What to buy? Dual550, 900 Duron, 800 T-Bird...

[bchalker]

I need some help...

800 Thunderbird? Dual PIII500? 900 Duron? 850 Celeron?

I've got $500-$530 to upgrade. I don't play games on my machine, therefore will probably load the Win2000 I've got sitting on my desk. I am a web designer, and primarily use the following software:

Photoshop 5.5
Fireworks 3
Flash 4
Dreamweaver 3

Prices I've found are:

900 Duron/board pretested - $395
Dual PIII550/board - $440
800 Thunderbird/board - $380
850 Celeron pretested/board - $340

I want what will be best suited for my work. Anyone have any advice?

Thanks
Bryan Chalker
Bleedingtree Web Design
www.bleedingtree.com

 

[inquis]

for your needs, go with the dual 550s. win2k can take advantage of them, and reguardless the dual 550s will kick the crap out of everything else there save the Duron. Of course, this is assuming that Photoshop will take advantage of SMP, and that you have enough RAM for the job (256M or more)...

Of course, if these were potential GAMING machines, take the Duron and a geforce and RUN. >🙂

my two cents, inquis

 

[bchalker]

Thanks for the advice...

Photoshop does support multi-tasking, and benefits from SMP, but you say the Duron would be close in performance?

 

[erikiksaz]

will any durons over 700 mhz ever be released?

 

[sandorski]

Hmm, take the Tbird.

 

[Remnant2]

If I were you, I would definitely go for the 900mhz Duron. The Duron is within about 90-95% of the performance of the Thunderbird, and will easily cream that Cel2 at the same clockspeed.

The reason why I would skip the dual 550 setup is that
1) The benefits of 2 CPUs are NEVER 1+1=2. Check out Anand's latest benches on the subject; you often get only a small percentage increase.

2) In non-SMP aware apps, you only will get the performance of a single one of those two 550s.. which compared to any of the other CPUs you have listed there, is rather slow.

3) Even with the SSE-optimized photoshop filters, and SMP dual 550s, I still wouldn't count out a 900mhz Duron.. my hunch is the Duron would still win, or be very close.

 

[Fenix793]

I would get the dual setup for the following reasons:
1. Photoshop uses smp so you'll benefit from faster filters, etc.
2. Win2k supports SMP and will dynamically adjust the workload on each of the cpus to keep everything balanced. Running several IE windows, with photoshop editing an image, while listening to music, and switching between the apps every few seconds will be far more responsive on the dual proc setup. That kind of load will bog down any single cpu setup.
3. Even apps that dont really take advantage of smp kinda will. You can tell wink2k what to put on each proc. By putting the app on one proc and leaving windows and ur other stuff on the other proc you'll get a little speed boost because the procs arent being bogged down.

For these reasons I'll be getting a dual 700 or 800mhz setup soon. The multitasking alone makes it worth it. The added benefit of smp aware programs will only make it better.

 

[bchalker]

Thanks again...

Would "Remnant2" be correct about the single-processor power on non-SMP apps? With a PIII550 dual, would I only feel the speed through Photoshop?

If that's the case, the Duron/T-Bird might be the best setup. Fireworks is a non-SMP app which I use heavily. I may prefer a balanced speed increase for all my apps, as opposed to minor increase for non-SMP, major for SMP apps...

Any thoughts.

Bryan

 

[BossDog]

Sorry to be questioning this, but I've never heard of a 900 Duron. I know that some people are o'cing this chip to 900 with the new Asus board, but its core maxes out currently at 700.

Id go for the Tbird personally, I agree that SMP often doesnt give the performance boost that people think. Plus, the Tbird will make for a solid all around system for any app or game you throw at it.

 

[bchalker]

Sorry, BossDog.

The Duron 900 is O/C'd. I've even considered getting an ASUS (with dipswitch)/600 Duron setup for $240, and trying to overclock. I can always upgrade to a T-Bird later if it would work. It would free up some money to get a 2D card/hard drive add-on.

If not, it looks like I'll go with the T-Bird. I had the same thoughts as BossDog. It will handle any app that I've got, just no as quickly with Photoshop.

Thanks guys for the opinions...

Bryan

 

[Finality]

Get the T-bird. I've been messing around with a dual celeron 550 setup vs an Athy classic. The Athy performs about 5-15% faster for most things. The equalizer is Q3, however I have to used the old 3.xx series of NV drivers to get SMP to work.

But (there always is a but isn't there? 😉) Win2K is a lot smoother on an smp 550 system than it is on a Athy 800 Mhz system. Its hard to describe you can't do any benchmarks to compare but it just is smoother 😀.