Howdy yall. With my newfound spare time, I decided to kill some time with some projects. My primary project was/is resurrecting an old computer we had in the basement, and testing out the Dev build of windows 8. Well, here I am. First, specs on the computer.
Gateway GT5426E Tower
ECS Elitegroup MCP61P Motherboard (nvidia nforce 430 chipset)
Powercolor Radeon 4670
AMD Athlon64 X2 +5200 (Windsor, 2.6Ghz)
2GB Kingston DDR2-800
Western Digital Scorpio 160GB SATA. (Yes, I needed a HDD so I pulled the 160GB 2.5" out of my mom's old acer laptop).
I have it running next to my regular tower, with a seperate monitor and keyboard. I installed the 64 bit version of Windows 8 on it.
You know what? I'm impressed. Windows 8 so far seem extremely lightweight and fast. The Athlon64 X2 processor is so outclassed by even my laptop processor that it's ridiculous. Coupled with only 2GB of RAM, and a 2.5" 5400RPM HDD, and you'd think it would be slow. Well, it isn't. It's fast. Blazing fast even. It boots extremely quickly, even with MSSE and O installed, and loading at boot. So far every Windows 7 driver works perfectly, and I have not had a single issue of any kind.
Idle, it pulls about .7GB of RAM, which isn't really bad at all considering. I haven't tried any games, and I probably won't. There isn't much point, because the 4670, while not a terrible card, is ludicrously slow compared to the dual 5770s in my main. Anyway, I just wanted to comment on it. Even with the relatively outdated hardware, it is still extremely fast. Almost as fast as my desktop is in everyday tasks. I did run a few SiSandra benchmarks, and I had to laugh at how slow this processor is. (I mean seriously, it's dual-core, 2.6Ghz instead of 3.8, and K8 architecture with no L3 cache).
It is immensely faster than it ever was with Windows vista on the same hardware. The metro UI for the start menu is going to take some getting used to. The only real niggle I've found is there is no easy way to exit out of the Windows 8 "apps". I have to resort to alt-tabbing out, and closing them from Task manager. (The new task manager is excellent as well, by the way. I like that it shows disk usage as well as CPU)
I'll keep you posted as I use it more.
Gateway GT5426E Tower
ECS Elitegroup MCP61P Motherboard (nvidia nforce 430 chipset)
Powercolor Radeon 4670
AMD Athlon64 X2 +5200 (Windsor, 2.6Ghz)
2GB Kingston DDR2-800
Western Digital Scorpio 160GB SATA. (Yes, I needed a HDD so I pulled the 160GB 2.5" out of my mom's old acer laptop).
I have it running next to my regular tower, with a seperate monitor and keyboard. I installed the 64 bit version of Windows 8 on it.
You know what? I'm impressed. Windows 8 so far seem extremely lightweight and fast. The Athlon64 X2 processor is so outclassed by even my laptop processor that it's ridiculous. Coupled with only 2GB of RAM, and a 2.5" 5400RPM HDD, and you'd think it would be slow. Well, it isn't. It's fast. Blazing fast even. It boots extremely quickly, even with MSSE and O installed, and loading at boot. So far every Windows 7 driver works perfectly, and I have not had a single issue of any kind.
Idle, it pulls about .7GB of RAM, which isn't really bad at all considering. I haven't tried any games, and I probably won't. There isn't much point, because the 4670, while not a terrible card, is ludicrously slow compared to the dual 5770s in my main. Anyway, I just wanted to comment on it. Even with the relatively outdated hardware, it is still extremely fast. Almost as fast as my desktop is in everyday tasks. I did run a few SiSandra benchmarks, and I had to laugh at how slow this processor is. (I mean seriously, it's dual-core, 2.6Ghz instead of 3.8, and K8 architecture with no L3 cache).
It is immensely faster than it ever was with Windows vista on the same hardware. The metro UI for the start menu is going to take some getting used to. The only real niggle I've found is there is no easy way to exit out of the Windows 8 "apps". I have to resort to alt-tabbing out, and closing them from Task manager. (The new task manager is excellent as well, by the way. I like that it shows disk usage as well as CPU)
I'll keep you posted as I use it more.