Were P3 cpu's better than P4 cpu's?

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Blain
I played with the Coppermine's, but never made it over to the Tualatin's.
They do sound like very nice CPU's. Especially since they could pull off SMP.

The only Tualatins that can do SMP were the ones with 512k cache. All Coppermine P3 can do SMP.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
The early P4 was a worse performer than the P3 on both a clock to clock basis and on an absolute basis.

I am also pretty sure that it did not do well at games at all compared to either the P3 or the Athlon. Remember, Netburst is weak in FPU capability, making up for with higher clockspeeds and relying more on SSE2 and 3. The early P4s did not have enough advantage in clockspeed to make up for the weak FPU and there was little to no SSE2 optimized software available when the P4 launched.

 

[dynossr]

I have been building and rebuilding the machines we use in our small business for nearly 10 years, including four dual-processor WS with PIII. I also built a P4 system with DDR and HT, 3 Ghz with 1 MB cache. We use these machines for all normal office functions, but moreover for desktop publishing, and audio and video production of our own proprietary training materials, and a bit of gaming. I'm telling you, the machine I enjoy working on most, both in production and maintenance and modification is this dual PIII-S Tualatin, currently the 1.26 version, on an iWill DVD266-uRN with two 512 MB PC2700 modules and with OS on Ultra ATA IDE and the data on the integrated onboard RAID in an Ultra ATA stripe, and its all in a Lian Li case with PC Power & Cooling 510 watt PS. In daily use it is totally reliable, it is 5 years old and its impression of response is defintely better than the 3 Ghz P4, although part of the reason may be that this PIII system is running on W2K Pro SP4, which I still prefer, whereas the P4 systems we have are on XP SP2. Now here is the great news -- when I built it (five years ago) I bought the 1.26 processors to save some serious money over the 1.4s. But just recently I found the price of the 1.4s are now low enough to upgrade, and the total cost will still be lower than if I had bought the 1.4s originally. I'll run some benchmarks before and after installing the new 1.4s and maybe try to overclock to 1.5 -- I'll post again when I have some results. My guess is that with a good AGP 4X graphic card like the Asus 8460 Ultra we've had since new, and the dual PIII-S Tualatin at 1.4 Ghz and maybe with the overclock to 1.5, any real world computing task can be done very very well. I haven't been jealous of the ever increasing performance hype.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: WT
I still have a Coppermine P3, but a rather rare one at that. Its a P3 1ghz 100 FSB chip. Its still in use even, and I often get the notion to Ebay it. I have yet to find any Ebay auctions for that chip, as they are always the common 133fsb chips available, but for the old BX rigs still running, this was the best chip available.

I ran a 133mhz coppermine in abit BE6-II with a slocket for a long while. It was for my work machine so I just used a PCI video card. (There was no divider to get the AGP bus in spec at that speed, however there WAS one for the PCI bus on at least that particular board.)

The BX chipset was pretty damn nice.

 

[SparkyJJO]

yeah they were. Ran cooler, performance was better (generally, of cours a 3GHz P4 will perform better than a 1GHz P3). The reason why the P-M 2GHz could match or outdo a P4 3GHz was it was based on the P3, hence the reason it also ran cool unlike the P4 thermonuclear furnaces.

I use AMD so I don't really care either way

 

[dynossr]

See my post above. Here are the test results comparing the performance of PIII, P4 and Pentium M. One of the nice things about SiSoft Sandra is that after the various tests, you can compare results not only to different system configurations, but to a reference configuration of your actual system -- therefore you can also see if there is some problem or advantage to the actual system you have relative to the theoretical normal performance. In this comparison, all systems had performance equal or better than the Sandra reference configurations, so all were very healthy. The three PIII tests were done on the system described in my post above on the iWill board, the P4 in a machine I custom built on an Intel 865, and the PM in a custom configured Asus notebook on Intel 915, all systems had (2) 512 MB DDR modules and 7200 RPM drives:

CPU: dual 1.26-S PIII / dual 1.4-S PIII / dual 1.5-S PIII oc / 3 P4-E ht / 2 PM 755

Arithmetic: 12262 / 13557 / 14523 / 12294 / 12102
Multi-Media: 49710 / 54883 / 58708 / 55326 / 39224

Interesting?

Now it seems to me that the much higher overall combined index benchmark results widely publicized regarding the newer generation P4 and PM systems are really the results of the much higher FSB and DDR-2 memory bandwidth, certainly as shown above there is no CPU performance advantage against a good dual processor Tualatin system. But as I said above, so far I cannot "feel" any advantage of the P4 or PM systems over my dual processor PIII systems in our business' demanding real world use of computers, and with five years reliable daily use so far I think we are getting great service from our PIII systems.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: PingSpike
The BX chipset was pretty damn nice.

Yup. I had an Asus P3B-F with a slot 1 Coppermine Pentium III 550 and a Thermaltake Slot 1 Golden Orb. I ran that puppy at the maximum FSB setting in BIOS, a full 150MHz, for 825MHz clock speeds. Don't remember the exact RAM used, but it was either 256MB Crucial or Mushkin PC133. AGP was definately a no go at 100MHz so I had to stick with PCI at 37.5MHz, and used a Voodoo3 2000 overclocked to 180MHz (basically Voodoo3 3500 levels). I used frag tape to mount a CPU heatsink on the Voodoo 3 GPU and another smaller heatsink on the back of the card (was smooth, nothing sticking out like current cards). That was one mean Quake 3 gaming rig.

 

[HannibalX]

I had a notebook at work (Dell C640) with a 2.0Ghz P4 - what a POS that thing was. I now have an HP notebook with a 1.7Ghz Pentium M and love it - loads faster than the P4 and more stable too.