<< Questions for Daovonnaex:
Will the 1.6a Northwood system whip butt on my Thunderbird systems if I update to about 1700MHz XP speed? >>
If you're referring to mine, yes. The XP 1700+ would outperform the standard P4 1.6A, but the 1.6A overclocks much farther.
<< How much of a performance difference would there be from a DDR P4 150-160MHz fsb set up vs the RDRAM 133MHz fsb? >>
The DDR SDRAM on a P4A doesn't change with FSB necessarily (nor does RDRAM all the time). Anyhow, I'll assume that you mean PC2700 DDR SDRAM and a P4 1.6A.
DDR SDRAM
Frequency: 2.4GHz (150fsb)
Bandwidth: 2664 MB/sec
RDRAM
Frequency: 2128 MHz
Bandwidth: 4264 MB/sec
In gaming, video editing, photoshop, 3D, etc. the RDRAM system would win. In other apps, the DDR SDRAM would be marginally ahead, not completely, since higher clocked DDR SDRAM has more latency, and has some problems with the P4.
<< Does your 3.2GHz Northwood stomp on the 2.1GHz XP in real world applications and gaming? If so is this mostly because of your awesome RDRAM overclock? >>
It crushes it, due to the more advanced hyperburst architecture, the memory bandwidth and very low memory latency, and the Intel Pentium 4 Compiler (SSE2).