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A crazy upgrade that yielded no visible speed increase.

T

TheSHANK

Member
Here is what I had:

AMD 1800XP
Gigabyte 7vxp+ motherboard
512MB ddr 2100
ASUS geforce 4mx 64mb ddr
WD 7200rpm 40 gig

Here is what I upgraded to

AMD 2400XP
Chaintech Zenith 7jns motherboard
(2) 256MB 2700 DDR (Dual ddr technology)
ASUS Geforce 4mx 64mb ddr
WD 7200 80 gig on raid with Maxtor 7200 80 gig

What is it that there is no speed difference, I mean I am talking like a simple task like running adobe or launching a game. I mean damn then when/where do I see a difference in speed?

maybe my video card holds me back 🙂
 
i guess u should see differences when running benchmarks. i've never been a fan on benchmarking myself. the only test i run is i unzip a large file 😛
 
Hehe...
As far as the raw CPU performance increase, there isn't much to notice in real-world applications. A synthetic math benchmark would show that your new CPU is X% faster. However, in regular apps you won't notice much improvement. It's like going from a 48x CDRW to a 52x 😉 On paper - nice, in reality - only in some cases.

Additionally, did you change the BIOS/jumpers to take advantahe of the new RAM? Did you defrag the HD?

And sorry, but that videocard sucks. Anything below GF4-4600 is a bad choice for this PC (as you mention you play games).
 
A couple things I noticed, 1. the two tasks you mentioned can both be highly I/O bound (particular application initiallization) pointing the direction at your HD's. 2. I could be mistaken but isn't it best to match harddrives for RAID arrays? 3. That graphics card has got to go. 4. If you went from low latency DDR2100 to high latency DDR2700 there might be no noticeable increase (keeping in mind that anything less than 5-6% will be unnoticeable. Also, with dual channel memory there is actually some increased latency when doing non bandwidth intensive activities. So there is some counter-balancing there as well.

My two cents worth 😉
 
😉 Great points VBboy and PrinceXizor. XP1800+ is a fast CPU anyway although the XP2400+ is a fair bit faster will you actually notice if something takes 40 secs in stead of 44 secs to process! Again PC2100 to PC2700 isn't a HUGE jump in AthlonXP unless you up the FSB to 333mhz (on a CPU faster than XP2000+). Can't comment on the mobo diff as you don't specify the chipsets (like saying I upgraded my Ford to a Vauxhall).

😱 A GF4MX is simply a slightly enhanced GF2 and far inferior to a GF3, Rad8500 let alone a GF4TI or Rad9500 which ar ethe least that PC deserves, esp if you have any interest in gaming at all. A Duron 1ghz easily maxes out the full potential of a GF4MX460, in fact a Duron with a GF3 would be a better gaming PC. Having a GF4MX in there is a bit like using 64MB system RAM!

🙂 Upgrading your kit is only going to show itself in gaming (but you lack a decent gfx card) or in big memeory dependent or number crunching tasks such as encoding or compressing files. Encoding a full length DVD movie to high quality DivX would probably have taken your old machine 8 hours and your new machine should be closer to 6 hours. No offence but I'd be more careful in all of your component choices in future and think about what you use your PC for and what gains there's likely to be!

ADDED:

AnAndTech showing the effect of CPU speed on diff gfx cards with diff games 1

AnAndTech showing the effect of CPU speed on diff gfx cards with UT2003 2

3Dmark2001:

XP2400+ & GF4MX460 - 7700, 58, 58, 63, na (no DX8 support) {not an average, only 1 bm with this combination}
Duron1.2ghz & GF4TI4200 - 9000, 35, 94, 49, 77
XP2000+ & GF4TI4200 - 12200, 58, 121, 73, 84
 

Generally the "responsiveness" of your computer can mostly be felt by the speed of your hard drives. You seem to have addressed that. As for games - dude your video card sucks...especially in proportion to the rest of the system.
 
I had a similar upgrade path (T-Bird 1.4 with a GF2 to a XP2000 and GF ti4400) and my 3dMark went from 8,700 +/- to 12,000 +/-

Just for kicks I decided to see what I would get with the T-bird 1.4 and Ti4400 combo and I still got 10,500 +/- 3d marks. So It seems that the video card was indeed the bottleneck.

Your MX is essentially a GF2, so there you have it. You might have been better to keep your old CPU and swapped your Video card instead.

Anyway you look at it, the MX has to be retired. Sell it for a few $$ and get a decent Ti4200 or Ti4600 (Whatever your budget allows).
 
A bit of a faster processor, somewhat faster memory, and maybe a very slightly faster hard drive. Time to get a Radeon 9700. THEN you will notice a difference.😀
 
get a better video card, and consider ATA133 raid 😉 your cpu and mobo / ram did NOT need upgraded with that crappy MX holding it all back. Don't get me wrong its a decent card, but it's your biggest framerate bottleneck. The hard drives are your loadtime bottleneck. With video cards, memory bandwidth (on the card) is the biggest concern.

edit: heh i should read more carefully... check and see how your raid is doing using the ATTO benchmark
 
not surprised you see no increase.
maybe a bit of difference in games, and mostly in stuff like SETI.
the RAID with 2 differnent drives could post a problem, as could the fact you have a relatively slow video card.
what type of differences were you expecting to see?
 
Upgrade that video card and you should see an improvement in speed. I did when I upgraded from a Geforce2mx to a Geforce4 4400.
 
Hey thanks for all the feedback I appreciate it. I don't play games too much, which is why I didn't upgrade the video card yet, but if I do, I was looking at the ATI Radeon 9500 PRO 128MB. I just thought games would load faster, since they do take up some time loading, and when I ran the game for the first time It was like eh... hmm not a big increase if any at all. As far as HDs go, one HD is ATA/133, other is ATA/100. On top of that, one HD is connected via SERIAL ATA using a convertor, since the motherboard only supports on channal on IDE :disgust: but when I spoke to Chaintech, Promise and a local computer store, they all stated that the serial ata is an increase, but mostly only for faster write times starting up, and better throughout, and it wasn't worth the money and in my case of mismatching the HDs it was "okay." So that's why I didn't spend an extra $5000 grand on being the first to get a Serial ATA drive 🙂

As for memory, I believe on this motherboard it is set already at 166mhz onboard. So i didn't set any jumpers or bios settings.


Thanks

shank
 
Your CPU upgrade merely gave you an a few seconds shaved in compile times, render times, etc. For gaming, your video card is definitely holding you back. Way too many people have come to me and asked why their GF4MX card seems so much slower than my Geforce3. Video card upgrades are yielding the performance increase that we all want, most CPU upgrades are worth it when you are getting 2-3x over existing MHZ. Most games don't push the CPU over the video card, but for those games that do (UT2K3 based games), it is quite a nice sight to see.

vash
 
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