I just upgraded my Dell r710 from Xeon L5520 to Xeon L5640. That doesn’t sound like much of a difference but the L5520 is 4 core 8 threads the L5640 is 6 core 12 threads. All for a total of $18 for two cpu.
Fantastic video! Still absolutely psyched my ol’ 1070 Ti could find some new life in your test bench. Regardless, always love seeing how old CPUs are able to handle in today’s world. Absolutely amazing how well some of them hold up! Like, I had a friend who was still using his dad’s old Core 2 Quad machine up until 2019! Only thing he’d upgraded within its nearly 10 year lifespan was the RAM and the GPU. Seriously crazy how relentless those processors were!
Watching this on my Athlon II x4 640 PC, it was my 1st PC build that I bought in 2011. Then handed it down to my brother when I upgraded to an i7-4790 in 2016. Then I upgraded to a Xeon keeping the i7 system as backup, eventually giving the i7 to my brother. Then upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5700x around August of last year.The Athlon was stowed away for a while then I decided to reassemble it. It still works along with the HD 6770 that it was originally paired with. But its IMC is clearly dying, I've got issues using it back then around 2015 or 2016 because it only recognized 1 out of the 2 RAM sticks that I installed. I even bought a new Asrock AM3+ board that time thinking that the issue was with the ECS mobo. Few years ago I bought an Athlon dual core of the same generation just as a diagnostic CPU in case I might need to troubleshoot my AM3 build and the dual core immediately saw 2 RAM sticks installed. I would need to reseat the Athlon x4 640 to get it to recognize the 2 RAM sticks. Underclocking the RAM sticks currently works so as to remove some load off the IMC in the Athlon 640. Definitely got my money's worth with this build! Currently using it as my coding/low powered workload/retro-gaming machine!
@@HardwareHaven Yup, the more textures have to be streamed the more demand to the CPU, best is to have textures on medium, shaders on low/medium, model details on high and draw distance on high(draw distance depends mainly on RAM), i think any post procesing is GPU too.
From what I have read in regards to Valhime CPU usage is the game tries really hard to efficiently schedule tasks across cores to try more effectively feed the main core that is running the game though I think in parctice it's less than stellar even on newer chips with more cores and hyper threading on offer. I can only imagine what you witnessing is this getting exacerbated since it is a much much older architecture and even slower system memory and per core IPC not being as high.
Thanks! Yeah.. I was focused more on benchmarking and also trying not to double jump or dash to avoid 'spoilers'. It made it hard to do basic things lol
Great video! I remember growing up when our only computer was in my dad’s office, HP Pavilion a1310n, running Windows XP from 2005-ish. My siblings and I tried to use it for gaming and anything from the XP era ran okay but competitive gaming was a big No for the PC.
hmmmmm as I remember the athlon II's were quiet friendly to overclocking in and around 500 or more mhrz and would be interesting to see a side by side comparison
I noticed on my Athlon Windows 10 build that if I changed the driver in device manager from the "K8 processor" to just "processor" it helped performance..
For anyone on an extreme budget building a "new" computer, I highly recommend looking for as new parts as possible, then working your way down through the generations, for example for the same $10 you could get this or something like pentium g3258 and I can tell you from experience that the g3258 is a lot better and for those who don't remember can also be overclocked, so if you can find a cheap motherboard you can have somewhat modern performance for next to nothing. Also don't completely overlook pre-builts either, if you're lucky you can stumble upon something pretty decent like an i5 for pretty cheap or at the very least, you can get something not great and upgrade the CPU to a base model i5 for as little as $20-30.
Believe it or not but I played Witcher 3 HD reworked project and GTA5 on PC based on that processor and it went just fine. My setup: AMD Athlon II x4 640 NVidia GTX 750Ti 2Gb Kingston HyperX Fury 8Gb DDR3
Omg i literally was running x4 640 + gtx 1070 ti yesterday, i search for a x4 640 video on youtube because i was curious and boom somebody did literally the same thing.
the 640 does not have some instruction sets that modern games use. It may be why valhiem didn't use 100 percent of the cpu. I think the max gpu I would put with that graphics card would be the gtx 1050ti, r9 380( I used with it awhile ago), or gtx 960.
i still own one of these, was one of my main pcs several years back. Its in the garage though and i've got several that surpass it in terms of cpu (mostly barely though) Its got 10 on it but the OS is messed up and basically needs a reinstall (after saving some data and then a reformat n reload)
I hope someone can explain the seemingly strange CPU utilization in Valheim. I know people who have encountered the same, lower than expected, CPU utilization with system configurations similar to this. The strange part is that this can happen in configurations where, on paper, the CPU should have enough performance(good clock speeds and core count). Maybe it has something to do with the relatively slower speeds of DDR2 and the smaller cache sizes of these older CPUs
The Athlon does not even have an L3 cache, plus more RAM would help. I usually go for the old school(Pentium II era) rule of thumb of having 4 times the System RAM of the GPU RAM, i.e. use 16GB System RAM for a 4GB video card.
Great vid 👍!i agree ,is it pretty odd pairing an athlon with an gtx 1070 ti .still though,it’s pretty amazing that an athlon can actually handle games ! Keep on making great content!!!
I found a X4 640 and FX 6300 at a thrift store about an hour before finding this video. Bought them both for 5 dollars, X4 640 came with a cooler and its original packaging. The FX 6300 came with original packaging and a cooler but no CPU 😢. I'm slowly collecting parts in hopes of building my own minecraft server 💪😎
Going to be honest I sold a pc with a athlon x640 with in it. The gaming preformance was good enough for the buyer. And I recommend picking up some games like bf5 and gta or red dead.
Great video! Have you tried increasing the resolution so that the gpu would have to work harder? I think it sometimes helps if the cpu is the bottleneck
I tried pushing gpu-specific settings to get better visuals and push the gpu a bit more, but I liked keeping the resolution at native. And it helps in the sense that you don't get big swings in frame times which can definitely make things feel less stuttery. You won't see an improvement to raw fps though if that makes sense
@@HardwareHaven It really depended on if the game was more GPU or CPU intensive, like a game of Minecraft would get 20fps at best from the CPU but a game of Roblox could easily do 60fps, now I got a new PC and use that one for a docker Minecraft server using your tutorial!
@@HardwareHaven It has been! I'm playing on it with my friends and it is awesome, as someone with very little Linux knowledge! Edit: I should mention I gave it 8gb of ram
I have one of those too, but I can't revive it as it's not easy to find an AM2 board that supports a 125w CPU that isn't very expensive. I also have on storage an Athlon II x2 250, X4 640, and a Phenom II x4 965. 😅
I have an athlon based system mines socket it a single core 3.4ghz pre Sata I found my first CPU the other day it’s a dinosaur a 500mhz amd k-6 ahh the memories I remember when halo came out I had to build a new PC, I bought it and was crashed I couldn’t play it I got it to load and barely play by OC’ing my GPU but the frame rate was like 5fps but it wouldn’t even load before that it just crashed out
I actually have the Athlon x4 641 (Socket FM1 version of this CPU) sitting in a cupboard on an A75 chipset board. I tried to gift it to a couple of bigger UA-camrs like RandomGamingInHD and BudgetBuilds but they both ignored me with RGinHD straight up blocking me from messaging him. Shame your not based in the UK as I think you'd be more likely to appreciate stuff like this. The A75 chipset was very good for it's time with USB 3.0 and SATA3 support back in 2012 for a very cheap price. If I remember correctly the board cost me about £30 and the CPU about £40 both brand new!
I wouldn't take it personally. I'm a MUCH smaller channel than them, and I still get a lot of messages about things, and it can almost be overwhelming at times. I imagine they get a lot more. Sounds like a pretty sweet mobo/cpu! I'll keep my eyes peeled for one around here. Thanks for the comment!
While gaming is interesting, I'm curious about video rendering a project, or video decoding on a Plex server, even ai training. If I understand correctly massive GPU usage in calculation, but not high in data transfer or CPU usage.
Yeah I've been trying to find ideas for utilizing GPUs outside of games, but other than encoding for plex or something like OBS, most everything else is out of my comfort zone haha
I think bottleneck is a personal thing. For me that want to play TF2 in a competitive framerate I just need a good CPU, I can use even intel HD graphics. But for my girlfriend that want to play singleplayer games with just the better graphics possible, she needs a lot more GPU than CPU. It wall depends on the way you want to play, you just gonna need a top tier CPU for playing competitive games at 200+ fps.
@@HardwareHaven Aye no worries, on my main system, for whatever reason it will only launch in directx. Which is fine, since it has a ryzen 5 3600 and 6700xt, but, still, I wish it was easily accessible in the settings like most games, even if it requires a restart
Is EMULATION possible with a PC like this? (Older consoles, like NES, SNES, MegaDrive.. Stuff like that I have 2 working computers with Athlon II / Phenom II (AM2+ or AM3.. I forget) motherboards... (One from my mother, one I inherited from my father) Also some SSDs I can use as boot drives.. My interest is not really on new consoles (though that would be cool also)... But logically, it feels like a dual core 'several gigahertz' processor should be able to run SNES games at least (3.58 MHz processor...) or even N64.. (93.75 MHz). I know... It's a very specific thing to ask.. But not many people are still using AMD processors from 12 years ago :) So it definitely feels like you're the right person to ask (wondering about "without a dedicated GPU" as well.. Until what point would that be playable?)
(Btw. I have just subscribed to your channel :) Before this, I saw a short about turning a very old PC into a media server / device mgmt server. (Will check that out in detail asap). Nice to see content that isn't about 'redlining' the newest available hardware. Especially since I firmly believe in repairing / reusing / upgrading older 'obsolete' stuff (from tools to technology) Will be watching your videos, streaming to my 39" LG full HD television that I found in the trash ;)
its NVIDIA overhead drop the frame rates, if you test it with radeon the score will be higher. dont pair GTX with old or really slow CPU, use radeon card instead. you can watch this from the steve you mention too LOL
Biggest limitation will be the lack of CPU extensions
This an be such an expensive hobby but sometimes older hardware can get the job done. Nice video
Thanks Johnny!
I just upgraded my Dell r710 from Xeon L5520 to Xeon L5640. That doesn’t sound like much of a difference but the L5520 is 4 core 8 threads the L5640 is 6 core 12 threads. All for a total of $18 for two cpu.
Fantastic video! Still absolutely psyched my ol’ 1070 Ti could find some new life in your test bench. Regardless, always love seeing how old CPUs are able to handle in today’s world. Absolutely amazing how well some of them hold up! Like, I had a friend who was still using his dad’s old Core 2 Quad machine up until 2019! Only thing he’d upgraded within its nearly 10 year lifespan was the RAM and the GPU. Seriously crazy how relentless those processors were!
Yeah the core2 stuff is still super viable with basic work. Thanks again for the GPU!
Another banger from hardware haven! Keep it up!
Watching this on my Athlon II x4 640 PC, it was my 1st PC build that I bought in 2011. Then handed it down to my brother when I upgraded to an i7-4790 in 2016. Then I upgraded to a Xeon keeping the i7 system as backup, eventually giving the i7 to my brother. Then upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5700x around August of last year.The Athlon was stowed away for a while then I decided to reassemble it. It still works along with the HD 6770 that it was originally paired with.
But its IMC is clearly dying, I've got issues using it back then around 2015 or 2016 because it only recognized 1 out of the 2 RAM sticks that I installed. I even bought a new Asrock AM3+ board that time thinking that the issue was with the ECS mobo. Few years ago I bought an Athlon dual core of the same generation just as a diagnostic CPU in case I might need to troubleshoot my AM3 build and the dual core immediately saw 2 RAM sticks installed. I would need to reseat the Athlon x4 640 to get it to recognize the 2 RAM sticks. Underclocking the RAM sticks currently works so as to remove some load off the IMC in the Athlon 640. Definitely got my money's worth with this build! Currently using it as my coding/low powered workload/retro-gaming machine!
love the vids man keep it up, one of the few youtubers who pushed me to pc building as a hobby
Oh wow! That's awesome
It's an amazing CPU for gaming. 300 FPS on Rollercoaster Tycoon.
😂
@@HardwareHaven Higher presets = GPU LOAD
LOW PRESETS = CPU LOAD
Depends on what settings. Some settings are more demanding on the cpu.
@@HardwareHaven Yup, the more textures have to be streamed the more demand to the CPU, best is to have textures on medium, shaders on low/medium, model details on high and draw distance on high(draw distance depends mainly on RAM), i think any post procesing is GPU too.
From what I have read in regards to Valhime CPU usage is the game tries really hard to efficiently schedule tasks across cores to try more effectively feed the main core that is running the game though I think in parctice it's less than stellar even on newer chips with more cores and hyper threading on offer.
I can only imagine what you witnessing is this getting exacerbated since it is a much much older architecture and even slower system memory and per core IPC not being as high.
Good luck with your chanel.
like the videos, keep it up.
The video was fun as always.
Specially the Avid Hollow Knight clip. But knowing how hard the game is, I totally understand that happening.
Thanks! Yeah.. I was focused more on benchmarking and also trying not to double jump or dash to avoid 'spoilers'. It made it hard to do basic things lol
Great video! I remember growing up when our only computer was in my dad’s office, HP Pavilion a1310n, running Windows XP from 2005-ish. My siblings and I tried to use it for gaming and anything from the XP era ran okay but competitive gaming was a big No for the PC.
Love your videos man, i really like your intro. Nice community too
I appreciate it, thanks!
The best bang for-your-buck cpu
Your channel is very underrated, keep up the good work!
Thanks, I'll try haha
Very excited to see new videos
You can try going into Windows Power Management and setting minimum Processor speed to 100 percent. It might help a little bit.
That was my first quad core CPU. Wasn't too bad back in the day
hmmmmm as I remember the athlon II's were quiet friendly to overclocking in and around 500 or more mhrz and would be interesting to see a side by side comparison
I noticed on my Athlon Windows 10 build that if I changed the driver in device manager from the "K8 processor" to just "processor" it helped performance..
Interesting... I might have to look into that
For anyone on an extreme budget building a "new" computer, I highly recommend looking for as new parts as possible, then working your way down through the generations, for example for the same $10 you could get this or something like pentium g3258 and I can tell you from experience that the g3258 is a lot better and for those who don't remember can also be overclocked, so if you can find a cheap motherboard you can have somewhat modern performance for next to nothing.
Also don't completely overlook pre-builts either, if you're lucky you can stumble upon something pretty decent like an i5 for pretty cheap or at the very least, you can get something not great and upgrade the CPU to a base model i5 for as little as $20-30.
Believe it or not but I played Witcher 3 HD reworked project and GTA5 on PC based on that processor and it went just fine. My setup:
AMD Athlon II x4 640
NVidia GTX 750Ti 2Gb
Kingston HyperX Fury 8Gb DDR3
"why isnt it possible"
"it is"
"pardon?"
I will mention Valhem. Turn off shadows and try again. I believe shadows were an issue.
Omg i literally was running x4 640 + gtx 1070 ti yesterday, i search for a x4 640 video on youtube because i was curious and boom somebody did literally the same thing.
I built a PC with a X4 640 on a Foxconn MB. It was a pretty good PC back in the day.
The fact that the cpu isn't 100% may be caused by the slow ram timing that are the actual bottleneck but i'm not an engineer...
Very possible. I was able to use ddr3 and not ddr2 though, and forgot to mention that in the video.
4:20 I think that the RAM bandwidth might be the bottleneck here.
the 640 does not have some instruction sets that modern games use. It may be why valhiem didn't use 100 percent of the cpu. I think the max gpu I would put with that graphics card would be the gtx 1050ti, r9 380( I used with it awhile ago), or gtx 960.
Interesting.. I always imagined that a game just wouldn't run at all if certain instruction sets weren't supported. I'm clueless though on that
i still own one of these, was one of my main pcs several years back. Its in the garage though and i've got several that surpass it in terms of cpu (mostly barely though) Its got 10 on it but the OS is messed up and basically needs a reinstall (after saving some data and then a reformat n reload)
I hope someone can explain the seemingly strange CPU utilization in Valheim. I know people who have encountered the same, lower than expected, CPU utilization with system configurations similar to this. The strange part is that this can happen in configurations where, on paper, the CPU should have enough performance(good clock speeds and core count). Maybe it has something to do with the relatively slower speeds of DDR2 and the smaller cache sizes of these older CPUs
I forgot to mention that I was using 8GB of ddr3, but RAM could definitely still be an issue
The Athlon does not even have an L3 cache, plus more RAM would help. I usually go for the old school(Pentium II era) rule of thumb of having 4 times the System RAM of the GPU RAM, i.e. use 16GB System RAM for a 4GB video card.
i love your videos! very fun!
Great vid 👍!i agree ,is it pretty odd pairing an athlon with an gtx 1070 ti .still though,it’s pretty amazing that an athlon can actually handle games ! Keep on making great content!!!
Thanks!
I found a X4 640 and FX 6300 at a thrift store about an hour before finding this video. Bought them both for 5 dollars, X4 640 came with a cooler and its original packaging. The FX 6300 came with original packaging and a cooler but no CPU 😢.
I'm slowly collecting parts in hopes of building my own minecraft server 💪😎
Going to be honest I sold a pc with a athlon x640 with in it. The gaming preformance was good enough for the buyer. And I recommend picking up some games like bf5 and gta or red dead.
From my experience, normally when either of the GPU or CPU are not maxed out it's the memory that is the issue
Yeah that makes sense, but I didn’t expect the ddr3 in this to be that limiting, but I guess that’s very possible
@@HardwareHaven normally either the timings are poor or the memory is just too slow
Great video! Have you tried increasing the resolution so that the gpu would have to work harder? I think it sometimes helps if the cpu is the bottleneck
I tried pushing gpu-specific settings to get better visuals and push the gpu a bit more, but I liked keeping the resolution at native. And it helps in the sense that you don't get big swings in frame times which can definitely make things feel less stuttery. You won't see an improvement to raw fps though if that makes sense
I played on a Athlon 64 X2 6000+ with a 750 ti and 2gb of ram in 2017
How’s that go?
@@HardwareHaven It really depended on if the game was more GPU or CPU intensive, like a game of Minecraft would get 20fps at best from the CPU but a game of Roblox could easily do 60fps, now I got a new PC and use that one for a docker Minecraft server using your tutorial!
@@stoutscientist Oh awesome! Hope it's working well
@@HardwareHaven It has been! I'm playing on it with my friends and it is awesome, as someone with very little Linux knowledge! Edit: I should mention I gave it 8gb of ram
I have one of those too, but I can't revive it as it's not easy to find an AM2 board that supports a 125w CPU that isn't very expensive.
I also have on storage an Athlon II x2 250, X4 640, and a Phenom II x4 965. 😅
Been meaning to ask... Would you ever release the Hardware Haven theme for us to listen and enjoy while doing work?
Done!
ua-cam.com/video/FwD2mOYDPNA/v-deo.html
can you post your intro song? It is such a banger.
Done!
ua-cam.com/video/FwD2mOYDPNA/v-deo.html
I have an athlon based system mines socket it a single core 3.4ghz pre Sata I found my first CPU the other day it’s a dinosaur a 500mhz amd k-6 ahh the memories I remember when halo came out I had to build a new PC, I bought it and was crashed I couldn’t play it I got it to load and barely play by OC’ing my GPU but the frame rate was like 5fps but it wouldn’t even load before that it just crashed out
I actually have the Athlon x4 641 (Socket FM1 version of this CPU) sitting in a cupboard on an A75 chipset board. I tried to gift it to a couple of bigger UA-camrs like RandomGamingInHD and BudgetBuilds but they both ignored me with RGinHD straight up blocking me from messaging him.
Shame your not based in the UK as I think you'd be more likely to appreciate stuff like this.
The A75 chipset was very good for it's time with USB 3.0 and SATA3 support back in 2012 for a very cheap price. If I remember correctly the board cost me about £30 and the CPU about £40 both brand new!
I wouldn't take it personally. I'm a MUCH smaller channel than them, and I still get a lot of messages about things, and it can almost be overwhelming at times. I imagine they get a lot more.
Sounds like a pretty sweet mobo/cpu! I'll keep my eyes peeled for one around here. Thanks for the comment!
While gaming is interesting, I'm curious about video rendering a project, or video decoding on a Plex server, even ai training. If I understand correctly massive GPU usage in calculation, but not high in data transfer or CPU usage.
Yeah I've been trying to find ideas for utilizing GPUs outside of games, but other than encoding for plex or something like OBS, most everything else is out of my comfort zone haha
I think bottleneck is a personal thing. For me that want to play TF2 in a competitive framerate I just need a good CPU, I can use even intel HD graphics. But for my girlfriend that want to play singleplayer games with just the better graphics possible, she needs a lot more GPU than CPU. It wall depends on the way you want to play, you just gonna need a top tier CPU for playing competitive games at 200+ fps.
Compare to intel x4 640 maybe equal to i5 1st gen?
Wonder how it would pair with a 1050ti or rx550.
Nice, wondering what generation of Intel CPU this AMD CPU can be compared with, the last LGA775 gen or the early 1st, 2nd gen Core i ?
I believe the x4 640s were on the market around the same time as the first gen core i products, right before gen 2 launched
Good video m8
Was valheim using directx or Vulkan? Vulkan would probably be the only way to give this cpu a fighting chance tbh
Yeah looking back I wish I would’ve tried Vulcan as well..
@@HardwareHaven Aye no worries, on my main system, for whatever reason it will only launch in directx. Which is fine, since it has a ryzen 5 3600 and 6700xt, but, still, I wish it was easily accessible in the settings like most games, even if it requires a restart
What name is motherhood
You should try windows 7 on it. Just to figure out if it would use a higher cpu % and higher fps
Yeah maybe!
Or Windows 8.1, at least, since it's supported until January 2023.
Only thing I can recommend is if they game supports Vulkan give them another try never know lol
Hi, Where you running these games on win 10 ?
Yes sorry; I should've mentioned that
Is EMULATION possible with a PC like this? (Older consoles, like NES, SNES, MegaDrive.. Stuff like that
I have 2 working computers with Athlon II / Phenom II (AM2+ or AM3.. I forget) motherboards...
(One from my mother, one I inherited from my father)
Also some SSDs I can use as boot drives..
My interest is not really on new consoles (though that would be cool also)...
But logically, it feels like a dual core 'several gigahertz' processor should be able to run SNES games at least (3.58 MHz processor...) or even N64.. (93.75 MHz).
I know... It's a very specific thing to ask..
But not many people are still using AMD processors from 12 years ago :)
So it definitely feels like you're the right person to ask
(wondering about "without a dedicated GPU" as well.. Until what point would that be playable?)
(Btw. I have just subscribed to your channel :)
Before this, I saw a short about turning a very old PC into a media server / device mgmt server. (Will check that out in detail asap).
Nice to see content that isn't about 'redlining' the newest available hardware.
Especially since I firmly believe in repairing / reusing / upgrading older 'obsolete' stuff (from tools to technology)
Will be watching your videos, streaming to my 39" LG full HD television that I found in the trash ;)
Haven what if you overclock the CPU Athlon!
That could be cool! But I would need a motherboard that supports it
Old AMD CPUs are great on Linux OS.
Try Linux on it. If you need any help, we'll be happy to help in Linux Enthusiast Group, like you joined before on Discord.
its NVIDIA overhead drop the frame rates, if you test it with radeon the score will be higher.
dont pair GTX with old or really slow CPU, use radeon card instead.
you can watch this from the steve you mention too LOL
Just install a GTX 750 if you have a prebuilt with this cpu
No you definitely need a 1070ti
/s
@@HardwareHaven That's definitely a better option!
Can’t for the next one.
idk i like videos about this
Now overclock it
I have same computer than you 😀 trying build low buject gaming machine 😁
First one
No.
@@iamb0 Yes
Y’all need to chill haha