Gaming and VIA systems

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Prmetime

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Hi all. The vast majority of you will laugh at this thread but I'm curious to see what people have tried. The latest and greatest will not work on a C3 or C7 Mini/Nano/Pico-itx board but how about some older stuff. What about Starcraft, Masters of Orion II, Battlefield 1942 or Homeworld? Let me know what you have tried and if it was playable. The screen resolution would be nice also. :D
 
Many of those game have a 1ghz P3 as the requirement, so they probably could run on a 1.5ghz VIA.

I wonder how VIA's perform on a clock for clock basis.
 
Well, crysis runs fine on my set of voodoo 2's in sli, Paired with a slot 1 celeron.
 
Well in all truth some of these cpu's can hardly run windows + firefox nevermind 3d games.
 
As a basic benchmark - I could play diablo 2 on a fanless 533 with the built in video card. Playable... not fast. A video card helps considerably. Mame works (grin)
 
Are there any VIA mobo's with an integrated CPU that take DDR2 and have a PCI-E slot? If so, I might pick one up and test it.
 
The VIA cpu's arnet really powerfull enough to utalize this slot, so i doubt it.
 
I played Starcraft & Homeworld back in the day on my 233MHz K6 with a 16MB onboard graphics card, so I'm pretty certain it'll run on a modern VIA board! You shouldn't have too much of a problem running stuff like Unreal Tournament, I ran that on the aforementioned K6 at 1024*768 as well.
 
ring.of.steel said:
The VIA cpu's arnet really powerfull enough to utalize this slot, so i doubt it.
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I was under the impression that the expansion slots were handled by a seprate chip on the motherboard. And its not like any GPU's max out the PCI-E slot anyway.
 
Are there any VIA mobo's with an integrated CPU that take DDR2 and have a PCI-E slot? If so, I might pick one up and test it.
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There are plenty of Via systems that support DDR2 but none that I know of that has a PCI-E slot.

That doesn't mean you can't find a Mini-ITX board that has a PCI-E slot.MSI makes a Mini-ITX motherboard that takes Core 2 Duo mobile processors, has a PCI-E slot, and takes DDR2 memory.
 
WOW, I was expecting at least S3 Savage 4 performance levels (because that's what the UniChrome Pro is supposed to be), but I have to say I'm disappointed. I got better framerates with my old 16MB Riva TnT at 640x480. Did you SEE the framerate drop noticeably after he picked up the crowbar?

In fact, the only card I've seen perform WORSE than this on Half-Life was my old Rendition v2200 Thriller 3D 4MB, which forced me to knock the resolution down to 512x384. I bought the TnT so I could actually FINISH Half-Life, and I did so at a comfortable 800x600 resolution.

And that Quake III review is obviously just a fluff piece, I love the fact that the reviewer insists that the game is "smooth as silk" while the game is constantly dropping frames, and slows to a noticeable stutter when effects like the rocket blast are rendered. That's not "smooth as silk" by any definition, and the problem will only get worse when you actually play versus more than one opponent.

Not bad for an ultra-portable, but since you need to attach a mouse anyway, it's kinda not worth the effort.

And if you REALLY want to play games on your Via system, pick up a PCI video card. It will perform many times faster, even with PCI as a bottleneck, because the on-board graphics are from 1999, and really suck.
 
You should be fine if you pick up a pci card. I think the best current card is a 2400pro and Albatros is suppose to be releasing a 8600GT and/or 8600GTS pci card in the not so distant future. I would think you could squeeze by with the titles you listed on that and certainly so with the Albatros cards. The pci-e mini itx options are nice but the board and cpu will cost more then two 8800GTs:/

I played Diablo 2 for its first 3 years on a 233Mhz celeron compaq presorio with 64MB of RAM. Played like crap but it was fun. Bought a used Vodoo 3 after a couple of years and that greatly improved it. That was the game that got me into pc hardware, had to bulk up the system to run 4 bots. Probably wouldnt be where I am today if it werent for the requirements of those damn botting programs. lol
 
practal said:
I played Diablo 2 for its first 3 years on a 233Mhz celeron compaq presorio with 64MB of RAM. Played like crap but it was fun.
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I played Diablo 2 on a P166 with 64MB of RAM. Ran just fine.... (As did pretty much any other 2d game. -Baldurs Gate excluded- )
 
Don't forget VIA & nVidia were proud of their little one-two combo of a new nano coupled with a PCI-E slot for discreet graphics. I don't have the link on hand, but it was playing Crysis too. (Which does say a lot regardless of settings)
 
Anyone know where to buy a nano motherboard?
 
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Well I should be answering my own question pretty soon. I picked up a refurbished HP 2133 Mini Note which has a 1.2GHz C7, 2 Gigs of RAM, and the Chrome 9 IGP (which is supposed to be the best IGP S3 has at the moment). As soon as I get an external DVD drive to load the games on the machine, I will let you know what happens. It seems like most of my games will run fine since they are all old. I'm curious to see if BF1942 will run...
 
You don't have another rig you can load the games from? Just set the optical drive to shared and do it over the network, unless it's a huge install it shouldn't take very long.
 
It looks like your HP 2133 is the same spec as mine. Let me know how it handles as I currently only play Hexic & GTA2 on there to pass the time. Slightly off topic but does anyone know if any of the Doom games were re-released for WinXP? as I'd love to give them a crack on the HP 2133.
 
Ok, I haven't done much with the Netbook other than use it for what I bought it for (web surfing, skype, etc). I have loaded some games onto a thumbdrive but I haven't installed them yet. I did just pick up Windows 7 for the Netbook which will be my next task as I just got done updating my laptop. So, if everything goes according to plan, I will start loading games on the HP in a little bit and I will tell you what works and what doesn't. Considering the vast majority of the games that I own are pretty old, I don't think there will be too many problems with what I have. :D
 
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