Unimpressed with all this new hardware

[videogames101]

my folding@home ppd is through the roof with my new rig, I see a massive difference with my q95550 and HD4870 in that regard.

Some people like me have a great need (or want, w/e, speed, more SPEED!) for every mhz, if you don't, don't buy new hardware.


...SPEED!!!

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Originally posted by: WaitingForNehalem
Hopefully I'll notice a difference from my P4 to Nehalem. I will finally be able to multitask!

Why do you have to wait for Nehalem to multitask? I multitasked on my Amiga 500 with a 7 mhz Motorola CPU...

 

[mrSHEiK124]

Originally posted by: Flipped Gazelle

Originally posted by: WaitingForNehalem
Hopefully I'll notice a difference from my P4 to Nehalem. I will finally be able to multitask!

Why do you have to wait for Nehalem to multitask? I multitasked on my Amiga 500 with a 7 mhz Motorola CPU...

Core architecture + improvements + the return of SMT = fuckwin?

I imagine it's going to be fast as balls. Only reason I'm holding off upgrading my S939 4200+ X2 system.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

Originally posted by: Flipped Gazelle

Originally posted by: WaitingForNehalem
Hopefully I'll notice a difference from my P4 to Nehalem. I will finally be able to multitask!

Why do you have to wait for Nehalem to multitask? I multitasked on my Amiga 500 with a 7 mhz Motorola CPU...

waiting is a stupid thing.

ex of waiting problem:

currently own: OLD SHIT
current tech: core/phenom
new tech on the horizon: neha

u skip out on buying the current tech and wait for new tech. new tech arrives but is expensive and buggy. you buy and get screwed cuz you were so eager and waiting for so long.
or u wait some more until more new tech arrives around the horizon.

hence this guy "waitingfornehalem" will get screwed because he's been holding onto his old crappy p4 until nehalem comes around and buy it asap. what will nehalem do for you that core couldn't that made u wait an extra 2 years to get it? will it be so fast that it gives u those 2 years back of time?

is there something specific that Neha does that core/phenom couldn't do or does SUBSTANTIALLY faster? (we already know that neha won't give games much improvement)

don't wait. buy what you can afford when you need to.

 

[tallman45]

The last big improvement for me was when we went from
OS on 5 1/2 floppys to a hard drive
Green or Amber screens to color
DOS to Windows
The Mouse
Token ring to Ethernet
Novell to NT
386 to DX2
300 baud acoustic coupler to 9600bps dial up internet access (Bulletin Boards)
any single core to any Dual core proc

Seriously, Want a few months maybe a year and go SSD as your OS/app load medium

>Originally posted by: BoboKatt<
""honestly whether I have a 640 WD or a 1TB Samsung, I can?t tell the difference in how they load my games""

not sure what you mean here, performance is not going to be any different, storage capacity is the only main diff

 

[Zenoth]

Just going from my X1800XL 256MB to my G80 GTS 640MB had enough of a wow effect. And going from my P4C 2.2Ghz to my previous Athlon 64 X2 4400+ was also impressive. But then again we pretty much perceive what's a "noticeable or very high performance jump" differently, it's always subjectively defined.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Originally posted by: WaitingForNehalem
Hopefully I'll notice a difference from my P4 to Nehalem. I will finally be able to multitask!

I gave to my brother my beloved MOJO P4-Prescott 3.4Ghz@3.8. And as I mentioned, I have this old P4T533-R ASUS mobo running a Northwood P4 3.06 Ghz (voted worst over-clocker since the IBM-PC with 64K of RAM [they came stock with 16!].

I don't get "immediate comparison" between Bro's MOJO and my 4 Ghz E8600, but the Northwood 3.06 makes it pretty clear. It's a "sea-change."

And I said several times: "Choosing when to buy, build and upgrade is like surfing."

You can catch the wave early, when prices are high and the bugs come at you like flying fish. Or you can wait. Some people have budgets like Russians invested in Yukoil. Some don't -- that's me. And if I'd been paddling for three or four years, I'm sure I could find a $150 mobo, 4GB of DDR2 RAM for $80, and an E8400 for maybe $180 -- right . . . freakin' . . . . now. You don't need to surf the point-break or the Banzai-Pipeline to get a good ride.

The only thing I wonder about is this. How long will a B3 Q6600 go before it's obsolete?

Look for me buying Nehalem/i7, Bloomfield X58 or Striker II Ex, some DDR3 . . . . around late 2009 or well into 2010. Meanwhile, Ah'm growin' my Cilantro, Tomatoes, Chili Peppers and Jalopeno, buyin' pork-roast for $1.89/lb, and makin' my own Carnitas Chili Verde while I let the pennies accumulate.

 

[imported_apocalypse]

The biggest change for me was going from a Pentium 233Mhz MMX on Windows 98 -> P4 1.4Ghz on Windows XP. A huge change with both speed and pretty UI.

Coming a close second was switching from 56k to DSL. 2 or 3 mins to load a graphics intense page, or 30 mins to download a song from napster? haha!

Regarding upgrading, I personally like hitting the middle of the cycle. After the price drops that invariably come from the announcements/release dates for the next line of products. Of course it all comes down to budget, needs and urgency, so to each his own.

 

[oztrailrider]

The biggest change for me was going from an old NEC 386/SX 20 to a P75 with 16MB RAM and 850MB hard drive. Win 3.1 never ran so fast!, it was awesome. I had a 4X CD-ROM also, fun times.

 

[OCGuy]

I am extremely impressed with my setup. To each his own, I guess.

 

[mindless1]

It's not that the hardware didn't get significantly faster, it's that you became more productive, did jobs with larger datasets, and the software became more and more bloated.

The comparison is easy, run Vista and new apps on a typical Win98 era system and compare that to Win98 & same age apps on a modern one.

On the other hand, all the hardware junkies I've known tend to upgrade less and less often the older they get, even the ones that were there in the beginning of the PC revolution. In the beginning (of one's enthusiast or better interest level) the change seems more important then later it just becomes routine.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: mindless1
It's not that the hardware didn't get significantly faster, it's that you became more productive, did jobs with larger datasets, and the software became more and more bloated.

This is so true. I vividly recall the first time I saw a live video on a computer, it floored me to witness firsthand this postage stamp sized video running on what was then a top-of-the-line 486 computer complete with super highend 640x480 graphics. That video must have been a 32x32 pixel video. But it floored me that computers could do that then.

Nowadays I sit in front of my 24" dual-screens watching videos at full-screen and hardly get surprised by it (not unless the content itself is...entertaining) some 20yrs later.

My expectations of what a computer should do for me, and when and how fast, have drastically moved at the pace of technology. With so much personal history on what computers used to do versus what they do now, its all the harder for a computer to trump all that and bring its own bag of chips too.

Now, were I 10yrs old again then I'm quite sure that a computer 10yrs from now will seem fabtastically fast compared to the one's I'd be gaining first impressions about right now. Just as that first video clip on a 486 was awesome to me but a yawner to the folks in the decades-old CGI industry at that time.

 

[Tempered81]

Originally posted by: Mango1970
I doubt anyone remembers their "number 9 video cards" which were all the rage. Also playing Quake back in the day... how can anyone forget finally getting their hands on 2 Voodoo cards in SLI. That was the stuff of dreams...

I remember this. Two voodoo 2 12mb's in SLI for GL Quake. It was awesome to run at 800 x 600 resolution back then, and everything looked so realistic! $300 each for the cards and they connected via a short VGA dongle outside of the rear of the case - LOL. Fun days.

 

[Rubycon]

I thought a single velociraptor was slow. Spoiled eh?

But compared to the stock system drive it was noticeable. But a lot of folks will balk at the $1/GB price.

RE: Voodoo SLI - I remember that a Quantum Raven was not just a bowling ball but a video card too! :laugh: p.s. the Obsidan X24 was basically a pair of 12MB V2 boards in a single PCI slot. The passthrough design was a dealbreaker for me in the beginning because it marred the 1600x1200 - 100Hz video my 21" CRT (and eyes) required.

 

[taltamir]

way to miss ALL the marks...

News flash, those newer HDD are not for being faster, they are for cramming more space... we just hit 1.5TB HDD and they only cost 200$
The SPEED based drives are the SSDs and the raptor, and intel just conroed the SSD market... where, the greatest upgrade people could get now is an intel SSD (but it is too expensive right now)

The extra ram would not just help, but is absolutely NECESSARY for video creation, because every model on the screen takes an amount of ram. If you run out, you can't encode that scene. And vista speedboost makes use of unlimited amount of ram to cache your programs.

And the new 600$ video cards are faster then ever. The 4870x2 is way more then TWICE the FPS of the 600$ 8800GTX from last year. and NEITHER is enough to reach even 30FPS (min playable) on max settings in many modern games. Not "over 100FPS"

And lastly, you said your main goal was reencoding video.. well, all the things above don't really matter to that... except that now we have GPU video encoding that is several orders of magnitude higher. But also the CPUs are getting massively faster, since video encoding scales really REALLY well on multiple cores. The wolfdale brought SS4 (60% faster divx encoding) and also a native per clock 60% increase in divx encoding... 120% ish increase in encoding performance... Take that to quad core and you have some fast encoding...

The last game I saw a huge change in was level loading in NWN2... where going from an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2ghz) to a E8400 wolfdale cut down my level load time from 1/2 to 1/10th depending on the graphics settings (I know it does not make sense, it is not that much faster, but I measured it and it did... I am guessing something else was involved, it is a very inefficient game at level loading,all I changed, mobo + CPU that is)

 

[Proteusza]

I think I get what the OP is saying.

Between my Athlon 700 with 256mb of RAM, Athlon XP 2400+ with 1GB of RAM, and my Athlon X2 5600+ with 4GB of RAM and two 7200rpm drives in RAID 0, they all feel about the same speed navigating windows. Obviously my latest PC with its 8800 GTS blows them all out of the water in gaming performance. But in Windows start up time, time to navigate to a new folder and read its contents - nothing much has changed in years. I expected RAID 0 to help a bit with that, but I suppose what would really help is either 2 Velociraptors in RAID 0 or 2 SSDs in RAID 0. Or maybe just one SSD.

Still, with platter sizes increasing, and cache increasing, and IO buses getting faster, and the advent of SATA, that drives would read much quicker, and Windows would feel much quicker. But it doesnt really. Hell my work machine has 8 CPUs, and a 10000 RPM Sas drive, and when I do a subversion update every morning I cant even browse the internet. Literally, the machine just about locks up.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Proteusza
But in Windows start up time, time to navigate to a new folder and read its contents - nothing much has changed in years. I expected RAID 0 to help a bit with that, but I suppose what would really help is either 2 Velociraptors in RAID 0 or 2 SSDs in RAID 0. Or maybe just one SSD.

Still, with platter sizes increasing, and cache increasing, and IO buses getting faster, and the advent of SATA, that drives would read much quicker, and Windows would feel much quicker. But it doesnt really. Hell my work machine has 8 CPUs, and a 10000 RPM Sas drive, and when I do a subversion update every morning I cant even browse the internet. Literally, the machine just about locks up.

Most of these involve latency of the hdrive as the dominate rate-limiting step. 10k rpm hdrive helps, but raid-0 doesn't improve latency (only increases bandwidth, you actually increase latency slightly).

The next "order of magnitude" improvement to be gained here is going to come from SATA 6Gb/s SSD drives with their sub-ms latency. I can tell you from experience, having installed my XP onto a raid-0 array of Gigabyte IRAM drives with sub-0.1ms latency that the "snappiness" of a computer system lies nearly entirely in the hard-drive system's latency.

Iram latency made my system nearly instantaneous. It takes longer to lift my finger off the mouse button after clicking on a program startup shortcut than it took for the program to load. Iram isn't cost-effective for the typical consumer, but SSD's will be in 12-18months. I'm quite excited for everyone else to begin to experience what I have for the past 18 months.

 

[Martimus]

My biggest jump was going from an 8088 to a 60MHz Pentium. I went from having 640KB of memory to 8MB. From a 2.5" monochrome screen to a 15" color monitor. From CGA to SVGA graphics. From a 10MB HDD to a 720MB HDD. Both used DOS 5.0, but the second could actually play Doom 2, while I had to write my own games on the first computer.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Proteusza
I think I get what the OP is saying.

Between my Athlon 700 with 256mb of RAM, Athlon XP 2400+ with 1GB of RAM, and my Athlon X2 5600+ with 4GB of RAM and two 7200rpm drives in RAID 0, they all feel about the same speed navigating windows. Obviously my latest PC with its 8800 GTS blows them all out of the water in gaming performance. But in Windows start up time, time to navigate to a new folder and read its contents - nothing much has changed in years. I expected RAID 0 to help a bit with that, but I suppose what would really help is either 2 Velociraptors in RAID 0 or 2 SSDs in RAID 0. Or maybe just one SSD.

Still, with platter sizes increasing, and cache increasing, and IO buses getting faster, and the advent of SATA, that drives would read much quicker, and Windows would feel much quicker. But it doesnt really. Hell my work machine has 8 CPUs, and a 10000 RPM Sas drive, and when I do a subversion update every morning I cant even browse the internet. Literally, the machine just about locks up.

That is purely HDD performance, not system performance, and I explained that... SSD are for high performance, and they have been more then doubling in speed every few months now.
Platter drives have not gone up in speed significantly, only a few percent, but have seen massive increase in space. And decrease in cost. More then doubling each year.

It is like you are buying a budget van/pickup and complaining it isn't snappy and fast enough for you. You want snappy and fast, you get a sports car (WD raptor, or the intel SSD, don't bother with earlier SSDs, the new raptor is too good for them), you want to have large hauling capacity and be able to take your 10 children on a fishing trip, you buy a huge ass van that handles like a pregnant cow.
You don't buy a huge ass van and complain it handles badly and does 0-60 too slowly.

 

[Dadofamunky]

I went from a 486-100 to a Pentium-100 and REALLY noticed the difference back then. The 486 got dedicated to running NetWare. I think the nearest thing to a big leap I had was going from a Pentium-MMX-233 to a PIII-650 OCd to 733 MHz. That box lasted me for five years. Lasted so long I forgot how to build PCs! Typically I haven't had giant leaps, because I've pretty consistently stepped up one or two speed grades over the last 20 years. That five-year pause was by far the longest. I started with a CP/M machine and self-built a 286-12 while an Amiga was still my main machine. I must have had over fifteen different builds since then.

 

[Tempered81]

Originally posted by: Idontcare
The next "order of magnitude" improvement to be gained here is going to come from SATA 6Gb/s SSD drives with their sub-ms latency. I can tell you from experience, having installed my XP onto a raid-0 array of Gigabyte IRAM drives with sub-0.1ms latency that the "snappiness" of a computer system lies nearly entirely in the hard-drive system's latency.

YES! I don't know why i bothered to get a fast C2D & 2GB DDR2 in my laptop and have dell throw in the made in china black market OEM 4800 RPM whateverthefuck IDE-66 HDD to store all my files. In the end, it feels like a PII desktop.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Martimus
My biggest jump was going from an 8088 to a 60MHz Pentium. I went from having 640KB of memory to 8MB. From a 2.5" monochrome screen to a 15" color monitor. From CGA to SVGA graphics. From a 10MB HDD to a 720MB HDD. Both used DOS 5.0, but the second could actually play Doom 2, while I had to write my own games on the first computer.

That's phenomenal. Jumping three entire architecture generations as well as nearly an 8x increase in clockspeed to boot. Must have been a ridiculous Heaviside step function of an experience.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: Martimus
My biggest jump was going from an 8088 to a 60MHz Pentium. I went from having 640KB of memory to 8MB. From a 2.5" monochrome screen to a 15" color monitor. From CGA to SVGA graphics. From a 10MB HDD to a 720MB HDD. Both used DOS 5.0, but the second could actually play Doom 2, while I had to write my own games on the first computer.

That's phenomenal. Jumping three entire architecture generations as well as nearly an 8x increase in clockspeed to boot. Must have been a ridiculous Heaviside step function of an experience.

The 8088 was a gift when I was 11 or so. My mothers old job was throwing them out, and the computer guy who worked for them put all the best parts into one of them and gave it to me. The Pentium came around 1993 or so, I guess ~2 years later. It was like going from a calculator to a all around useful computer. The difference in experience was complete. It was almost like the difference between a bicycle and a bus. But I still had fun with the 8088. I taught myself how to program with it, because it wasn't powerful enough to run nearly anything I wanted.

The next major step will probably be going to a Solid State Drive, to knock down the biggest bottle-neck in the majority of situations. If accessing storage becomes fast enough, I wonder what the next major bottle-neck will be? (For a wide range of functions) I would guess network connections would be the most wide range general bottle-neck after storage access speed is resolved.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: jaredpace

Originally posted by: Idontcare
The next "order of magnitude" improvement to be gained here is going to come from SATA 6Gb/s SSD drives with their sub-ms latency. I can tell you from experience, having installed my XP onto a raid-0 array of Gigabyte IRAM drives with sub-0.1ms latency that the "snappiness" of a computer system lies nearly entirely in the hard-drive system's latency.

YES! I don't know why i bothered to get a fast C2D & 2GB DDR2 in my laptop and have dell throw in the made in china black market OEM 4800 RPM whateverthefuck IDE-66 HDD to store all my files. In the end, it feels like a PII desktop.

it saves you money, dell would have ravaged you for an SSD. And wouldn't have given you the best one in the market. Get an intel X25-M... only 600

I also had some several generations jumps back in the day... Nowadays I do cheap micro updates. Makes a lot more economical sense.

 

[SunSamurai]

Originally posted by: PeteRoy
The hard drive bottleneck is getting more and more obvious, the GPU, CPU, and memory all increase in speed, but hard drives remain as slow as they were 10 years ago.

I agree about the hard drive being the bottleneck. It always will be, more or less. But you have to be pretty daft to think even mainstreem hard drives are anywhere close to as slow as they were 10 years ago. They are 3-5x faster. Anyone that can see that by just noticeing that the bigger they get, the more information passes per cycle. If drives spun slower the bigger they got, you might have some sort of small chance at being right about that, but 5400 and 7200 have been the mainstreem for ages.