For p4 owner!

[ALstonLoong]

Hi guys ,
I am really curious how well p4 performe. Can someone with P4 tell me how well is p4 performe? Base on real life experience..not benchmark.I couldnt affort a p4 but i still have the interest to listen to p4 user how well it performe. thanks alot

 

[Dameon]

(hears Fkloster running towards this thread...)

 

[Wingznut]

You probably want to be more specific, ALston. What benchmarks are you looking for? (Not that I own a P4, myself.)

 

[ALstonLoong]

i am not looking for benchmark wingnuz .... i am just curious about how well is p4 performe. I dont need result from benchmark, because i reliase that normally benchmark is design for certain thing only.What i need is for those p4 user, tell me about how they feel using their p4 by comparing their ex pc.

 

[AndyHui]

I got my hands on one over the weekend for a test drive.

To tell you the truth, it seems OK to me.....but can you really tell the difference between any processor running between 600MHz and 1.5GHz? It all seems the same to me. It's not slow....it's pretty quick and Quake 3 looked smooth to me.

What else do you want to know? Office applications all seem to be no slower or faster than my normal P3-933. I didn't really do anything to really push speed out of it or benchmark it though.

Intel P4 1.5GHz, ASUS P4T, 256MB of PC800 RDRAM, Creative GeForce 2 GTS.

 

[ALstonLoong]

yah i got your point andy ....nowadays is hard to see the difference between 1 GHZ and 1.5 GHZ ...even p3 550 performe not much difference then p3 800e. Well, anyway at least you tell me it runs smooth in games.. is it smoother then your previous p3 in games?

 

[jhalada]

Are benchmarks too difficult concept to understand? What do you want hear? "Pentium 4 is fast"? If you have a say sub 300 MHz processor, you will experience the faster processor with your own eyes, using programs you are acustomed to using. If you already have a say 800 to 1.2 GHz processor, you will probably not notice much difference.

Bechmarks measure how the microprocessor performs. If you care how P4 performs in business applications, you may want to take a look at Anand's test of:
SysMark: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1360&p=19
Winstone: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1360&p=20
P4 basically stinks in these apps.

If you care about 3D games
Quake: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1360&p=16
MDK2: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1360&p=17
Unreal: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1360&p=18
P4 is competitive in 3D games, very good at Quake. If you play other non-3D games like strategy games etc, they behave similar to regular office apps, and P4 most likely stinks in those.

Generally, if P4 was as good as Athlon, it would be a consideration, but since it is more expensive, and requires that you sign your soal to the devil (Rambus - the memory type you have to use with P4), the choice is clear: Athlon.

 

[AndyHui]

I don't know.....it seemed fast enough for me. Personally, I don't think benchmarks are very useful. As compared to my P3-933, no faster or slower in Quake 3.

 

[ALstonLoong]

thanks andy maybe in future there would be a software require more power from cpu , at that time maybe we can see the difference.

 

[Wingznut]

I agree that benchmarks suck, for the most part. They are useful when comparing tweaks to your machine. But to compare across platforms, is fairly useless.

Take Office Creation benchmarks... When was the last time anyone thought, "Boy, I sure wish my Excel spreadsheet would open faster. Maybe I should've gotten the *whatever* instead of this cpu."

So, if cpu 'A' is faster than cpu 'B' by 20%, how does that relate to my Word document?

 

[jhalada]

Wingznut PEZ,

"Boy, I sure wish my Excel spreadsheet would open faster. Maybe I should've gotten the *whatever* instead of this cpu."

If you limit your use of Excel to opening and closing of worksheets, or recalculating the allowance you get from your parents, you are right, you don't need much of a CPU.

Excel is a powerfull tool in hands of people who know how to harness the power and do productive work with it. It happens that the complexity of the worksheets and of the VBA code overwhelms an underpowered CPU.

The same with Word. If all you do with it is to complete your homework assignment or a book report, you don't need much power. But Word is also a powerful and a flexible tool, which doesn't happen to be too responsive on slower CPUs. I currently work on dual 366/550 CPUs, and I very often wish I had a faster CPU / memory.

Have you ever tried to work with Photoshop? It is part of the Office / Content Creation benchmarks. It needs all the power you can get.

 

[LordEdmond]

runs fine here, runs all I can throw at it
with graphic intensive programs running very smooth this includes high end progs.
the differance between my old vc820 base 866 p3 is outstanding

the thing is this when software catches up things can only get better

I aggree that bench marks do NOT reflect the real world as the can be tailored to a specific chip/mb/vid card setup not to mention the O/S etc.

IMHO they are made to demonstrate a product

 

[Wingznut]

First off, jhalada... Thanks for trying to demean me, by inferring that I get an allowance from my parents. (Actually, I support a wife and two kids on my income.) And also for implying that I don't know what Excel can do. I do appreciate that.

What I was getting at, is the fact that no matter what you use Excel for, you aren't going to notice the ~4-7% difference between platforms. Hence, the relative uselessness of the benchmark. Sure, the pretty bar graph looks nice in the review. But really, how does it affect real-world performance?

If you want to compare Photoshop work, then compare Photoshop work. Not some synthetic benchmark. If you want to compare games, then compare the real games. Not some synthetic benchmark.

Synthetic benchmarks are useless when comparing platforms. Use real world applications to compare.

 

[TravisBickle]

no "synthetic" benchmarks are not useless Wingnut PEZ. they are a handy and convenient one-stop, very useful to reviewers reviewing pre-built systems in comparison tests. synthetic benchmarks are not designed to be meaningless, the people who program them seem quite clever...

 

[AndyHui]

What's the point of running benchmarks for applications and circumstances that you are never going to be in?

To Wingznut PEZ, large and complex spreadsheets with VBA code and recalcs are irrelevent if he never uses them, and I would argue that the large majority here on this board are unlikely to be in such situations either.



<< the people who program them seem quite clever... >>

clever at making benchmarks show whatever they really want to. From a comparison standpoint, yes, benchmarks may be useful. But again, who actually has that sort of pattern of work or doing things?

Finally, I seriously question the idea that processor speed is the be-all and end-all of the reasons why certain applications seem slow. For most things, it's the other peripherals that slow the system down, with hard drives being the main culprit.

jhalada: I would concede the point that a pair of 550s may be slow, but only if you had minimal disk thrashing. If you had to hit the hard drive for an extended period of time, then I would argue that disk IO would be your bottleneck, and not the processors.

 

[Need4Speed]

Where the hell is Fkloster? I would have thought he would be all over this one by now

 

[AndyHui]

I'm waiting for him too. Probably playing with the Intel compiled povray...

 

[fkloster]

O.k. I'm here. P4's are great. I have been using one since December. Scale of 1 to 10
1) Stability: 9.5
2) 3D Apps: 6 (SSE2 makes this # a 9)
3) 3D Games: 8.5
4) OC'ing: 9.5
5) Price: 4
6) Ease of Setup: 7 (need special PS &amp; mounting bracket)

 

[ALstonLoong]

emm...p4 performe so bad in 3d app ?i thought p4 should be good in 3d ?

 

[fkloster]

With optimized code, not necessarily SSE2, but just optimized the P4 scales much better than expected &amp; competes neck &amp; neck with the competition. W/SSE2 this CPU smokes..

 

[Czar]

Regardless of how it performs I would never get one, even if it would be 10 times faster than a Athlon. It all comes to this, the memory, the gaddamn rdram, the root of all evil in this world.

 

[LordEdmond]

Bet you do when the chipset uses DDR ram

 

[ALstonLoong]

thanks for the info guys

 

[NOX]

<< Excel is a powerfull tool in hands of people who know how to harness the power and do productive work with it. It happens that the complexity of the worksheets and of the VBA code overwhelms an underpowered CPU. >>

You?re not serious right? My moms PIII 450 system runs Excel fast enough, and you say what? Excel VBA code overwhelms the P4, because according to benchmarks (which in the real world mean crap) suggest the P4 is underpowered in certain areas? Please man; you need to bring your AMD investors mentality back to reality!

I agree with everyone here who has at least tried a P4 system. It is more then capable of doing everything demanded of today?s high end PC?s.

[EDIT]

You're scaring the children.

 

[KarsinTheHutt]

I agree with NOX. It would be ridiculous to say that a P4 is incapable of handling a VBS script. I'm running a P3-450 under windows 2000, and it is dam fast on everything except synthetic benchmarks.