pio

I've been REALLY loving my 7900XTX. A 7600XT with 16GB VRAM sounds like a very attractive 1080p / 1440p option. Wow. I hate to say it and bring the green team into the conversation, but Nvidia really doesn't have much of a solution in these budget ranges. They have the RTX 4060, and the much more expensive 4060Ti, but both are only 8GB cards. Today's games, even at 1080p definitely are starting to use more and more VRAM. DLSS, yeah sure. AMD has FSR and AFMF though too, which also do work and work well too now. The GPU competition is starting to get good. Wish it would bring the prices down some though, I still say the entire stack of cards is overpriced from both parties. -_-

I'm always promoting EHW. Anything I can do to help further our site's reach so the tech communities start realizing we're here, I'll do.

I was just going to say the 4080S looks like it could be a really good budget high end contender with its $999 MSRP. The regular 4080 is currently $1200+ on newegg. Obviously it probably won't actually release at MSRP, but we can hope. It'll be a cut in current 4080 pricing anyway, actually makes the 4080S an attractive option over the old 4080 to be honest. Especially when you consider the 4090 tax of like $2200+ on those.

I actually really enjoy WarCraft II, but I usually just play BNE on an old system. This is neat, but I'm not buying a Blizzard title to try it out.

But if they did that, they'd be taking content away that people have paid for. -_- Not that it matters, since they've nerfed the capabilities of making them run anyway by taking support of old OS's away. I think they should refund people who have bought titles that only work on older OS's, regardless of if they take them away from the store front (since they don't work) or not. Personally. I know I wouldn't be so upset over this kind of crap if they gave me my money back.

I might be in, might not. We'll see if I have stuff running in time to be in.

Does that one even support video files? it CLAIMS you can put "movies" on the TF card, but then doesn't list a single video file extension its capable of playing. Resolution is 128x160 on the screen on that, so keep that in mind. I would try really old codecs, that device says right in the description it was made for Windows 98 (and the specs make me think similar). I would be shooting for old avi or mpeg codecs for that to try. I wouldn't hold my breathe though with it either.

In - pioneerisloud

I'll admit to being a noob with handheld PC's, but isn't it mostly the software that's the big hiccup on these devices today? What I mean is, a Steam deck is supposed to be a finalized product and they seem to work pretty well. But the Windows devices I've heard of, all seem to have problems because of Windows. Hopefully MSI gets permission to use SteamOS, or maybe it'll be possible to load SteamOS on them. I'd LOVE to have a Windows capable handheld to be honest, I just don't know if Windows is ready for that (again). Their last attempt at a mobile capable desktop OS was 8, and well, we know how that went.

Woohoo! I'll sign up. EDIT: Awww, its a closed beta test for the alpha, only for like 2 weeks. Jan 17-31st. I couldn't properly give them the feedback they'd need from beta testers, I don't think I'd play it nearly enough to do that. I'll wait till its actually out in whatever stage.

I wasn't invited. I'd play, used to play the original WoT years and years ago.

I remember playing something similar to that in my Windows 98 days, wonder if it was Zork. I'll have to look around for that, I want to experience it actually natively on DOS! Not trying to keep off topic or anything, but hey..........cool vintage games count me in!

Do it!!!!!!!! You knew that was coming though.

After researching it a tad more, yes 775 CPU's seem to support the missing instruction that K8's are missing. Makes sense, since K8 came before 775 did, K8 was released as the "first" 64bit CPU ever. Intel answered with the P4 for 775 (and Pentium D to TRY to compete with the Athlon64 x2's). And then later smoked the K8's with the Core 2 Duo. So yes, makes sense that Intel started that instruction set earlier than AMD did. Socket 423 and 478 P4's however will not run it. Granted those weren't 64bit CPU's anyway. That was a one off issue, yes. But the point still stands, you can't game on Windows 10 with vintage hardware. Windows 10 requires a quad core just to get the CPU usage below 100% at idle. -_- I can knock my Ryzen 5800x down to dual core without HT, just 2 threads, and it sits at 100% CPU usage 24/7. Enable my 5800x into a quad thread CPU, and CPU usage is magically at 0% idle.

Wasn't that run one of the top hwbot runs for that hardware, giving you massive hwbot points IIRC? Yup......can't run that anymore. -_-

Look, Ultra...... I never ONCE said that this move from Steam isn't something you can mitigate with modern hardware and OS's. That's duh, we all know that. The point I was making, is that this completely ruins the purchases of old games (on Steam), that were bought on purpose to play on old hardware. This is 110% a fact that you CANNOT dispute. Try to run a 4870x2 on Windows 11, tell me how well the driver install goes. Or same thing trying to install Windows 10 or 11 to an older CPU. I never said that this is a problem for people with modern hardware. It's a problem for people with older hardware, benchmarking (3dmark is on Steam), and other uses of old hardware such as retro gaming.

Dude, you just dissed our entire hwbot team........... We've got team members buying 4870x2's right now.......

I beg to differ on that last point. Retro and Enthusiast go hand in hand. The only people that are into retro hardware, are the people who have a geniune love of hardware itself. Retro enthusiasts, I'd say are a grade above your standard enthusiast that has one rig and upgrades regularly. It absolutely IS true. Try to run Windows 10 on a K7 or a Pentium 3 or Socket 423 P4. You'll find that games run just fine on that hardware on Windows 7, whereas they won't even install Windows 10. The K8 thing as well, which is newer. That's the whole point I'm making here mate. Steam is essentially stealing games from my access, that I've paid for, that I play on the systems designs to run them. Yes, YES, I "can" run them on modern hardware with a modern OS. But I shouldn't HAVE TO.

TY. I wasn't sure if the cutoff was Socket 939 or if AM2 K8's were included. I know K10's work, which I said. ............didn't I say that like 10 times? Yes, a K8 can install Win10 x86. But its not going to play games on Steam in 10 x86. The CPU is stuck at 100% the whole time because of the Windows 10 overhead required. But yet 2 weeks ago, my K8 build was happily playing my Steam games on Windows 7 x64. You're also negating every OTHER CPU that's older than K8, that can run and play games on Windows 7 just fine, but can't run Windows 10. I never said this was a problem for people with modern hardware, this is a problem for vintage / retro enthusiasts.

LOL, no its absolutely NOT a fact. I can install Windows 7 and enjoy it on an Athlon 1100MHz (yes, x86). And yes, it'll play games too with my Radeon 9800XT. However it too, will not even try to install Win10 x86, let alone play games. K8, absolutely is missing the CMPXCHG16b instruction set, which is a requirement for Windows 8.1 x64 and newer. This is a fact. Absolutely NOBODY, nobody at all, has EVER gotten Windows 10 x64 to run on a K8. I was wrong about Core 2. I'll give you that, but I also said from the very first comment I've never tried a Core 2 with Windows 10 yet. Maybe the 775 motherboard chipsets have the CMPXCHG16b instruction set, and maybe that's why those work? I really don't know. It was implemented with AMD during the K10 era. As far as sending you a board, dude I'll send you a whole 939 board, CPU, and RAM combo if you really want to do this. I have a stack of 6 of them in my storage closet lol.

Prove it, because I already did in my build log thread. Don't have a K8? PM me, I'll send you one just so you can prove me "wrong".

I have plenty of Windows 10 boxes. Yes, this actually does effect me 110%. My daily driver retro rig is a Socket 939 Opteron 180 with a GTX 480 in it, running Windows 7 x64 because nothing newer will run on it due to missing that instruction set CMPXCHG16b. I used to actually play games on it, I did just a month ago actually. In Steam. Ran my older titles beautifully actually.

Okay fine. I'll send you a 939 board, and YOU install Windows 10 x64 to it then? You're completely missing the point and running a rant about something that doesn't even matter. Windows 10 isn't a gaming OS for older hardware, its not. It cannot run on a lot of old hardware, (read the thread I linked) due to that missing CMPXCHG16b instruction set. And the hardware it CAN run on (that's vintage), it won't run games (even older games) due to missing drivers for the GPU, or the CPU just not having enough grunt power to get through Windows alone. For THOSE type of people, with retro machines, forcing Windows 10 is a bad bad thing.

Sigh, that's Windows 10 x86. Are you gaming with only 2GB of RAM? Do you really think a P4 is going to game with Windows 10? It will with 7. With 10, there's not enough CPU leftover.

Okay here, you find me a video of Windows 10 x64 actually running on a K8. I'll wait.