Discussion Memories of Celeron G530 and CS 1.6

[jnjnilson6]

Moderator edit: Moving thread from CPUs to Opinions and Experiences.

Back in the day, probably in 2011-2012, I used to have a Celeron G530 system with 2 GB RAM (afterward 4, I think) and while playing CS 1.6 with many players, the integrated Intel HD 2000 made things slow down and not run smoothly. Now, that seems very much weird, because the Intel HD 2000 should still be plenty powerful for such an old game with such simple graphics. When I upgraded to a Radeon HD 6770 that problem disappeared. Later I upgraded the CPU to an i7-3770K and the RAM to 16 GB. After that I updated it further with a single HD 7870 GHz and then with another so they'd run in CrossFire (the system underwent three motherboard changes; each motherboard being better than the last).

Isn't it weird that while playing Multiplayer on a game like CS 1.6 the experience would be sluggish with many players on an Intel HD 2000? The PSU was very good and the software installed on Windows was light and good; and since the 6770 resolved the problem (even before the i7-3770K came into view and the system ran on the Celeron G530), everything points to the HD 2000 as the main culprit of sluggish performance.

Do tell me your thoughts!

 

[Eximo]

Shared memory issues perhaps? Only having 2GB, running Windows, a game, and being the video memory might have pushed things down to needing to read from virtual memory.

Getting a discrete card would have moved the game's textures and such to the video memory.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Shared memory issues perhaps? Only having 2GB, running Windows, a game, and being the video memory might have pushed things down to needing to read from virtual memory.

Getting a discrete card would have moved the game's textures and such to the video memory.

True ..! Absolutely true. And thank you for the answer.

I think that setting the HD 2000's VRAM to 1 or 2 GB when the system ran with 4 GB RAM (originally ran with 2) proved of little gain in comparison to when the VRAM was, say, 256 MB. That I changed from the BIOS.

I remember how on Crysis servers with over 6 players, hosted by myself, the framerate drastically dropped on the Celeron G530 and the HD 6770. However when I updated to an i7-3770K there were no more frame drops (for example from 110 FPS to 30-35) with the HD 6770.

The Intel HD 2000 was horrible in Crysis; basically a slideshow.

 

[Eximo]

Celerons traditionally lacked l3 cache as well. So the 3770k would have been a huge step up there.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Celerons traditionally lacked l3 cache as well. So the 3770k would have been a huge step up there.

Had had a system with i7-2630QM (Lenovo IdeaPad Y570) and 8 GB RAM, 750 GB HDD and Nvidia GeForce GT 555M - 1 GB GDDR5 before the Celeron G530 desktop.

It used to perform with frame-skips and lowered frame-rate for protracted periods of time in Crysis. It ended up that my previous laptop (HP Pavilion dv6) which had an AMD Athlon M300 (2 cores / 2 GHz) and 4 GB RAM and an ATI Mobility 4530 (512 MB DDR3) ran Crysis in a smoother manner, despite generally with much less FPS.

That Lenovo was a nightmare. Went for repairs many times and in the end died out far too soon.

So yeah, I couldn't really get the kick out of the i7-2630QM (4 cores / 8 threads @ 2.0 to 2.9 GHz). So I decided to start building a desktop machine for gaming; that's where the Celeron G530 came along.

For the i7-3770K I eventually bought a Cooler Master Storm Trooper box and the Corsair H110 water cooling (got the latter from abroad). I was able to overclock up to 5 GHz, in which scenario my 3770K outperformed the 6 core / 12 thread i7-3930K (running at default speeds) in Cinebench R11.5.

Wild days. Currently, my i7-12700H would definitely kill out the i7-3770K in terms of everything, yet I've not touched the gaming world in the last decade or so. Now I prefer big blue books with long, tempting words in them.