not - it crashes game.

Threads are parallel by definition and are meant to be so. As you say and I said earlier, the only way a program can behave any different in this context is if it creates threads, the OS won't do it unsolicited, it doesn't happen on its own, there are particular API calls for it. The problem must be that the Dark Engine had bugs, but they happened to be masked in single-core computers. Each thread decides when to release its core (or whole CPU in single cores without hyper-threading) for other waiting threads; if it doesn't, it will happen to continue running before the rest of threads in time.

But this isn't a feature of the code, and the only benefit of creating threads is to have them run in parallel if possible. If you want code to run in sequence, creating threads is just overhead, and of course it won't run in sequence unless the computer happens to be single-core without hyper-threading. And of course making on purpose a program with multiple threads, that don't release control at least for time slicing in single cores, and then even making the program so that it won't work with multiple cores when parallelism does appear, would be as stupid as it gets.

I'd guess the multi-threading in the Dark Engine was a commendable feature, perhaps thinking in the future, but as its o often happens with games, the engine was released with bugs still outstanding. The problem with parallelization is that sooner or later you need to synchronize everything back, and this is hard and prone to error. This bug must have been considered non-fatal because at that time there was no multi-threading hardware.

Are you sure it was a bug inherent of the Dark Engine? I remember games running on other engines presenting the same problem, like Fallout 2 as I mentioned, Syberia and others.

As for threads, they used to serve another purpose in their origins, besides actual parallelism, which was flux control. It was (and is) common to see programs using them to block on file/socket reads, while the rest of the logic kept running, or to (pseudo) parallel run background tasks, etc.

Edit -

I was thinking here, when these games crashed on multi-core they weren't simply raising a process exception and having Windows kill them, they actually locked the entire machine, forcing a hard reset. In my opinion, this seems to be an OS fault, but I am not sure.

I was just speculating. I looked for info on the Dark Engine problem but I found no technical details. Of course I never said that other engines or games wouldn't have similar problems. And programs can stop working in many ways, it would be nice if they raised an exception every time, but sometimes they turn into zombies, eat all CPU, etc.

It's true that a system crash cannot be cause by an application, only by a fault in the hardware, OS or drivers. A BSOD would be a sure tell, but an application can eat all the CPU so that the whole system stops responding, without any fault in the OS, which is just busy running the application's infinite loop. Again I don't know what's the case with the Dark Engine.

I don't know about those uses of threads... Surely a background thread isn't needed to enforce a lock.

Well, I decided to go ahead and research it a bit. It seems the real cause is quite controversial, posts from back when multi cores started becoming available blame it on several things, from poor design choices in the softwares to OS/hardware malfunction.

Microsoft has some posts on clocking issues in multi core environments, as different cores produce different clock readings, older software would become confused/assume wrong things. This could be part of the cause.

In the end, I think it's a bummer. Also, from what I researched, it doesn't seem CPU starvation (as in completely locking out other threads/processes) is possible in XP, even though it can slow down the machine considerably.

Oh, it's a theory, actually.

In real software, it's quite possible to slow machine as far as "not responding" state. For WinXP and Win2k alike (I never seen it in Win2003 though). Game/application eats so much of processor time that it simply responds 3 seconds per 3 minutes. Broke everything up to network connections. I seen that several times with some viruses, and, funny enough, with Kaspersky anti-virus (in different case, not virus-related). :) And last one was on server with 2 processors - it not helped to free it at all. :)

I agree, but what I meant is that 3 seconds in 3 minutes is still (barely) responsive, and the freezes those games caused were completely unresponsive, no matter how long you waited.

Are you getting a desktop or notebook? Because the AMD A4 and Geforce M310 are low-end components meant for laptops. If you're looking to play modern games and don't need to carry your computer around, then a desktop is better and those components aren't going to cut it.

32 GB of RAM is overkill. There's no way to future-proof a computer for 10 years. RAM is cheap and easy to upgrade. And by the time you need 32 GB of RAM, everything else in your computer will be too outdated anyways to make use of it.

For dual-booting, you don't need two hard drives for that. You could partition a single hard drive into two volumes. 500 GB may seem like a lot now, but it will fill up fast. I think 500 GB is the bare minimum of what you should get nowadays. I got a 320 GB drive 5 years ago, and I'm always struggling to find room on it.

In regards to modern games, the graphics card is the most important component. Motherboard is equally important insofar as having one that's reliable and has all of the features you think you'll need. You can get away with using a low to mid-level desktop CPU depending on your needs.

If you don't care about playing current games, then it doesn't really matter what you get.

Try making ISO's of all the games you've got and put them on that drive for backup purposes (CD's/DVD's damage). Especially the current ones. You'll find out to be running out of space pretty quick I'm sure ;)

I agree with pretty much everything Maxor said.

Thank you all again for your comments.

For the dual HD, I asked for it. That's what I want. So it is a personal choice.

The 32 megs is also pretty much the same. By the time I want to upgrade RAM (if that happen) it might be even more costly than today price simply because it will get (maybe only slightly) out of date. So, again since I want it anyways, I'm going to stick with it.

For the graphic card though, that's a very valid point which I will need to investigate further.

Well the GPU though might also alter your PSU and Motherboard choice, of course. A medium range GPU nowadays has a power requirement of 100-150 W on high load. Pair that up with a dual/quad core, 2 HDDs, a DVD drive and other peripherals you might put it, and the 500-550 W range for a PSU is the bare minimum. Might want to go over it a bit, since as I personally found out a month ago, as the PSU ages, it gives off less and less voltage, and one morning you find out that your computer gives you the middle finger because the PSU can't power all components.

And without trying to pick a fight, if you go with AMD, I'd recommend an ATI GPU (and yes, I loathe nVidia, sorry guys). a HD5770 if you want to go cheap, but if money is not a problem, one of the new series cards. If you really plan ahead, then two of the more powerful ones with SLI.

I'm no professional with hardware, but lemme give some inside how I think you should go anyway.

10 years might be alittle more then you can have on a trustable bases, but let's try the best.

Two HDD is way better solution the two partitions. 500 GB HDDs are very cheap, even 1TB disks are perfect quality nowdays. Considering the machine can include 8 HDD, there is no reason to try sparing here.

Operation-system: get your prime a Win7. Home Premium is fine. XP is "left behind" currently, like still trying to use Win98 today.

The particles come from two major company (I think ATI vs. Gefore-Nvidia, but don't hurt me for this), I suggest avoid mixing the two. Seems to be personal preference above that (but with ATI it seemed like trying Macintosh instead of PC for me).

From RAM 4 GB can be satisfying already, even without graphic card. Above 8GB you won't be able to use what you actually have (according to the shopkeepers I asked), and even on a superb construction there is no reason to have more then 16GB RAM (especially as it'll start literally eat energy).

All the periferies (DVD-drive, mouse etc.) seem to not evolve too much, so even cheap basic ones will serve proper. Heck, they even might last longer then more expensive ones.

The CPU seems most important choice.

From graphic cards I say buy the one after the first big rise in price. Those will last for some coming years while remaining stable and don't overheating or such. Above these the prive/value ratio exponentially drops.