Published at LXer:

Last October I wrote about running Ubuntu 9.10 with older PC hardware, but over this past weekend I restored an even older Phoronix test system to see how it runs with the most recent Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release and the very-latest Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot in relation to the older Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS. This antiquated system has an Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB IDE hard drive, and an ATI Radeon 9200PRO AGP graphics card.

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Wow, a truly horrendous performance. The only test to come out better than the older Ubuntu was PostMark, but that's because of ext4's dangerous new default setting.

well Arch and CentOS 5.5 run fine on a 9 to 10 year old Dell p4 2.00GHz, with 1 gig ram, box
a bit slow at times but...
fedora 11 ran fine also

I wonder how much of this is due to the relatively poor support from ATI?

I have an equally old P4 based system with a 128Mb GeForce4 running Slackware 13.1 and the latest NVidia "legacy" drivers. Video performance is consistent with what it was 5 years ago, if not slightly better. At least, that's what GLXgears tells me.

Furthermore, the newer Linux kernel seems to be able to better exploit the HyperThreading capabilities of the CPU in this machine. With Linux-2.6.33 I've seen CPU loads of 200% where older versions would get to maybe 125%... and, despite the higher load, it runs about 5C cooler. I don't know how accurate GKrellm is, but timewise the machine is saving about 6 or 7 minutes off processes that used to take 20 minutes, so I guess that would make it reasonably close.

I think it'd be interesting to run these tests on an NVidia equipped machine.

well ATI was a MS only shop back then and still have some catching up with nvidia . But they are starting to get there.

i am still amazed that glxgears gives me 700's to 890's as output
with a GF 2 card

My 3ghz Pentium 4 is a workhorse! That thing has seen a lot of Linux distros installed through the years. It is currently running 9.04 and this article isn't going to make me rush out and upgrade.

rush out NO, but some time very soon there will not be a legacy driver for the old 173 and 96 nv cards and at that time new hardware will be needed.


that time might be now with x11 1.8 .

Says who?

Says who?

nvidia , at some point they will stop supporting 10+ year old hardware.

I don't think it'll happen as soon as you seem to think.

They still offer drivers for the Riva 128 PCI card.

rkelsen see LXer's post
"LXer: NVIDIA's Oldest Legacy Driver Will Not Gain New Support"
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...upport-820610/
they have.