Willamette--> Northwood, noticeable performance increase?

[sindows]

Will I notice a performance increase or will my PC100 SDRAM hold back the Northwood? I would love to see a decent boost but I kinda doubt it...

 

[Andrew1990]

Are you on the 478 platform or are you using a 423 to 478 converter? Anyways, just save your money. There wont be a huge difference between the two.

 

[RanDum72]

You will notice increased speed but nothing groundshaking. Besides the difference in cache (512k for northwood vs. 256k for the Willamette), I think the northwoods have some tweaks that make it noticeably faster than willamette. And yes PC100 SDRAM will hold it back since the P4 is memory-bandwidth hungry.

 

[hans007]

pc133 will hold you back, but i believe you will see a difference.

 

[zsdersw]

Northwood P4 on the 850E chipset with RDRAM was a very good (if expensive) setup.

.. but Northwood on the 865 or 875 chipsets was better, though.

 

[stevty2889]

You'll see some increase, but the ram will really really hold back the performance. Unless you are getting it for free or really really cheap, it is probably not worth the effort.

 

[daveybrat]

Sdram will strangle the poor northwood.

 

[secretanchitman]

the ram will hold you back, although you'll see an improvement in overall speed.

to be honest, i'd just wait and save the cash for a whole new system...the p4 is totally dead.

 

[magreen]

Do NOT invest money in a p4 system with sdram. I had one of those once. It was like driving a car with one wheel in the ditch and one wheel on the track (to quote Neil Young).

Just keep it if it works well enough for you or throw it out the window if it doesn't.