Is a 1.8ghz p4 a bottleneck to newer video cards?

[aka1nas]

Is that northwood running Sd-RAM or DDR? Dual or Single channel? if it's sd-ram, than it is a huge bottleneck and I don't know if its worth putting a newer card in. We have several machines of that class in the lab I admin at and they could barely handle directX 8 games with a 9600 and 1GB of SD

 

[carlosd]

Absolutely bottleneck

 

[stevty2889]

A 1.8 northwood should overclock easily to 2.4-2.6ghz on default voltage, and would be a nice match for a 6600. I have a 6600 in my backup rig, and it works just fine, with a 3.06ghz northwood. Haven't tried HL2 on it yet, but I'm sure it will run fine at 1024x768. The 1.6 and 1.8ghz northwoods are some of the best overclockers. I have had 2 1.6's that ran at 2.4ghz on stock voltage, and I have a mobile 1.6 thats run at 2.7ghz with a little extra voltage. That gigabyte board you were looking at should be good enough to get your 1.8 to 2.4 without having to worry about voltage. Not a gurantee of course, but a really good chance.

 

[Silversierra]

I used to have pc133 ram and the cpu at fsb 400. Now the fsb is 580(145) and my cpu is 2.55ghz. It seems to work. I am using ddr ram now. It's underclocked due to using the lower bus speed, I think it's about pc 3000 speeds. It seems to work well.

 

[stevty2889]

Originally posted by: Silversierra
I used to have pc133 ram and the cpu at fsb 400. Now the fsb is 580(145) and my cpu is 2.55ghz. It seems to work. I am using ddr ram now. It's underclocked due to using the lower bus speed, I think it's about pc 3000 speeds. It seems to work well.

Nice, that will squeeze some more performance out of it, and it won't be a bottleneck for the 6600 either.

 

[JBird7986]

Can you stick DDR RAM in slots designed for PC133, or do you specialized motherboards (i.e. My brother's MSI K7T Turbo2 is running an XP 2400+, but stuck with PC133 SDRAM. Any way around this without having to upgrade the entire computer?)

 

[stevty2889]

Originally posted by: JBird7986
Can you stick DDR RAM in slots designed for PC133, or do you specialized motherboards (i.e. My brother's MSI K7T Turbo2 is running an XP 2400+, but stuck with PC133 SDRAM. Any way around this without having to upgrade the entire computer?)

You can't use DDR in a motherboard that uses SDRAM, it won't even physicly fit. SDRAM is 168pins, ddr is 184 pins. You don't need to upgrade the entire computer, get a motherboard that uses DDR and supports the CPU, and some ddr memory and you'll be good to go.

 

[JBird7986]

That's what I thought and was trying to avoid...but thanks for the help.

 

[thegimp03]

I think it'd be a pretty bad bottleneck. I ran a p4 2.4 400 mhz fsb comp with a 6800 nu and it was bottlenecked significantly by the processor. Yes, I know the videocard is more powerful, but the proc was 600 mhz faster too. Upgrading to a faster processor is an option. The 400 mhz chips go up to 3.0 ghz, but they are likely very difficult to find now. You would have better luck finding a 2.6. Consider buying it used because prices are still way too high on these.

 

[coomar]

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/digest3d/index0502.html

Testing of cpu bottlenecks with gpu's, a 1400mhz amd64 is probably faster than a 2.6 P4 though

Looking at it, doesn't seem like your processor is bottlenecking the card

 

[pplapeu]

that is like a 256mb cache...think about that,,,whereas newer CPUs have 1000mb caches.....the cache being basically the size of the gate the data moves through..that is oversimplified

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Silversierra
I looked at the msi board, but saw the same thing you did. Multiple users reported that the vcore doesn't work, and now the option is gone. According to the manual, it has fsb adjustment, and I think it has lockable pci/agp.

Is the wire trick risky? Like is it possible that it'll fry the cpu?

Yes, wire trick involves risk, but with care and research you can minimize the risk. I've done the wire trick and have pin modded (intentionally broken off pins) a number of chips. So far (knock on wood) 100% success rate.

I checked the MSI board again. With the newest BIOS update not even FSB adjustments are available now. Strangely it still has AGP/PCI lock and chipset voltage.