Anybody running LabVIEW 7.0 on a Pentium II?

[tarheel_hax0r]

I came into the possession of an old server with quad PII 333MHz [i.e. 4 X PII 333MHz] and several GB of RAM.

Will LabVIEW 7.0 run on this box?

I know it will run on e.g. the old AMD K6-2, which is roughly the same vintage, but the official recommendations say "PIII at 600MHz":

http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/321778e.pdf

Has anyone gotten LabVIEW 7.0 to run on an older PII?

I ask because a while back, I tried to install NetWare 6 on an AMD K6-2, and the installer balked, demanding that it be installed on a PIII [which was the first time I'd ever seen something like that from Novell].

Anyway, while the CPU speeds will be a little slow, I figure the multithreading and the opportunity to use that much RAM ought to make the thing kinda fun to play with, assuming the LabVIEW installer will even let me install the thing in the first place.

Thanks!

[EdDickens]

I had LabVIEW 7.0 running on a PII 350MHz, 256 MB ram under Win98.

It wasn't a speed demon, but it worked with no problems.

I don't think the development environment takes advantage of multi processors, but it can help your applications if they have parallel tasks.

Let us know how it works if you do it.

Ed

[tarheel_hax0r]

I don't think the development environment takes advantage of multi processors, but it can help your applications if they have parallel tasks.

WHOA - that's weird: You're saying the development environment is single-threaded?

[EdDickens]

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WHOA - that's weird: You're saying the development environment is single-threaded?

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I don't know this for sure. It's somthing I've never really thought about. I do know that when you run your application inside the development environment, the application can use multi-threading while it's running.

As far as LabVIEW itself, some one else may know for sure.

Ed

[tarheel_hax0r]

Yeah, I'd be real interested to know whether the development environment is single-threaded, or multi-threaded but for some reason restricted to a single CPU.

Hey - here's another question: Does the development environment place any special demands on the graphics card, to the point that you would get better responsiveness if you were to upgrade to a modern 3D video card? Or would e.g. an old Matrox card, with really good 2D graphics, work just as well?

[EdDickens]

I would think that upgrading the video card would help. A faster GPU and more video ram will never hurt performance. It would take some of the video processing away from the CPU, so that should be of some help.

While we're at it...

One of the biggest improvments I saw in that old machine was to put a modern hard drive in it. Originally it had an old 5000 rpm. I put a 7200 rpm Western Digital with the 8 meg buffer and could not believe the difference it made. Of course since you're looking at an old server, it may already have some good SCSI drives. But I have seen benchmarks showing a single modern ATA100 drive being faster than an old SCSI setup.

Ed

[tarheel_hax0r]

Thanks.

I was surfing the web today, and I noticed where somebody had a dual-head Matrox G450 32MB PCI card for like $75, which seemed pretty darned good for a card with dual RAMDACs. [A lot of cards claim to be dual-capable, but they cheat, and use single a RAMDAC.]

The AGP cards are even cheaper, but, of course, the old systems don't have AGP slots.

[tarheel_hax0r]

Oops - my bad.

I don't think the standard G450 has dual RAMDACs.

There's a real nice list of cards with dual RAMDACs here:

http://www.processor.com/articles/P2608/07p08/07p08charts.pdf
PDF DOCUMENT

[waldemar.hersacher]

I'm running LV 6i to 7.1.1 on a Pentium II 400 MHz with a Matrox G400 single head, Windows NT 4 SP6 and McAffee virus scan on my home machine. At work I have a P4 Hyperthreading 2.6 GHz with a Matrox G550, Win XP and Sophos virus scan.

Starting LV and saving VIs and all other tasks which involve hard disk IO is much faster at work. During building the Front panel and the block diagram it is not much a difference.

LV uses Open GL for the 3D Front Panel objects. Most modern graphics card like Nvidia or ATI support Direct-X in hardware and not Open GL. I don't expect any increasing speed using such a graphics card.

[tarheel_hax0r]

Does Matrox support OpenGL in hardware?