I require suggestions...

[Aenslead]

I've been looking more and more towards the benefits of HyperThreading on P4's, and then's my question:

I use A LOT of programs at once. I can say my Windows taskbar is full of different windows, and in each, I have, say... 32 MSN Messenger windows, 16 Internet Explorer windows, 8 Excel 2003, Winamp, Media Player,6 Windows Explorer err... windows, 3 Word 2003 documents, Outlook 2003 and a bunch more. BitDefender 8 Pro Plus runing on the background all services...

I right now have an A64 @ 2800+, 1Gb RAM. If I change to a 3.0Ghz P4, would I notice a substantial increase of performance thanks to HT? I rarely play games, and the ones I do are not so 3d intensive.

I'd appreciate some counceling.

 

[Aenslead]

ANY?!

 

[carlosd]

No, those task can be easily done by an athlon 64 CPU, those are light tasks not demanding high load from the CPU but taking lot of memory resourses. Has nothing to do with the CPU.

 

[Rich85]

Originally posted by: carlosd
No, those task can be easily done by an athlon 64 CPU, those are light tasks not demanding high load from the CPU but taking lot of memory resourses. Has nothing to do with the CPU.

thats right because all these apps will be stored in the RAM and be dormant untill you click on one, then once you have clicked on one the CPU will just process what ever is needed to be done ....

 

[Appledrop]

you may see some benefit with more ram, indeed.

 

[omniviper]

what they said...

 

[Duvie]

That is not multtasking!!!! that is plain stupid!!!!

If while having all the crap open, you are holding a less then a 100% cpu usage then HT will not benefit you at all....cpu intensive apps ppl...

 

[flatblastard]

Originally posted by: Duvie
That is not multtasking!!!! that is plain stupid!!!!

If while having all the crap open, you are holding a less then a 100% cpu usage then HT will not benefit you at all....cpu intensive apps ppl...

Which part is stupid? That he has a bunch of windows open at the same time, or that he does not know what multitasking is?

 

[Duvie]

Originally posted by: flatblastard

Originally posted by: Duvie
That is not multtasking!!!! that is plain stupid!!!!

If while having all the crap open, you are holding a less then a 100% cpu usage then HT will not benefit you at all....cpu intensive apps ppl...

Which part is stupid? That he has a bunch of windows open at the same time, or that he does not know what multitasking is?

All of the above!!!

I dont think he is stupid...This is how we learn...

 

[n7]

What Duvie is trying to say is that unless you are running apps that take 100% of the CPU, there is extremely little benefit with Hyperthreading.

Video encoding, for example, will devour 100% of the CPU , & it basically renders my A64 unuseable while i am doing that.

With hyperthreading, i would be able to surf net & run my spyware scan while encoding smoothly without having to worry about screwing up the encoding process, etc.

IOW, in your case, no, that wouldn't be much of an upgrade.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: n7
What Duvie is trying to say is that unless you are running apps that take 100% of the CPU, there is extremely little benefit with Hyperthreading.

Video encoding, for example, will devour 100% of the CPU , & it basically renders my A64 unuseable while i am doing that.

With hyperthreading, i would be able to surf net & run my spyware scan while encoding smoothly without having to worry about screwing up the encoding process, etc.

IOW, in your case, no, that wouldn't be much of an upgrade.

Well, it certainly doesn;t render my Athlon64 unusable while rendering... I just can;t play a highly intensive 3d game at the same time.... Thats the deal, 2 applications that can take 100% cpu co-exist with 50% each, so the render gets 50%, and the game gets 50%, so the game slows down. I don;t notice the render slow down (except the time it takes) but when the game lags, its not nice.... Thats why I have several boxes One encodes and several game.

Now my duallie is another story, nothing has been able to kill that one yet..

 

[ribbon13]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
Now my duallie is another story, nothing has been able to kill that one yet..

SMP forever.

 

[Zap]

With the mentioned apps, don't bother with the lateral "up"grade. In my own experience, the only time that I miss having HyperThreading was with running bittorrents. Having a few torrents downloading, each with dozens to hundreds of peers can eat up CPU time. I noticed a definate performance hit on my previous system when I switched from a 2.6C to a 2.4A (both overclocked to same terminal speed, around 2.8GHz, ram mult dropped on 2.6C). Not enough to make the system unusable, but enough to notice.

However, I have the problem licked. I now run torrents on a dedicated machine with a VIA C3 933 (passively cooled) and a Seagate 120GB. Only fan in system is the 120mm in the Fortron PS. Machine is near silent and tucked away in a corner. I connect via Remote Desktop. Now my main system runs very speedy without having an average half-dozen torrents running at a time in the background.

 

[Aenslead]

I DO ask to know more, you know? That's the whole point of this.

Anyways, I appreciate your replies and I then assume it would be much wiser to stick with my A64 for another year.

The reason why it got me, is because some editor at Hard OCP mentioned that he "missed" his P4 system since it felt "snappier", and that's basicly what I want. But, since you've all answered my questions, I feel no longer the need to consider Intel no more.

Thank you all.

 

[gobucks]

i'll never understand all the people in here asking if they should upgrade to a new platform to get an extra 200MHz of performance. What's the point? That's like buying a brand new car every year. Is the money and time you spend worth it to go from a superpi 2M score of 85s to 84s? I don't bother upgrading till I can double my speed for the same price as my last component or less. Also, you'll lose 64-bit capability unless you get a 6xx P4, which are currently pretty expensive for the performance you get.

And like everybody else said, the hyperthreading will only make a difference if you are, say, running ripping a DVD to divx while playing HL2 or something. All current CPUs (except maybe some celerons with their tiny caches) are more than capable of running tons of small apps at the same time. Just look at your CPU usage - I highly doubt it's even close to 100%. So save your money, and wait for a real worthwhile upgrade, like dual cores.

 

[gobucks]

oh, yeah, and one other thing - if you have so much stuff open at once, and want a performance boost, try downloading trillian 3.1 to replace your MSN messenger and firefox instead of internet explorer. Both of these allow you to have one window open with lots of tabs, rather than opening up all kinds of extra instances. I don't know for sure if it matters in terms of performance with trillian, but firefox definitely speeds things up over IE with lots of windows. Whenever IE opens a new window, it loads a new instance of the program, taking up more cache/memory space. Firefox just loads the program once, no matter how many sites you're looking at, so that will help cut down on the clutter and improve your performance.

 

[akugami]

Or if you must use something based on the IE engine then use Maxthon which also supports tabbed browsing. Having multiple tabbed browser windows in either Maxthon or Firefox uses less RAM than opening multiple instances of any browser. Multiple browser tabs still use more RAM than only one tab or just a single browser but a lot less than multiple instances of a browser.