• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

P4 1,3 Ghz user need help!!!

F

foxymophandlemama

Member
I'm a NEWBIE and dad just bought me a new PC. He got his friend to 'build' it for me. Here's the specs:
Pentium 4 1,3 ghz
ASUS p4t mobo
128 MB RDRAM
Inno3d Tornado Geforce2 GTS 32 MB
Sony CD-RW
SB Live Value
Enlight Case
Unknown Floppy
WinME as OS

Now before flaming me for buying P4, I got my reasons 🙂 Dad wouldn't let me buy AMD for safety reasons (I live in tropical country, he heard that AMD gets hot easily + I got no Air Conditioner in my room) and I don't have enough technical skillz to tell him otherwise. My dad's friend also reccomend to use P4 for whatever reason, I dunno.
And for the 128 RAM, to get more RDRAM is darn expensive here, so right now guess it's OK.

Anyway, to the questions:

SPEED ISSUES
1. I FEEL that the performance is not that great. My old system is PIII 450 Mhz and I expect to get 3x more speed on my new rig, but no luck...For instance, the booting-up speed on the new system is on par with my old system, also loading programs in not much faster... Am I expecting too much?
2. Does P4 has some optimizing options that I dunno about? I already use RDRAM turbo on the BIOS, is there any settings I should change?
3. On the software part, does winME slow things for p4? Would I get a significant performance gain if I switch to win98/2000?

OVERCLOCK ISSUES
1. Is it safe to overclock the P4? I can get it up to 1,56 Ghz by changing the FSB thingy, but afraid to use it...(remember, my room temp is hot)
2. According to Asus Probe, I have no CPU fan and Power fan. I got only Chassis fan that ran on 3341. Is this correct? This sound stupid but, shouldn't the other fan be included with the chips/mobo? Or do I just have to buy it seperately?

Whoa, lots of questions for one post, hope some Intel users reply to it 🙂
To sum things up, I'm not really impressed with th performance, kinda dissapointed actually. The only good thing I can find is for gaming. Iheard AMD is way better in real performance so I'm thinking about trade the p4 with it.

IF I can convinve my dad to trade it with AMD system-since I just use it for 3 days, and assume store guy is someone I can bargain with-I'm thinking about getting a 1,3 Ghz Thunderbird, Iwill KK-266 Mobo with 256 MB PC 133, and FANS. Is this a good system? And how about the cooling stuff? Which fan I should buy and how much do I need since I'm living in hot country? I HAVE to make sure the system is easy to setup and most importantly SAFE, to convince my Dad.
Yet another set of questions, these are for AMD users 🙂


Thanks in advance.
 
<BEGIN PLUG>
Trade in for an AMD DDR system and save a couple $100 dollars 🙂 My computer room is hot as hell too... no problems yet.
<END PLUG>

Heh, I can try can't I? 😉
 
Did you actually time the boot time and load time? I say this because I got my new rig (see sig) and it didn't seem that much faster than my older one at first. But then I went over to a friends house to have a small LAN party, and I booted up WAY faster than him, and he had a similar rig to my older one. So it might be that there is a change, and you just aren't percieving (sp?) it.
 
&quot;I FEEL that the performance is not that great.&quot;

Can you be more specific? Different applications will show different improvements. For instance, at 1280 resolution in games, the video card is the bottleneck, and any cpu over a given point (800mhz seems to be the consensus number) will act the same. So, by increasing the cpu speed, it would be naive to &quot;expect&quot; a scaling speed increase overall.

Boot up times are hardly dependant on the cpu. The hard drive is definitely more influential on boot up times. Same with whatever programs are loaded in the background, bios settings (quick boot, RAM check, etc...), network settings, etc... Same with loading programs. Their are other factors than cpu speed.

As for the AsusProbe... It depends on where the fans are plugged into. If they are plugged into the motherboard, then it will read their speeds. If they are plugged directly into the powersupply, then obviously it won't.

No, WinME doesn't slow anything down compared to the other OS's.

Switching to AMD certainly won't speed up your program loading times, or your boot up times.

 
Get a Thunderbird 1.4 GHz and underclock/undervolt that sucker. 🙂

Heat issues resolved.

Edit: This is not a big deal at all in real life, but if you REALLY want to convince your dad to get you an AMD system, you could argue that DDR SDRAM runs MUCH COOLER than RDRAM. 🙂
 


<< 1. I FEEL that the performance is not that great. My old system is PIII 450 Mhz and I expect to get 3x more speed on my new rig, but no luck...For instance, the booting-up speed on the new system is on par with my old system, also loading programs in not much faster... Am I expecting too much? >>


Perhaps you are expecting too much from your system? For a while, I ran my Athlon 1 GHz UNDERCLOCKED to 500 MHz and I barely noticed any performance difference for normal web browsing or even while I was doing some programming work. It really depends on your application and remember that 3x clock speed does not necessarily mean 3x more performance. IE can only render HTML so quickly.. 🙂



<< 3. On the software part, does winME slow things for p4? Would I get a significant performance gain if I switch to win98/2000? >>


While I recommend Windows 2000, I don't think ME &quot;slows down&quot; the P4 significantly. However, Win9x does have more tendency to experience &quot;OS decay&quot; compared to NT. Did you do a clean install of ME after getting the new system?



<< 1. Is it safe to overclock the P4? I can get it up to 1,56 Ghz by changing the FSB thingy, but afraid to use it...(remember, my room temp is hot) >>


What for? Really depends on what you want to do with it. I personally wouldn't take the risk if this is going to be used for simple tasks. I'm an anti-overclocker, so I'll shut up at this point. 🙂



<< 2. According to Asus Probe, I have no CPU fan and Power fan. I got only Chassis fan that ran on 3341. Is this correct? This sound stupid but, shouldn't the other fan be included with the chips/mobo? Or do I just have to buy it seperately? >>


That's odd. Try opening up the case and check how many fans you got installed.
 

Might also be that this &quot;friend&quot; of your dads didn't to the essentials - i.e.: installing the chipset-drivers and the storage-drivers. Both these things speed up quite a few things. You should have these things on the CD from ASUS that came with the board.

Otherwise check on ASUS's site or (if they have nothing at all), you should be out of luck, check here - the CHIPSET-drivers are called &quot;INF-driver&quot; on intel's page HERE. In case you're wondering why I am pointing at Intel's page - the ASUS P4T (along with every P4 board out there) uses the i850 chipset - thus Intel's chipset drivers work on it.

Note though - the chipset/storage drivers MUST be installed first thing after the OS - before any other drivers. So you may have to rebuild your system. That is unless they're installed already. If such is the case, you should see all sorts of INTEL XYZYXYZ Bridge in yout SYSTEM part of the Device manager.
 
No CPU Fan?

That's got to be wrong.

You MUST have a CPU-fan. Check the case innards ... if you've NOT got a CPU-fan, then the problem is quite evident. The CPU (not being cooled enough) might throttle itself so as to not take permanent damage.

Also - what exactly is it you're going to DO with that thing? And explain exactly what you mean with &quot;feels&quot; slow. Your word-processing &amp; web-browsing certainly will not be much faster, I can tell you that for free... 😀

Depends on what you do with that thing :0.
 
Thanks for the reply guys,
There's a CPU Fan after all, stupid me 🙂
Maybe I was expecting too much from my new system afterall.
So, ehem, what exactly IS the improvement can I expect with this 1,3 ghz system anyway?
And would I be better off if I trade it for AMD system?

Thanks again.
 
Very generally speaking, a 1.3 GHz Thunderbird could easily outperform your P4 1.3 GHz in most applications.

It really depends on what you do with it, though.

Like I said earlier, for most everyday apps, CPU power barely makes any difference nowadays.
 
You are most likely expecting too much. IDE Hard drives can only go so fast, no matter which CPU you have. Clock speed is mostly for bragging rights as we have finally reached the state of diminishing returns. This is not to say that I do not want the fastest processor available as I enjoy tweaking and messing around. However, I went from a PII 350 to a PIII 600@800 to a PIII 700@933 and I can barely tell the difference in Windows apps. Even software DVD decoding was perfect with the PII 350.

The only way to tell the difference in most cases is through benchmarks and that is about all they are worth. Stick the GF2 in your PIII 450, bench it and then put is back in the new box and bench it. You will be happy with the results, but you probably won't notice them that much during single player game modes.

Keep the P4 as it will be able to drive the GF 4 or 5. Not too shabby a system there.

LJ
 
Thanks,
looks like I'm gonna keep my p4. About benchmarks, I get 3400ish score on 3dmark 2001, is this good or something wrong with my PC? And that's using 12.41 driver, if I use supplied driver, I only get like 2700ish. But I rather use the supplied driver since it looks more stable.
 
That's a good 3dMark score for that video card. Most ~1ghz users are getting around 3100 marks.
Check out this thread.

Why are you looking for something wrong with your PC, as if you are trying to convince yourself that it isn't good setup?
 


<< That's a good 3dMark score for that video card. Most ~1ghz users are getting around 3100 marks.
Check out this thread.

Why are you looking for something wrong with your PC, as if you are trying to convince yourself that it isn't good setup? >>




Pez,
You and I both know that the 1.3ghz P4 is pretty weak. He should have at least got a 1.7ghz P4. His old p3 450 would probably beat the 1.3 P4 in some benches.


Foxy,
If I was you I would upgrade your cpu to at least the 1.7ghz P4. There you should be pretty happy. The P4 weouldn't be the best performance enhancement at 1.3ghz.



Jason
 
What I am saying is that he was expecting more performance from 1.3ghz. If it was a P3 @1.3ghz(If they made them) or a TBird at 1.3ghz he would probably be happier. The P4 1.3ghz is pretty sad. He would see a difference between the TBird 1.3ghz and P4 1.3ghz. But the money it would take wouldn't be worth the upgrade to a TBird. His best choice would to upgrade to a P4 1.7ghz if his mobo supports it.


Jason
 
As to the speed of the boot,there is a setting in bios for the fast boot feature/ enable it, and watch it fly.
As to performance, if you have pc800 rdram, there is a setting for either 3x or 4x for the ram, 4x is for pc800 3x is for 600, it defaults to 3x/ that speeds things up big time.
As to Overclocking/ go for it, I have my P4 1.5 gig doing 1800 with the stock intel sink, I bench it in sisoft, and it's darn quick.
Most of the things that you get more performance from, are bios settings, pull out the book and read it.
PC probe is nothing short of a pain, use mobo monitor. Any other questions/ LMK as I have the Asus P4T as well 🙂
 
No, WinME doesn't slow anything down compared to the other OS's.

You sure? Although it boots faster than Windows 98, I've found ME to be more sluggish in day-to-day tasks, even after I disabled all that backup crap.

My Windows 98 SE system boots *very* fast so ME's possible advantage in that area doesn't really concern me. Even my friends comment on how fast my system boots. 🙂
 
Personally, I thought that ME was faster than 98. Actually, there wasn't anything about ME that I didn't like better than 98.

That's one thing that I don't get about ME. Ask five different people about their experiences with ME, and you get five totally different answers.
 
Hey, I'll try that BIOS stuff, thanks!
Now that I don't expect much from my setup, it's looking quite good actually 🙂
And since we're talking about OS, how about XP? I heard it support SSE2. I've read somewhere ppl using it gain like 50% performance increase. And is the SSE2 software is still far away? few months, a year or two?
 
What exactly are you looking to do with thing computer? It appears that you are looking to run the normal stuff. Office, internet (although I don't know what kind of connection you have, internet games are pretty much useless on anything less than or equal then a cable modem), some games (which will run great, you don't have to have the highest settings on everything) and maybe some mP3's. If you really want to properly tweak this machine, you should spend a week straight at www.tweakfiles.com. 90% of the people in this forum will probably not notice the difference between OS's running things like mP3's and EA Sports Games.

Quake will run very well for the occasional Quaker on a 450mHz.

The bottom line is that you were expecting a miracle machine, I don't think that a 2Ghz Athlon would impress you. Just be happy with you have, your machine is probably faster than 75% of the people in this forum.

 
I know I may sound ungrateful, but it's just that I want to get max performance for my new PC. And I was a little worried that there's something wrong when my daily task doesn't get faster, but now I know that there's really no significant increase from 450 to 1300 Mhz on normal software side. As for gaming, all I can say is WOW, definetely a big improvement 🙂
 
For WinME, it really depends on what software are installed on your machine. For example, my Dell P4 1.4GHz came with a bunch of useless software, and for once I thought I got a PII 233MHz!!!! After reinstalling WinMe (without the useless stuff) it ran smooth.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top