As my motherboard broke down some days ago, I figured I could give a shot to my old PC. It is an Athlon XP @ 1.15Ghz with 512MB SDRAM and an integrated graphics card. Clearly, this PC set-up is old. In fact, it’s reaaaally old. One of the reasons I wanted to give it a shot is the whole nostalgia thing. I mean, we remember all those great days of our past and want to relieve them, but what happens when you relieve them in a modern day with the same old hardware? Were our systems powerful enough for our daily activities? How come we were able to play games with GPU’s that had 8MB RAM? How were our systems performing with only 512MB of RAM? Well, it’s time to find out.
Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning. 512MB is too little these days. With MSN and NOD32 running in idle mode, I was already using 385MB. You can squeeze a little RAM by disabling a lot of background activities but this won’t help you when you are about to browse the internet. We tried IE8, FireFox Portable and Chrome and the RAM usage sky-rocketed in a lot of websites. This is primary due to the new layouts of almost every website, as the have Flash videos and such things that have a huge impact in the RAM usage. A lot of times we were averaging at 800MB and thank God for the Virtual Memory capabilities of Windows, as we wouldn’t be able to make it through otherwise.
On top of that, the integrated graphics card is really shitty. I now understand each and everyone that hasn’t bought a decent or above average GPU and I strongly recommend for everyone to get one. My ASRock K7S41GX is using the Mirage Graphics that has 64MB. This integrated card is unable to playback 720p movies. So forget all of your HD content. Same goes for HD streaming, as all the HD videos in YouTube were choppy as hell. I wasn’t expecting miracles but damn, we are talking about video playback, not decoding or encoding in HD format.
So this setup is useless for most of today’s standards but what about the games and all those good memories? Is it capable of delivering just that? Nope, it is not. Again the main problem is our integrated graphics card. We tried some games that were released in 1997-2000. Given the fact that this motherboard was manufactured in 2004, I was expecting good things. But I was disappointed.
Some good news first though. Mortal Kombat 4 was running without issues at 60fps. Graphically, it is as bad as you can remember it. The PC version is not based on the arcade but it is a simple port of the PSX version. Thanks to the accelerated graphics, it looks better than the PSX version but this can’t save the day. It’s really sad that Midway didn’t port the arcade version and I’m still jealous of the special Gold version that was released for Dreamcast after a few years.
Next stop, Fifa98. As with Mortal Kombat 4, Fifa98 was running smoothly without any issues. This was one of the best Fifa’s ever, but today… well, you can clearly see how arcade-ish it was. It can’t compare with today’s soccer games but if you don’t have any other option, it’s a nice and fun game. Just remember that it is as arcade as soccer can get. Sometimes, it reminded me of the last arcade versions of Super SideKicks. Only difference is that Fifa98 has more options, more leagues and lasts longer. Still, it is a good game.
But hey, what about the 2000’s games? What about Thief2, Deus Ex, Forsaken or Rally Championship 2000. Well, things are not looking good for these games and no, I didn’t have the guts to test Half-Life as it would be a huge slide-show. For starters, Forsaken was not working at all, as I was getting a video/audio error message. Rally Championship 2000 was running but it was lagging. At 1024x768 it was running with 20fps and the sound was lagging a lot. Controls were lagging too, thus making the whole driving experience unplayable to say the least. Thief 2 was sluggish too, as it was running with 13-17fps at 1024x768x16bit. These games are really old, way older than the motherboard. The integrated graphics card should be able to handle them. I mean come on… they were released 4 years before it.
Lastly, I tried Deus Ex. To tell you the truth, I was shocked at first as the training was running fine, even though I was using the lowest resolution (640x480x16bit). But things got worse when I started the first mission. The game was running with 14-20fps, even when there weren’t a lot of objects or enemies on screen. As I tried to rush in and finish the first mission, I remembered why we all love Deus Ex. Sure the AI is shitty by today's standards and quite forgiving, but the whole vibe of the game is amazing. The entire first level is huge with so many different places and so many things to do. If you are a new gamer, play Deus Ex and find out what games used to be. If you are an old one, replay it. Go ahead and do it. There is a reason why this is one of the best games ever. But do it with a nice PC setup and not one like the one I used. Cause you won’t be able to enjoy it.
All in all, those memories are great. But if you get stuck with an old PC setup in these days, you are really screwed. Whether you want to browse the internet, to watch HD movies or to play some old games, an old PC with little RAM and an integrated graphics card will make your life a living hell. If you get stuck to a PC like this, you’ll have to upgrade it, especially the RAM and the GPU. The point of this article though is not to say the obvious, but to see how well a middleware PC of 2004 can keep up with today’s, ordinary standards. And it can’t. It struggles but at the end of the day, it simply can’t. Furthermore, gaming is unacceptable with a PC setup like the above, even for titles that were released way before its time. And although the Mirage Graphics has 64MB, its performance was identical to the Voodoo2 (and it had only 8MB). And as a result of this and as we can see from the above examples, you’ll only be able to play games that were released a decade before this PC setup. So if you want to 'relive' those precious moments, make sure you have your current PC and not an old one!
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