My first Intel processor since Celeron 300A days...

[mamisano]

Well, I've been an AMD zealot since the early days of the Athlon. I was an early adopter of the 500 and have had an AMD based processor ever since, including my latest Barton 2500+ at 2.3Ghz.

I just go done water cooling my rig (last week) and I am just bored with my machine. I wanted a new challenge/experience and I was looking at the latest Dell 400SC bargains lately. For a lower price than the Dell, I ended up getting a motherboard & chip to replace the NF7-S 2.0 and Barton. I am also looking forward to playing with HT. I do a LOT of multi-tasking and this will be my best option short of true duals.

Just ordered a ABIT IC7 and P4 2.6/800 (Cheaper than 2.4 at Newegg), stock cooling for now. Rest of my setup will be:

Radoen 9800 NP (hope to pick up Black Friday at Microcenter for $199, if not my 9600 pro will have to do).
2x 512MB Corsair CMS3500C2PT
2x Western Digital Raptor in Raid 0
Lite-On LDW411S DVD-RW

Anyone else do a similar upgrade? Comments?

 

[jiffylube1024]

I did the same thing. I went from an NF7-S 2.0 and 2500+ @ 2.2 Ghz (200x11) to a P4 2.4C w/ Abit IC7 (non-G). I got it running at 3.15 GHz (210 MHz DDR dual channel). Most people getting the 2.4C/2.6C are getting higher overclocks than me it seems...

Btw - nice RAM and the hard drives - sick!

Anyways. Be careful what you wish for - the P4 and hyperthreading will spoil you rotten. I'm not kidding. I can't stand to use 2+ GHz Athlons anymore because Hyperthreading is so smooth on the P4 'C'. It seriously smooths out all "jerkiness" that even the Barton and P4 A's and B's are prone to, on rare occasions. Little stuff like burning a CD and doing other things like that can be done while multi tasking with just about anything. You can be running a Prime95 iteration and still burn a CD and surf the web at the same time. It's awesome. You basically get all of the advantages of running dual processors with pretty much none of the disadvantages.

Btw - have fun reformatting those Raptors and setting them up again for RAID 😉.

 

[mamisano]

Thanks for the reply JiffyLube. As far as reformating the Raptors, I am looking forward to it. I like starting my machine off from scratch every now and then. Besides, my "My Documents" folder, where all my important docs and downloads are (4GB worth) are stored on a 36GB SCSI drive and also backed up on DVD 😉

Parts should be here on Monday, just hoping I can sell off enough of my parts to help offset the price. If not, my wife is going to kill me 😱

 

[redpriest_]

I for one have been seriously disappointed with my 3.4 ghz Pentium 4 setup, haven't felt any multitask buttery-smoothness at all, as compared to even a single processor Athlon machine. No difference at all as far as perception goes, uses the same parts (HD/mem). My dual opteron setup is to die for though, compared to it, the Athlon and Pentium 4 machines just don't compete. I can't stand to use single processor machines anymore =) (Hyperthreading doesn't cut it - played with it and doesn't stand up to a true dual processor machine).

 

[WT]

(Hyperthreading doesn't cut it - played with it and doesn't stand up to a true dual processor machine).

True dat ... I think its comparing apples to oranges really. HT shouldn't be considered multi processing, more like 1+ processing .... the applications have to USE it to see any noticeable benefits.

 

[redpriest_]

Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing, but I just haven't noticed any difference in multitasking. My P4C will stutter at the same places a lower speed Athlon would. I think it's perhaps configuration issues. "Smoothness", "response time" are usually associated with fast hard drives and large amounts of memory. That doesn't mean that better multitasking won't give you more productivity, I just think it's very subjective to base a buying decision on it.

"Little stuff like burning a CD and doing other things like that can be done while multi tasking with just about anything." <- This is really based on what kind of burner you're using, and what kind of application you're running at the same time. If you're trying to defrag your harddrive and burn a CD with the data coming off that drive, you'll probably make a coaster, even if you're running dual processors. The hard drive -> CD is the bottleneck, probably not the CPU.

"can be running a Prime95 iteration and still burn a CD and surf the web at the same time." <- I've done that with even a PMMX 200, heh. Just depends on the type of hardware you're running. In fact, on all my computers I have folding@home constantly running at max capacity (gromacs core is as intensive as prime95 imo).

 

[beatle]

I ordered a 2.6C and IS7 from newegg on Monday. I'm hoping to get them by Friday! 😀 I'm not expecting day to day applications to feel any faster, but I am hoping media encoding to speed up significantly.

 

[Megatomic]

Threads like this one really make it hard for me to hold off the upgrade illness. My Barton 2500+ @ 3200+ is really fast but it is getting killed in the media encoding benchmarks and that's where the bulk of my computing is going to be over the next few months. I have lots of VHS that I want to make into SVCDs (and DVDs eventually).