Importance of FSB on Overall Performance? The real deal?

[Shinerx]

**correction: 450a vs. p2 550. sorry**
Back in the day i had my cel 300a at 450 with 100fsb and a friend had his fancy p2 550 or whatever and it seemed my system was just faster overall. We had the same mobo, vid card.
Today i see the same thing. I run my p3 500e at 750 with a 150fsb and he runs his p3 800(coppermine) at standard 100fsb and my system simply woops his. Even when he does overclock a tad (112fsb).
It seems to me that the primary performance boost u get is from the FSB being oc'd. So many people are rushing to hit 1ghz, but does it really mean that much if your still at around 100fsb (with cel2's or athlons)?
Why dont manufacturers focus more on upping the overall system bus instead of cramming every last little mgz it can out of their cpus when the difference in performance is marginal? I say its hype, people are fixated on high cpu speed. You ask your average guy/gal on the street about his/her computer all they know about it is "600mhz" or "800mhz". If i say mines 550 they assume theirs is better. Its the first thing on peoples minds. Its like horsepower in cars. Its overhyped and the industry is capitalizing on it.
Granted fsb's are going up, but very slowly compared to cpu speeds. They are way out of proportion i think, and your whole system ends up being one big overpriced bottleneck.
Maybe i'm not giving the industry enough time to adjust to the faster frequencies, because i'm sure they realize fsb's should go up. But what are they waiting for? ($$$?)

find the errors of my ways.

 

[Ulysses]

That's right. Most people buy on MHz and know nothing else. This is really annoying to me when I see people buying Celerons @ 566/66 intending to > 850/100. They think that's great, but it's no faster than a P3 600/100! You really have to look at the benchmarks at AnandTech or others to determine the best CPU for your apps.

The upcoming P4/Willamette is supposed to have a '400' MHz bus, although I'm not sure exactly how it will work.

 

[Hard_Boiled]

OK, of course having a higher FSB helps, and a P3 650@866 will seem more than 16 mhz faster than a P3 850 on a 100 mhz FSB. Intel is trying to increase the FSB, slowly but surely. Some of the P3's are designed to run at 133, and I think Athlon boards can run at 133(don't follow athlon stuff so much). I doubt your system really whoops his tho, it may be slightly faster, but that extra FSB wouldn't make it a whooping. Also, his P3 550 was 100 mhz faster than your celeron 450, they both ran at 100 mhz FSB. Perhaps there are other things making his system seem slower.

Ulysses, that's a low blow to the celerons. A 566@850 in worst case scenario's performs at the level of a P3 700, and thats worst case. I guess you could say, in terms of P3 performance, the Celeron 566@850 will be as slow as a P3 700 and as fast as a P3 850. It all depends on the application. To say a celeron at 850 performs like a P3 600 is lowballing it.


Here is a link: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1261&p=9
Notice the PIII 800/133 whooping ass, then the PIII 800/100 a whole 17 fps behind it. In this test the C2 850 doesn't look so hot, but it is right there with a 700 mhz Duron. That's about as fast as a PIII 700, so it shows an 850 C2 at about the 700 mhz range.

Now this link: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1227&p=11
This is what I was referring to, the C2 850 and the P3 700 basically scoring the same, both running 100 mhz FSB.

 

[Painman]

I base my target overclock on a balance of highest realistically expectable MHz and good bandwidth at that speed. Right now the cB0 core can get you over a GHz if you find a good chip. That's why the 700E is so great. If you find one that will run at 1008 MHz, it does so on a 144 MHz bus. It is the high bus speed that really makes an oc'ed rig a hot rod, and achieving a 150 MHz bus speed is truly awesome. I know that the CPU I have right now will take a bus speed somewhere in the mid to high 140s but the board I'm on doesn't offer any speeds between 140 and 150, and it's not stable at 150. The CPU might be, I'm not sure what its ceiling is. I'm waiting to get a CUSL2 and then I should have the best of both worlds, a GHz+ overclock and a beefy FSB to back it up. I just hope the i815's AGP lives up to Intel's tradition of overclocked stability.

-Pain

 

[Shinerx]

believe it or not, my 150fsb 500e woops his 100fsb 800. We both have voodoo3's, he has be6-II, i have p3b-f. Ok, i havent run tests. But game fps's (unreal, q3) are consistently lower. Just working in windows is slower.
A 50% increase in fsb make a huge difference a think.

 

[Eug]

"Celerons @ 566/66 intending to > 850/100. They think that's great, but it's no faster than a P3 600/100!"

Ulysses keeps saying this but most reviews put it at about the speed of a PIII 700. However, one always must mention the fact that it's a lot cheaper. That's the real draw of the Celeron.

Also, it depends on the software. If you're running RC5, a Celeron 850 = a PIII 850. Indeed, in OGR, my Celeron 897 beats most of the PIIIs out there, since PIIIs above 900 are not that common (but becoming more common of course).

Of course, an overclocked PIII 700 would whip a Celeron 850, but the problem is that most of the people buying the Celerons don't have the right parts to overclock a PIII.

I think blindly recommending the PIII 700 or 600 is doing a lot of people a potential disservice. It depends on the motherboard, the memory, the components, and of course, how much the person is willing to spend.

 

[Painman]

Ahh, Eug... Always the voice of reason.

You're right that we shouldn't tell everyone to go out and get a PIII 700 or so and overclock the crap out of it, it does take careful consideration of your components if you're looking to break the 133 MHz barrier much less reach the 150 MHz mark. A lot of people upgrade bit by bit because of financial constraints, common sense constraints, or both. I don't have boatloads of cash lying around to upgrade with, even though it may seem so... if I get a hankering for some new bit of hardware, I sell off whatever it is I'm replacing and hopefully I don't take too much of a depreciation penalty. My box is my pride and joy, so I want it to be a fire-breathing beast and I don't mind if it's a little bit of a money pit sometimes. Thus is the nature of that thing we call a hobby.

-Pain

 

[Insane3D]

As far as Athlons go, the 100mhz bus is a DDR bus, so it is effectively running a 200mhz. This is just like the DDR memory on the Geforce cards. That is also why the EV6 bus is more sensitive to o/c. I am running a 118mhz bus, but it is effectively running at 236mhz...

 

[mpitts]

There is an excellent article about the AMD 200Mhz FSB here:

http://www.hardocp.com/articles/amd/200bus.html

Check it out!

 

[Goi]

Actually the Celeron2s are weaker than P3Es, even at the same FSB, because of its cache structure.

But FSB does matter. My old C300A running at 450,464 and 504MHz(100, 103 and 112MHz FSB) all beat my current C533 running at 600MHz(75MHz FSB) in Quake3:Arena, with an otherwise exact same software and hardware settings

 

[Ulysses]

Here are a few of my thoughts on the Celeron question:

You can argue by selecting one chart or another that a Cele 566 @ 850 is equal to a P3 600E or 650 or 700 and be right depending on which chart you pick. But this ignores the ability to overclock the P3 600E as well. And the cost today of a 600E is not that much more than a Cele 566 - and for only a little bit more a 700 or 750 can be had that may do 900 - 1000 MHz. And those P3 MHz are with a full size L2 cache.

Budgets are budgets and if you only have a $100 then a Cele is a fine choice. But if you can spend $200 or so then to me it is clearly better to get one of the highly overclockable Coppermines. This was not the case a year ago, but it is today, and I think a lot of people who have Cele's and enjoy them find this difficult to accept. Even if you can only overclock a 600E a bit - say to 110-115 MHz bus - you're still ahead of the overclocked Cele on most benchmarks, and as you upgrade your RAM etc. you can overclock the P3 further.

What I think is really not good is to spend more than $100 on a Cele, like a 600 or 700 - that's just a waste of money since you're so close to a P3's price. Another mistake, of course, is to run a Celeron not overclocked, which gives very poor performance.

So in the end I think it comes down to recommending a Thunderbird, Coppermine or Duron, in that order of preference, and I see little reasonn for putting a Celeron in the serious enthusiast's PC (except maybe for RC5, but, heh, get a life). I'm sorry if this irritates Cele owners or fans.

Lastly, I really think that Cele fans should jump ship and start to champion the Duron - now that makes a lot more sense for those on a budget.

 

[Eug]

Heheh, I'm starting to see more complete information about the Celerons from Ulysses's posts...

I'd agree about the Duron, since it's a must better chip, except that the motherboards are expensive and few and far between. Plus, there isn't as much info yet as the tried and true BX. But both those issues will be solved with time (hopefully short).

 

[Hard_Boiled]

Ulysses, but a P3 600 is not equal to a celeron 850. The celeron 850 is equal to a P3 700. Hell my Celeron 566@952 runs at about the same pace as a P3 800. Sure you could buy a P3 600 and overclock it, i just had to put in my thoughts that u were selling the celeron short. Belive me if I didnt ahve 384 megs of PC100 ram I would've been all over a P3, but this is not the case.

I know that a celeron is not as fast as a P3/Duron/Athlon, but I knew that before I bought it too. i don't think any of your comments should irritate celeron owners at all, because the simple truth is that they are not as fast a a P3, or Athlon. But a celeron @850 is not any slower than a P3 700 in any benchmark, and faster than it in quite a few.