Pentium 4 2GHz and Dual Core 1.4GHz

[linklunk]

I've got an old desktop cpu (Pentium 4 2A -> 2GHz) still running well and suits my needs of just browsing and working with office applications. There's one thing I do sometimes like recording tv using external usb tv tuner (analog PAL - 25fps), for which I find the cpu performance is lacking (occasionally stuttering / jerky during recording). Of course, I can use lower settings to get better recording which uses modest (lowest) encoding setting that requires at least P4 1.5 GHz.

I'm interested in a notebook using Core2Duo SU 9400 (1.4GHz). I'm not quite following recent advancement in cpu, so my question is whether the newer dual core cpu is powerful enough for encoding videos even though it has lower frequency (1.4 vs the old desktop 2GHz)? I'd like to use better encoding setting (and resolution and other stuff) and the application says it requires a minimum 2GHz Pentium 4.

Certainly I don't include details as what the bitrate is, and etc. I just want a quick answer whether the forementioned dual core CPU can provide better performance and smooth recording eventhough it has lower frequency.

Thanks

 

[richierich1212]

The mobile Core2Duo is a lot faster than the P4. Mobile processor speeds are "measured" differently from desktop ones. Plus it is on newer technology (more software optimization?).

 

[BolleY2K]

As a sort of comparison, I upgraded my girlfriends pc, which she uses mainly for surfing and working, from a P4 3GHz to an E2180 with 2 x 2 GHz. The new rig is a lot faster in anything she does.

 

[freaky123]

hi,

you should take a look at here:

Scaleability

cu

 

[Gikaseixas]

even at 1.4 the dual core cpu will be faster

what Laptop brand/model are you buying?

 

[linklunk]

I am thinking of the Acer Timeline series, the one with SU 9400 cpu. Low power (low temp) and therefore hopefully low noise are the things I'm looking for in notebook. The long battery life is nice, and I think it has Radeon 4330 (though even Intel x4500M-HD is good enough - just for watching movies and not for playing heavy games).

The price at around $1050 is a bit too expensive though for a notebook, so suggestion for less expensive one is welcome - with specs such as low temp (can really put it on top of your lap) and silent (can't stand loud fan) on top of my list, and then comparable performance (browsing, office apps, occasional programming with visual express, occasional photo editing, and if powerful enough maybe some video editing mainly for removing unwanted parts of recorded tv/radio programs or file conversion - avi, mpeg, mp3).

 

[drizek]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16834115586

This model is slightly slower at 1.3ghz, but it is half the price so it is a much better deal.

 

[linklunk]

That one uses only a single core and I'm not sure if a single core is powerful enough to multitask recording (from usb tv tuner) smoothly while working on other things (browsing multiple tabs plus running excel/word).

Back to my original question, I got the thought of comparing the performances because whenever I look at Core2Duo T series (4xxx or 6xxx), they run at min of 2GHz. So while of course a 2GHz C2D is faster/more powerful than an old P4 2GHz, I have questions about the SU9400 at 1.4GHz. Perhaps a better question would be where the SU9400 falls in the T series range as its clock rate is ~600 MHz less.

 

[richierich1212]

Well the SU series is for low power usage / long battery life. If you can get a P-series processor you'll be golden.

And yeah, if you're comparing Core2Duo processors with other Core2Duo Processors, then you can compare the clock speeds. So yes, the SU9400 might be a bit slower than the T-Series ones, but it has 3MB of L2 Cache, whereas the T-Series ones have 1-2MB of L2 Cache. And you're going to be encoding, so the 3MB of L2 helps there.

Try to look for a laptop that has a P-Series processor.

 

[Denithor]

I think a benchmark is in order.

Here we see general system performance (office apps, video content, web publishing, communication & networking, etc, etc...) of various CPUs. Focus on the e6300 (2x1.86GHz, 2MB shared cache) and the highest end Pentium 4 ever produced, the Pentium D Extreme Edition 965 (2x3.73GHz, 2x2MB cache). A surprising fact develops: the lowly e6300 - which is exactly 1/2 the speed and cache of the behemoth P4D - matches or beats the Extreme Edition chip in nearly every case. In the few cases it does not win or exactly match it falls behind by a super-slim 1-3% margin.

So the Core 2 Duo with two cores at 1.4GHz is going to have exactly zero cases where it will not beat out your current P4 single core at 2GHz. Honestly it's probably 3-4 times the processing power of your current chip.

Take a look at this laptop: Acer Aspire AS6920-6898. Comes loaded with a C2D T5900 (2.2GHz dual core), 16" widescreen lcd, 4GB DDR2, 320GB HDD and decent nVidia integrated graphics (9500M GS). All for $650, about $400 less than the model you are looking at.

 

[linklunk]

Thnk you all for the replies.

My initial concern was while a dual core at the same clock rate would definitely win over the old P4 many times (new tech, faster fsb, etc.), but what about its performance in a case when only a single core is used (due to the app) and when its clock rate is also less by 30% (600MHz). If it's faster only by a small margin then it's not up to for my need since I need something more powerful than the old P4 performance-wise at single core.

Reading all the comments, I think I may safely conclude that even the single core in a dual core C2D 1.4GHz will still beat the old P4 2GHz by a comfortable margin for my not-so-demanding applications (smooth tv recording while doing other 'general' stuff). So getting other model either P or T series will certainly give even better performance since most of them are already at 2GHz min.

@Denithor:
The Acer Aspire AS6920-6898 is good except that it's too big for me.

Thanks...

edit:
Upon reading this timeline review @whatlaptop - "...It?s the 1.4GHz ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) Intel Core 2 Duo processor that really makes a difference to power consumption, however. We managed to run office applications for a staggering 682 minutes when out and about. It comes at a cost, however, as office performance suffers, and there?s noticeable lag when running a few applications at the same time...." and this another user review , I'm not quite sure anymore the 1.4GHz SU9400 will be faster at single core performance.

Yes, it'll be more responsive (since it's dual core) in general but probably not that much faster at single core performance, which is what I wanted for the encoding I'll be doing (live recording at higher encoding settings with no stuttering effect while browsing or working). (The encoder program that comes with the tuner is TVR 2 or 2.5 from honestech, that is likely not multicore (or -thread) capable since it's quite old. But I may be mistaken).

I think the safest route to go is to get a T or P series then.

 

[deimos3428]

Faster or not, the computer in general will be more responsive.

All those annoying things the operating system decides to do right when you'd like to actually use the computer can now happen simultaneously. Third/fourth cores show diminishing returns in this regard, but the jump from single to dual is rather significant and readily observable.

 

[Denithor]

Did you not read/comprehend my comments above?

C2D architecture is approximately twice as fast as the older P4 architecture. The two cores of e6300 matched or beat the two cores of the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 in most cases and they run at half the speed with half the cache of the P4 chip. And that's compared to a Pentium EE chip with a 1066 fsb and hyperthreading - your P4A chip has either a 400fsb or 533fsb and definitely no hyperthreading.

Meaning that each 1.4GHz core is at least 50% faster than your current chip.

And most video software these days is optimized for multiple cores so the encoding will go much, much faster (and smooth).

I'm not sure what happened in that review. A C2D at 1.4GHz is plenty of speed for general office duties, browsing, email and such. Heck, a Pentium 3 at 700MHz with 512MB RAM is adequate for those kind of tasks. The only problem you run into is when you try to do too many things at once - then a single core will become sluggish - but a dual core chip should be enough to keep rolling. They didn't get into the specs of the machine they tested beyond just the CPU - perhaps they didn't have enough RAM to juggle among a lot of apps or something.

Since you like the smaller laptops take a look at these two models.

Toshiba U505-S2930 T6500 (2.1GHz) / 13.3" LCD / 4GB / 320GB - $800
Toshiba U505-S2940 P7350 (2GHz) / 13.3" LCD / 4GB / 400GB - $900

 

[linklunk]

Yes, I did read and checked the benchmark. It's just that based on my past experience with an Acer with T5500 when the cpu first came out, I didn't find it particularly faster. It felt just like a typical 2GHz desktop when I was re-installing winxp on that laptop for a friend and then perhaps some browsing and running office (I wasn't doing any cpu-demanding things like encoding or even transcoding). Though perhaps it was the slow HD of that Acer model that was the real culprit and not the cpu itself.

T5500 is 1.7GHz with 677MHz FSB, and the SU9400 is 1.4GHz and 800MHz FSB, so I kind of expect overall they'll perform similarly, but I asked here in case anyone has real experience with the SU9400. Right now, I am just guessing that even with newer architecture and faster FSB, a drop of 600MHz clock rate (from 2GHz) is probably too deep a cut for the SU9400 and this is ultra-low voltage version afterall, not designed for performance.

--

I think I need to clarify the kind of performance I was talking about as I might sound paradoxical in previous posts. There are two: one is 'real' and the other is 'perceived'. The dual core is certainly faster and more powerful in 'real' performance just like the benchmark showed. While I'm definitely not going to be able to edit/transcode with the old P4 (impractical - it take hours), with a dual core it should be able to do this in minutes. And yes, with the dual core I can record smoothly maybe at the highest settings. Not so with the P4 even without running other applications.

The 'perceived' performance is highly subjective since it's based on how people (I) feel. So for example, if starting Windows with P4 takes 1min and the dual core takes 50sec, I wouldn't so much 'feel' that improvement though the tech behind the dual core already increases by leaps and bounds. Some processes don't depend highly on the cpu itself, yet people (I) sometimes expect all things to improve as much as the cpu has improved. People with different needs (ie. gamers, etc.) will certainly perceive differently, if not opposite, since they focus on different aspects.

So a combination of recording (mpeg2 encoding) at the highest settings, having more browser tabs and explorer windows, and running word/excel on a low-voltage 1.4GHz dual core may give similar 'perceived' performance of recording at lowest settings (foreground), less browser tabs, and excel in the background with a P4 2GHz.

I know, I'm doing more with the dual core, yet since the 'perceived' performance is similar I feel like I'm back at square one. Of course having equal running condition as the P4, the recording shouldn't stutter while I'm scrolling in a browser for example. But I was hoping to be able to do this at the highest settings (with more things in the background). By this and that review I mentioned I estimated the dual core 1.4GHz was not powerful enough for the kind of increase I expected in 'perceived' performance. (Note: A Timeline with SU9400 comes with 4GB memory).

Maybe for other series (P or T or even SL), each core is at least 50% faster, but not for the SU series. The multiple cores allow for more applications running simultaneously, but as for the increase in speed / 'perceived' performance, I suspect it is not that great. I'm not trying to contradict the benchmark results here since I'm referring specifically to the SU9400 and the condition at which I want to run the dual core is different (heavier) already than that at which I run P4 (and still expect a sigficant boost in 'perceived' performance at that heavier condition, afterall I skip a couple generations of cpu).

I guess this is another case where things increase linearly while our perception of them increases logarithmically?

Thanks for the input I'll be checking them out.

 

[drizek]

Originally posted by: linklunk
That one uses only a single core and I'm not sure if a single core is powerful enough to multitask recording (from usb tv tuner) smoothly while working on other things (browsing multiple tabs plus running excel/word).

Back to my original question, I got the thought of comparing the performances because whenever I look at Core2Duo T series (4xxx or 6xxx), they run at min of 2GHz. So while of course a 2GHz C2D is faster/more powerful than an old P4 2GHz, I have questions about the SU9400 at 1.4GHz. Perhaps a better question would be where the SU9400 falls in the T series range as its clock rate is ~600 MHz less.

I could have sworn it was a dual core. They say Pentium pretty prominently in the title though, so I must have just overlooked it(or maybe just wishful thinking )

Acer just announced new Timelines today BTW.

 

[mindless1]

You will have to look at what the CPU is actually doing, and the optimizations of the software encoder and codec to make any kind of reasonable guess about performance. Looking at benchmarks that do something else is not likely to be accurate when benchmarks tend to keep moving on to newer software instead of a targeted apples:apples comparison. For example it may not even use the 2nd core much if at all.

The curious part is USB capturing often does the bulk of the work (encoding to MPEG2) on the USB chipset, and this much is a great thing since USB2 bandwidth isn't enough for raw video so I have to wonder where the problem starts, possibly one of inappropriate priority for the application, or possibly bad latency from a driver (wifi drivers in particular are terrible for this on laptops).

I may be wrong, just throwing a few thoughts into the coversation because the generalizations about the CPU aren't going to really tell you, actually trying to do the task would. It could be that you have an unanticipated separate issue like the webpages have lots of scripts bogging down the CPU, even a simple task described as "surfing" doesn't really pinpoint what is going on. Some 'sites are so bloated these days that they really thrash the hard drive if you have it set as the browser disk cache instead of caching only to main memory. However, the browsing can have affinity set to the core that isn't doing the bulk of the encoding computations so for such multitasking it is expected to help quite a bit... but nailing down an exact percentage is beyond reasonable with so many unknown factors.

 

[linklunk]

Originally posted by: mindless1
You will have to look at what the CPU is actually doing, and the optimizations of the software encoder and codec to make any kind of reasonable guess about performance. Looking at benchmarks that do something else is not likely to be accurate when benchmarks tend to keep moving on to newer software instead of a targeted apples:apples comparison. For example it may not even use the 2nd core much if at all.

Yes, a couple points I was trying to say in my post above.

... if you have it set as the browser disk cache instead of caching only to main memory...

How do you set cache to main memory? By setting temp disk cache to 0 or by creating a memory disk ?

 

[dirkdigglerinsf]

I'm glad I found this forum.

Denithor, I saw your benchmark post, but it does not have the dual core (E2180) that I am interested in. I'm sure the Core 2 Duo is more efficient than the P4, but I am mainly interested in comparing a P4 with a dual core.

I have a Dell P4 (3.0GHz 2MB L2 Cache 800MHz FSB) and a good friend is telling me he is willing to trade with his Dell dual-core (E2180 2.0GHz 1MB L2 Cache 800MHz FSB). I am using my P4 in my lab to run an old version of LabVIEW (data collection stuff, not too intensive and written for single core architecture) and collecting data using a USB-interface A/D converter. I run a few Office programs on it (Excel, Word, and Powerpoint) to analyze & present data, and to write up protocol, results, etc.

So for apps that do not utilize multi-core processing, will the dual core (E2180 2.0GHz 1MB L2 Cache 800MHz FSB) still beat out an Intel P4 630 (3.0GHz 2MB L2 Cache 800MHz FSB)? Both PCs are running similar specs:
WinXP Pro SP2
2GB 800MHz RAM
SATA 500GB 7200rpm drive

I'm sure there are differences in the architecture that may serve as the bottleneck (533MHz vs 800MHz somewhere). I will post the specs at a later time.

Any constructive comments would be greatly appreciated.

-Dirk

 

[cusideabelincoln]

To put it simply, Dirk, yes the E2180 processor is faster than a Pentium 4 630 at anything and everything.

But here are some quick results:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=92&p2=68

Look carefully at the bench. Most of the stuff is multithreaded, so to get an idea of single threaded performance look at the Cinebench single threaded score. The E2180 is still able to match the 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 660, and it doesn't take much imagination (or math) to realize that the E2180 would outperform a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4.

Here's the math:
Assuming perfect scaling, the P4 630 is 16% slower than the P4 660. The P4 660 gets a Cinebench score of 2245. Take away 16%, and the P4 630 should score around 1870. To give it the benefit of the doubt, we'll say it scores 1900. Well the E2180 scores 2179, which is a higher score than our calculated one for the 630 and is only 3% lower than the score for the 660.

 

[MODEL3]

the Core2Duo SU 9400 should be around 3-4X faster than Pentium 4 2GHzA (like Denithor said) (only for well threaded aplications)


For video apps that is closer to 3X!

But you should check also if your capture program use 2 cores! (i suppose the encoding is done through CPU not internally in the card, you should check this also...)

I use (not very often) a freeware (VirtualDubMod ver 2008) and is using only 1 core!

Your program what encode options does it have? (MPEG2, MPEG4 (DIVX/XVID), RAW, WMV9, H264...)

If it has a MPEG4 (DIVX/XVID) choice then the quality is just fine and maybe the 2.0GHzA should be enough for 576p? (check this also..., in any case, if your capture program use 2 cores the SU 9400 should be just fine for MPEG4)

 

[RussianSensation]

My friend got the Timeline Series C2D 1.4ghz with 80GB Intel SSD. It easily feels 2-3x faster than my C2Q 3.4ghz because of the Intel SSD. Opening 10 applications in a row takes maybe 10 seconds vs. a minute on the mechanical drive. Get the model with the SSD and get an external mechanical drive for storage. I can't think of a single laptop for $800 that has the same balance of 8 hour battery life, core 2 duo which wipes the floor with the atom, 3.5lbs weight and an Intel SSD.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

^^LOL, you guys the OP convo is a month old. Some dude bumped it with his own question.