Modern netbooks do not provide the highest specs, and are not recommended for high-end gaming, and it seems that they are intentionally designed for compactness and low power usage, and their specs are “low end”. Is a netbook of today totally superior in terms of processor speed, bus speed, RAM, graphics performance, etc. to a high end gaming PC of sufficient age, such as an uber-leet gaming box from, say, 1995, or is the old gaming PC still superior in some way?
By specs, I mean performance such as clock speed, main bus speed, memory size, memory latency, disk seek latency, disk write speed, etc., not quality of manufacture such as MTBF.
The fact that a netbook may not come with a CD drive is not, for this question, a disadvantage, unless an external CD drive attached to the netbook gives worse performance than would be obtained by a high-end CD-ROM or CD-R drive of yesteryear. Similarly, the fact that a netbook of today probably doesn’t come with an ancient operating system is also not inherently a disadvantage unless an ancient computer system with the old operating system provides significantly better performance than a modern netbook with Windows 7, etc.
That is, if I bought a $400 netbook and hooked it up with a bunch of ancient gaming Pentium 1’s running Windows 95 and tried to play network DOOM, am I going to see any poor performance on the netbook as compared to the old PC’s?
There is new crop of netbooks coming out right now with enhanced speed, video and power conservation specs vs the crop of Intel Atom based netbooks that have been kind of static or the last 2 years or so. Assuming you are talking about the older Atom based units, these had about the real world CPU horsepower of middling to slowish circa 2005 Celeron CPUs, so yes, even as relative 2010-2011 slowpokes they would be significantly speedier than almost any mainstream 1995 Intel CPU.
With respect to playing a Win95 DOS based video game I suspect (I’m not 100% sure on this) that this would have to be done within some virtual x86 emulation window within Windows XP or Windows 7, and this may bog things down enough that the 1995 system could be competitive speedwise but that’s function of the scenario not the inherent speed of the CPUs.
As a example re true functional speed it’s entirely possible that a Win 3.1 or Win 95 system with a compatible WordPerfect version would be snappier in overall performance, and let you get more typing work done, vs a Atom based notebook running XP with Office 2007 or 2010. You give up a lot of features goodies with the older system, but with respect to grinding out text they worked as fast as you could type, and the non-mouse all keyboard functionality let skilled typists work at a very fast pace.
No. The only place where it would be a problem would be in software, as DOS pretty much must be emulated on Windows 7. But you’ve explicitly ruled that out.
Graphics is the only place left where I had to even do a check. But, as I suspected, 3D graphics cards in 1995 were nowhere near the capability of the onboard graphics of a netbook, especially one at $400, which is right in the mid range.
Remember thought that DOOM was a DOS game that came out before Windows 95, and did not even require a 3D graphics card. There’s a reason why it was the base engine for 3D shooters. Heck, it could even be played on the 21Mhz Super Nintendo.
The other things you mention: SSD is faster than even modern hard drives, The memory is definitely clocked faster, as is the processor and bus.
Again, software is the only possible bottleneck. I’d have to do a test with Dosbox to see, but I bet you could emulate at least a 486, easy. And that’s just assuming you couldn’t get some version of DOS running natively on the netbook.
DOSBox on my Dual Core runs just as good as a 486, but when I try to run MS Virtual PC to emulate Win98 (necessary as Vista64 won’t run many older Windows programs) it is significantly slower than my old P2. But that is all academic, as the OP specifically stated that they would be running Windows 95 natively.
With respect to that issue it would be interesting to see if you could even get Win 95 to run properly on an atom (or similar CPU) based netbook. I suspect there would be serious problems getting it to run in a functional manner as there would be no compatible Win 95 drivers available for the modern onboard hardware.
They are kind of apples and oranges There was a huge functional OS difference between 98 and 95. 95 was much more DOS centric. 98 had vastly more available drivers.
Hell no. Netbook processors are 1.0 ghz, single core, and they are set to run at half power, or .5 ghz. The last time I had a .5 ghz processor was maybe 1992 running DOS.
Here’s a netbook. HP Mini 110-3150ca. It was just the first one in the list at Tiger Direct, and costs $329.99 plus tax. It has a 10.1" screen at a pixel resolution of 1024 x 600, 1 gibibyte of DDR2 system memory (the max), a 250-gigabyte hard drive, an Intel Atom processor at 1.66 gigahertz, and stereo audio. The video uses up to 256 mebibytes of system memory.
A 1995 gaming computer? I went looking for old computer ads, I found a lot from the eighties, but not so many from the nineties. But there was this:
I am now wondering how that compares with my phone.
In what universe? I’ve got a 2.X year old Samsung NC10 that I got basically as a gift for subscribing to wireless broadband, and it runs an Atom n270 @ 1.600 Gz - note that this a 2-threaded CPU. And even if it was 0.5 Gz, I would still be slightly surprised if it was any slower, in general, than a 1 Gz 1995 vintage CPU.
Yeah, as far as I could find quickly, the fastest commodity processor Intel made in '95 was a a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro. I’m certain a 1 Ghz Atom could easily beat it in any reasonable benchmark.
I’m more interested in the graphics cards, but even with those, I suspect anything but the most basic netbook can beat them.
First of all, there were no 1Ghz computers in 1995, at least none for public consumption. P1 at 100Mhz were more like it.
Second of all, there certainly weren’t any 500Mhz computers in 1992. I think the person you are replying to has a very fuzzy memory.
You had a .5 ghz processor in 1992? Was it a Cray or something? The first Pentium at a blistering 60MHz didn’t event debut until 1993.
I remember putting together a PC in 1998 when the fastest off the shelf consumer processor was an Intel Pentium II at 450 MHz. Some fanatics had managed to get a Celeron 300A up to the unheard of speed of 500 MHz with peltier cooling. I got a 300A and clocked it to 450 like every enthusiast was doing at the time.
I know that Windows 95 or 98 will not run on my current eMachine due to the budget processor’s lack of old processor emulation. It wouldn’t surprise me if a netbook would run into the same problem.
That’s why I mentioned getting some version of DOS running on the computer. I know that FreeDOS was successfully run on the EEEPC when it first came out.
I’m guessing most netbooks will run Windows 95 or 98 itself just fine but good luck getting network, wireless or power management working. 3d graphics might just work if it’s an NVIDIA chipset, but I am not sure.
I don’t think I’d bet on that expectation for Win 95. I’m fairly sure there are limits to the backward compatibility of the Atom CPU. I’d be willing to bet that 95 would choke on the unfamiliar hardware and glitch terminally at some point before loading the OS. It would be an interesting experiment if you want to try.
Just for the sake of comparison, I bought this netbook at BestBuy for my teenage daughter yesterday. It has 1GB of RAM, a 250GB HD, and a 1.66 ghz processor. List price was $329.
In terms of processing speed, the Pentium 4 was the first to get over 1.5 ghz, and that came out in mid-2001. But even a high-end desktop in those days was onlygonna have maybe 256mb of RAM and 80gb harddrive (see this ad from Oct 2001 issue of Maximum PC)
Not sure when the earliest you could have gotten a 250gb harddrive but looking through old magazines at GoogleBooks I find this this review from 2003 describes one that sells for $899. RAM prices were probably higher than that for 1GB.
So, if you wanted to put together a PC as powerful as my daughter’s new $300 netbook 7 years ago, you could do it, but it would probably cost at least 10 times as much. And while your 2004 PC would have better graphics, I could attach a 27" LCD for another $300 bucks that blows you out of the water.
