Just replaced a Tbird with a Palmino, to get SSE under WinXP do I need to reinstall windows?

[stonecold3169]

I just swapped out my old and aging 1.4ghz Tbird with an Athlon XP 1800+, and I was curious about if I should reinstall windows or not.

I know originally it was a nessessity to reinstall windows to gain the new instruction set, but service pack 1 released a new driver for the XP cpus, so Iwas curious if those were to fix this issue perhaps.

Normally I wouldn't care, except I would have to call and reregister my winXP because I'm over my 5 times now, and that would just be a bit more involved then what I want to get into at the moment as I have better ways to waste my time

Thanks in advance

 

[thorin]

Yes it's likely a different kernel.

Thorin

 

[SUOrangeman]

I don't think MS customizes NT kernels for different AMD chips. A re-install shouldn't be necessary.

It may be worth snagging WCPUID or SANDRA to see if any of those programs detect SSE.

-SUO

 

[John]

FWIW, (2) of the AMD Tech tours I attended specified that you must do a clean install of the OS when going from a Tbird to a Pally.

* Calling MS to reactivate XP is not a dubious task at all.

 

[Adul]

I thought you could just update the processor driver in the devicemanager to get SSE support

 

[BigFatCow]

wow 4 elite member posts in a row...

 

[Syborg1211]

LOL yea i was going to post before John did but I didn't want to join in the elite member postings... then 2 more posted haha

 

[pillage2001]

The battle of the Elites.

 

[Viper GTS]

I upgraded a system running dual 1.2 GHz TBirds to dual 1800+ XP's, SSE was detected & enabled just fine with no OS re-install. Was running Windows 2K at the time, but XP is no different.

Viper GTS

 

[zephyrprime]

Why would a reinstall be necessary at all? SSE has more to do with the application being run than the OS. It's of course possible that some libraries in windows could be rewritten faster ussing SSE but microsoft never does stuff like that in it's software (for example, the memcpy routine in the visual c++ 6 runtime is only 8bit! It would be much faster if it used MMX or SSE or even ordinary 32bit movs)

 

[JBT]

I usta have a 1.4 T-Bird now I have a 1700 XP T-Bred WCPUID clearly states that I have SSE with no reinstall of Win2K.

 

[stonecold3169]

hmm...I seem to have started a debate

See, back in the day, before SP1 was released, I had attended an AMD press conference and they said that regardless of what software said, in order for applications to actually USE sse you had to do a clean install.

I pretty much accepted this as fact, except I went from a 1.4ghz tbird (266 fsb) to a 1.53ghz palmino (obviously also 266 fsb), changed no other hardware, and my MP3 encoding time DRASTICALLY changed. We aren't talking a few seconds faster, we're talking about taking only maybe 3/4 or even 2/3 of the time it took before. I know that the palmino core is just faster in general, but this seems drastic. I know that video and audio encoding benefits greatly by sse, but who the heck knows, lol...

Anyways, thanks, I think for now I'll avoid the reinstall.

PS: If you have to call in for reactivation, do you get stuck on hold for hours? If it's a 5-10 minute wait, I'll just dump it and reinstall and make a ghost image tonight, but I doubt it's as quick and painless as they claim

 

[Lord Evermore]

How long has it been since your original XP install? After I think 3 months (I forget the time) they don't count a new activation as a possible double-install, you can just activate over the Internet like it's your first time; it's like a reset timer. Activation is only trying to stop the people installing it on several machines at once.