What can I do with a low-end P4?

[Raduque]

Just finished building a low-end Pent-4 computer.

1.5ghz Willamette
512mb 133 SDR
FX5200 128bit 128mb

About how fast is a P4 1.5, compared to, say, an AthlonXP2500? Or, what the hell, a similar in clock-speed XP1800 (1.53ghz)? I know it's good for internets, email, yadda yadda. I have two options for it, right now really.

1) New server (replacing a Celeron 1.1, 1gb SDR)
2) bedroom HTPC (would only process SD TV/divx/xvid and DVDs no HD at all)

Which of these two tasks is this computer more suited to?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Raduque
Just finished building a low-end Pent-4 computer.

1.5ghz Willamette
512mb 133 SDR
FX5200 128bit 128mb

About how fast is a P4 1.5, compared to, say, an AthlonXP2500? Or, what the hell, a similar in clock-speed XP1800 (1.53ghz)? I know it's good for internets, email, yadda yadda. I have two options for it, right now really.

1) New server (replacing a Celeron 1.1, 1gb SDR)
2) bedroom HTPC (would only process SD TV/divx/xvid and DVDs no HD at all)

Which of these two tasks is this computer more suited to?

what is the server serving up?

the htpc are you doing a lot of things at onec? like recording, watching and encoding all at the same time?

 

[smopoim86]

server

EDIT: I have never dealt with a p4 that slow, but one at 2ghz is slow enough to get on my nerves, i figure as a file server you would not really notice it is slow, but like mentioned below, you probably wouldn'tnotice much difference between the celeron your currrently using.

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: bob4432

Originally posted by: Raduque
Just finished building a low-end Pent-4 computer.

1.5ghz Willamette
512mb 133 SDR
FX5200 128bit 128mb

About how fast is a P4 1.5, compared to, say, an AthlonXP2500? Or, what the hell, a similar in clock-speed XP1800 (1.53ghz)? I know it's good for internets, email, yadda yadda. I have two options for it, right now really.

1) New server (replacing a Celeron 1.1, 1gb SDR)
2) bedroom HTPC (would only process SD TV/divx/xvid and DVDs no HD at all)

Which of these two tasks is this computer more suited to?

what is the server serving up?

the htpc are you doing a lot of things at onec? like recording, watching and encoding all at the same time?

Server is mostly a file server with a small webserver that's used to share pictures with my family (through my cable modem).

The HTPC would only be doing at most, two things at once (recording a show while watching an already recorded one). I plan on using MCE and an Hauppage or ATI550 tuner.

smopoim, thanks for your vote

 

[Lord Evermore]

What can I do with a low-end P4?

Heat a homeless shelter? Start your own cooking show with a "custom oven"? Iron clothes?

Willamette was a pretty damn slow architecture, all Netburst is slow on a per-clock basis. Giving it single channel SDR memory was like making an old man walk without his cane. And maybe he was on fire too.

Depending on the application, a 1.5GHz P4 could be spanked by a 1.2GHz Athlon, or 1.4GHz P3. And that's with RDRAM. Netburst absolutely craves memory bandwidth.

It would probably work a bit better as a server than the Celeron, but unless you were already taxing the Celeron's capabilities, you might not notice. As an HTPC it might work great, since Netburst is really good with that sort of data processing, but it might be a little warm and loud. Using the TV tuner with hardware encoding means the CPU would only ever be doing real work while watching the videos (and transcoding to other compression if you did that).

 

[Ruptga]

Yeah, what Evermore said, it generally takes a 1.7 P4 to equal a 1.4 PIII, though I´m pretty sure it would be an upgrade from the 1.1 celly. I´d use it for the server, but I have a feeling Evermore knows a crapload more than I do about this.

 

[athfbum]

Target practice

 

[bob4432]

i would go the htpc route since for what you are doing even a 500MHz P3 would be fine as your server.