How much is enough?

I've been creepingly aquiring parts for my newest system since I switched from my old 2.66GHz "Northwood" P4 to my current 2.8GHz "Prescott" P4 in February....

Yeah the HT P4's are a LOT faster at things like audio compression and such
and my switching to XP-SP3 probably didn't hurt either.

But I found myself in posession of an HP DC7100 CMt computer with a 3.4 P4.

After a short bit of playing wiht it the MoBo died, so I set about getting another. it seemed like a nice system and as with everything HP parts are readily available, but when I went to buy I found I could get a MoBo for a
DC7600 for only a few dollars more and it would run on the same 3.4 chip
plus it took cheaper DDR2 memory... so much better... and it was capable of accepting a Pentium D dual core chip (either a 8xx-series "smithfield" or a 9xx-series "Presler") and while not a more efficient Core 2 Duo "Conroe" they are faster....

Anyway I got the new MoBo off Ebay, ran a POST on it decided it was good
and set it aside to deal with other issues....

Time goes by and I get looking at pentium D chips... I never stopped looking on ebay... thing is I am as methodical as I am cheap and I was looking for a specific Pentium D, in specific a 945 SL9QQ as they seem to be the most common...

but first a note on the Pentium D processor, an 8xx "smithfield" is essentially TWO "Prescott" chips in the same case but their "hyper threading" capability has been disabled.
The 9xx Pentium D is a different animal, it's two "Cedar Mill" aka Pentium 4 "Extreme" chips in the same case. Hyperthreading works and each core has 2032Mb of Cache... all I can say is DAMN it's FAST...

I haven't run my personal benchmark tests on it yet because I had to use my test setup to set up a computer for my aunt (a Dell GX280 (3.0 Prescott)) after her old computer (a Dell GX150 (1GHz P3)) dropped dead...

But my personal benchmark tests are:
1)time the computer to quiet inactive HDD from a power off bootup
(this must compare computers with the same software in the startu menu)
2)time the computer to rip a specific Audio CD (I use two, Queensrÿche - "Empire" and Metallica's "black" album)
3) Time the computer in creating compressed CBR mp3 files from the same two CD's

And Yes I use the same specific physical HDD and an old,
but trusted, NEC DVD drive for my testing, and to be "fair" the drive is
empty and freshly formatted when I run my crude but effective
test.

Other than bopping around on the web the actual "work" I do with my computer is audio compression, so my testing is oriented to doing the
specific time consuming operations.

That is NOT YET my operating computer, because I need to move the system to another case so I have room for my drives (the DC7x00 case has room for a 3.5" floppy drive two 3.5" drive bays and three 5" bays and that doesn't do it for someone who NEEDS six HDD's plus an optical drive

but with all my software applications on the system and running XP-SP3 "Media Center Edition" it's an obviously fast system...

going from my old 2.66P4 to the current HT 2.8 P4 was eye opening it had twice the cache memory and a faster FSB speed and unlike my old computer I could run a HDD Defrag in the background while reading posts here at TRS or browsing ebay and not notice that the computer was busy doing something else in the background...

I've done that with the new computer and had TWO seperate Defragging programs running defrags on two different HDDs (with the defrag priority set to maximum), downloading a large program (XP-SP3) with one open browser window and browsing the web with another and it was still faster at loading pages or defragging than my current machine is...

But just how fast are those core2duo and core2quads, not to mention the newer (and presumably faster) processors?

The question is this (a philisophical one) just how fast does a computer need to be?

and the other question is just how scared should I be about how much I've learned about this computer junk in the last six months?

The last question is my other computer the one I retired around Christmas 2008 was a 750Mhz P3,
I had that machine for nearly four years, the 2.66GHz P4 I had next I had for 14 months, my current
machine will be retired (actually handed off to my Mother) as soon as I have the time to mount the
DC7600 in an Antec case with enough drive bays and fans to keep me happy.
I've had this computer for just over three months...

I'm getting pretty good at doing system setups, but I just got everything working and all the
bugs sorted out and damn it, it's time to do it again!



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AllanD said:

But just how fast are those core2duo and core2quads, not to mention the newer (and presumably faster) processors?

Click to expand...

Compared to an older intel dual core? Or to a single core? Single vs dual is day and night difference, but price wise you can usually find a faster dual core over quad, which is sometimes the better way to go if you can't really justify needing the extra two..

AllanD said:

The question is this (a philisophical one) just how fast does a computer need to be?

Click to expand...

LOL, as fast as the bus speed can get

Edit:

AllanD said:

I'm getting pretty good at doing system setups, but I just got everything working and all the
bugs sorted out and damn it, it's time to do it again!

Click to expand...

Tell me about it, just spent a day forcing a wireless driver to work with a client on windows 2000 that it wasn't ever meant to support. Ended up extracting the driver from the installer, installing it, mocked an installation from a windows XP machine (registry/DLLS/etc), got all of the services running according to the diagnostics it had, wireless client wouldn't load... Got an aftermarket client and it works now, just sucks to see how little effort it would have taken them to make that work.

AD I've gotta be honest with you, the Prescott is arguably the worst chip Intel ever made. The Pentium D chips are not much better, it wasn't until the Core 2 chips that Intel really started making good stuff again. If you switch to one of Intel's newer chips, even something like a Conroe Core 2 Duo, you will see a massive night and day difference.

Going from a "northwood" to a Prescott is like going from a 6cyl Dodge Dart
(with bad wires) to a properly tuned 318-V8, going from that to the Pentium D 3.4
was like going to a a flawlessly tuned big block engine.

while not the formula1 car of the computer world I have no complaints with the "prescott" family,
the prescott computers I have are all much faster and more stable than the earlier P4s they replaced.

Of course I should note that I'm making this reply on a Dell 1525 Notebook I literally "garbage picked"
over the holiday weekend...

I find stuff because I LOOK and I SEE.


Anyway on the way back from taking a load of bottles and such to the township recycling center I spot
a couple of minitower cases the guy renting the house diagonallly across the street left them behind when
he moved out. The owner of the house was cleaning up the place and put everything on the curb for
trash pickup... I stopped to look at the mid tower (allways looking for parts if not a complete computer)
and spotted the notebooks as soon as I walked over to the pile of stuff....

But it's a Dell 1525 Core2duo 2.0GHz with 3gb of Ram running Vista
(which I just upgraded to SP2), I had to borrow a battery charger
from one of my other my neighbors to test it, but the thing simply works.
It's even got a good battery, though only the mid-sized one...


Chatting with another neighbor it turns out he has a dead Dell 600m that
he just gave me and that came with another charger..., so all I need to make
this notebook "perfect" (the caseback is cracked, impact trauma, by the left hinge)
is to buy a back cover and LCD bezel off eBay (about $50 shipped)
and I'll have a functional and cosmetically perfect 2year old notebook

But what really cracks me up about this "busted notebook" is that it has an optical drive
(DVD+RW/DL) that was replaced in November and a WD-Scorpio Blue HDD that was
replaced in september... (I guess the original Hitachi crap HDD and HL DVD-drive it was
originally built with in '08 didn't last long...)

Unfortunatly they only upgraded from the 120gb this notebook was shipped with to a 160gb,
(I, know, I'm whining about a FREE notebook computer so I get to spend $45(blue)-$75(Black)
on a 320gb HDD to make it do everything I want it to do.

As for Vista? my main complaint with it are all the automatic security features I've needed to turn
OFF to be able to accomplish anything at all with cleaning out the previous owner's games and
applications and installing my own.

AND the fact that I'm still chasing down all the preference settings that are set to mexican spanish
(the previous owner was bi-lingual)

It's an authenticated copy of Vista Home Basic and the best thing I can say about it is that it's
reasonably cheap to upgrade to Win7, but in all honesty what bugs me most is the stuff that is just
enough different from XP to make you wonder why they bothered to change it at all....

AD

im personally a fan of the AMD athelon 64x2 and up processors

AllanD said:

But just how fast are those core2duo and core2quads, not to mention the newer (and presumably faster) processors?

Click to expand...

AllanD said:

Going from a "northwood" to a Prescott is like going from a 6cyl Dodge Dart
(with bad wires) to a properly tuned 318-V8, going from that to the Pentium D 3.4
was like going to a a flawlessly tuned big block engine.

Click to expand...

Using that line of thinking going from even the best P4 to any core 2 based chip would be like going to a top fuel dragster pretty much. while the P4's have clock speed on their side they are actually pretty slow. Even the slowest speed Core 2 chip you can get will kill any P4 based chip.

I hear this analogy once and it stuck pretty well on how to describe why P4's suck, they are fast in speed but can't do much work

Which would get 10 people across town faster, A Ferrari (the P4) or a 10 passenger van (core 2). while the Ferrari may be fast it takes more trips to accomplish the same amount of work.

AllanD said:

The question is this (a philisophical one) just how fast does a computer need to be?

Click to expand...

It needs to be fast enough to accomplish your needs in what you consider a reasonable amount of time.

My mom has a an Intel dual core E5300 (2.6 Ghz 45nm) and even in her most demanding usage probably never even tops out at 25% CPU usage.

I have an Intel I5 750 quad core running at 4 Ghz and can peg it at 100% on all cores (though usually only max 2 cores at a time for a single task).

how fast a computer does a particular job depends greatly on the job you are asking it to do.


As for dual-core P4's there are two very different families, there are the "smithfield"
8xx Pentium D chips and then there are the 9xx series "Presler" cores which are ahhh... different.... essentially two cedarmill CPU's... while the only core2 duo I have for comparison is my "new" 2.0ghz notebook the 3.4 Presler sure seems faster...

But then again my core2duo is also got to run Vista... not XP-MCE(sp3)

I judge my computer speed by speed at ripping and compressing audio.
As for loading web pages if I don't end up tapping my toes in frustration it's doing well.

don't mistake my patience for explaining things to people as patience for my own mechanical/electrical/electronic/computer problems

Lets suffice it to say that something that manages to tick me off more than once...

Well as for ripping CD's that is almost all your CD drive and Hdd not the processor (I did a quick test and never topped 5% cpu usage so any modern cpu shouldn't be pegged out.)

How much memory and what speed of HDD is in that Core2 laptop? That will be the biggest bottle neck and will make a fast cpu seem slow and bogged down (if it has at least 2 gig of memory I wouldn't blame vista but that's me I'm a weird guy who actually prefers it over XP if the machine is up to the task)

Also one downside to the P4 duals if your using a multi threaded app is since they are actually 2 single cores on the same chip instead of a single 2 core die they can't directly communicate which can cause some bottle necks.

the dell notebook has 3gb of RAM. the HDD is a 5400rpm WD Caviar "blue" 160gb

My dual-core Desktop is an HP DC7600 with an Intel 945, 2gb of RAM
and the HDD I'm ripping toon that is a 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda.

And compression is the big deal for "speed", not ripping

But I don't normally use my notebook for ripping or burning, it's a communication device that CAN burn mp3 discs for playback or reload an ipod OR play a DVD...

it isn't only clock speed but CPU L2 Cache
I've gone from 512 to 1024 to 2024 to dual channel 2024 (2x2024)

Frankly as soon as I buy some burning software
(this notebook came bundled with Roxio DE 10.2) I'll make the switch to Win7


Oh, on pentium D chips? there is a big difference between the 8xx smithfield chips and the 9xx Preslers, Hyperthreading is disabled on the 8xx chips...

Well clock speed and L2 cache can't be compared between different architectures. Intel crammed as much L2 into the P4's as they could to try and help the crappy netburst architecture that was horrid. Take an Athlon 64 from the same time period, in almost every task the A64 with a lower clock speed and only 512 K cache will win.

I know the the 9xx P4's are better than the 8xx but both suck compared to pretty much any core 2 based chip. Also HT only helps so much and only if the application can use enough threads to utilize it. Even on todays I7's HT can actually hurt performance in applications that can't use all the rean and virtual cores.

And to see if the processor in your lappy is better than the P4 (which I'd bet it is) try running some cpu test between the 2 and see. the lack of dual channel RAM (I would bet as the 3GB is most likely a 1 gig stick and a 2 gig stick) and the 5400 RPM HDD will make the whole computer feel slow but the processor should be faster.

well the HO DC7600 Desktop (the presler core Pentium D) has dual channel memory

I believe on the Dell notebook the first gig is actuially built on the board as two 512mb channels and the two removeable cards are 1gb each.

And audio compression does use the hyperthreading feature and it makes a BIG difference

I've done that test on essentially identical computers (a Dell GX280)
with different 2.8GHz CPU's one HT the other not, and the difference
in speed was not subtle... on average the HT chip in the SAME mother
board did any compression run in 60% of the time.

My big processor activity hog is audio compression.

Yeah, "Netburst" never really worked the way they hoped it would,
but try getting a core2 based bord that plays well with IDE HDD's

I've still got a bunch of what they now euphamastically call "legacy storage devices"

And all those pesky IDE drives are why I specifically bought a PentiumD DC7600MoBo
instead of the next generation DC7700MoBo which while core2 capable
also finally discarded having ANY IDE channels on the MoBo.

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