Leaderboard

As a very lucky owner of a 1.4ghz board, I'll share some of my experiences. It is very handy for things like homebrew, XBMC and indeed some games to run with more graphical stability in heavy combat situations. Halo: Combat Evolved running on a 1.4ghz board can act as a more stable host for LAN connected consoles to reduce lag. Unfortunately there are a number of games that are programmed to be timed based on the CPU itself since the programmers never tested with anything other than the stock CPU. In other words, scenes, clocks and walking speed. Some cutscenes even get muddled up altogether. It's a bit like a PowerPoint presentation expecting things to start and finish at fixed times, some bits of scenes starting too fast for another part to finish properly, and getting totally confused causing some parts to get missed out completely. (Ironically the very same 1.4ghz CPU being used in a Windows machine with older DOS games has exactly the same problem in my experience!) Notable games tend to be of these series: Halo 2, Wallace & Gromit, Shrek, Star Wars, GTA (pretty much all of them), Indiana Jones... and any game made by Ubisoft or Rockstar. Some, but not all, of these games can be patched to expect the 1.4ghz timing. Most of the Star Wars games can, so can most Ubisoft games, as well as Halo 2. Sadly Shrek, GTA (or any other Rockstar game) and Indiana Jones still has your character running around far too fast to do anything. Star Wars: Obiwan with patching will allow your character to have normal speed, but the enemies will still run around too fast! Also, even if you manage to get your character to move at a playable speed, some games with missions with a time limit will effectively have shorter time limits as the clock will count down too fast! There may be more but I haven't tested out too far when it comes to game compatibility. I just patched every single XBE and hope for the best- it does seem to fix most issues, except the ones I've listed above that I know about. If a game doesn't work properly when I happen to feel like playing it, I make a note and move on. The best compromise is to have two Xboxes. One can have just the 128MB RAM upgrade, and the second can have both the 128MB RAM upgrade and CPU upgrade. This the option I have gone with, and couldn't be happier with it!