Interesting results changing from dual proc to single proc

CDM wrote on 2/21/2003, 9:03 AM
I know this has been of some recent discussion here so I thought I would post my findings:

Yesterday I swapped out my Tyan Tiger MP mobo with dual athlon 1.67 GHz processors with 1gig of pc2100 ECC RAM for a P4 2.54 GHz and an ASUS P4PE motherboard with 256 (temporarily) megs of pc2700 ram. Before swapping I did some Sandra tests as well as a performance test with Vegas.


1) The pentium and the ASUS P4PE were a BREEZE to install! It feels incredibly stable compared to the Athlon. Also, it's 50-75% quieter which is invaluable.

2) the P4PE is a GREAT motherboard. It has many options but the one I got for $144 has built in IEEE1394, Gigabit LAN, 5.1 audio, and RAID (SATA 133). I higly recommend it. It's also built for serious overclocking, which works.

3) Projects in V4 that used 27-30% CPU (it looked like it was only using one of the two) on the dual athlon system, now jump around from 45 to 85%. I think this will improve with more ram, overclocked. I only have 256 on this machine compared to the 1 gig on the dual athlon.

4) overall, I'm VERY happy being with a Pentium again as my dual athlon bluescreened a lot and got very hot. I had to buy two Thermalright slk-800 heatsinks, new fans, and when I finally unplugged the power supply from the motherboard I saw it had actually burned the plastic around some of the leads...

Thought you all might be interested.

Charles.

Comments

stakeoutstudios wrote on 2/24/2003, 2:47 AM
so, you upgraded, but your projects run slower on a faster P4?!
CDM wrote on 2/24/2003, 10:10 AM
well, kind of. Overall, the system is a lot more stable and faster. But I DO think the dual proc was helping in V4, even though the procs were slower than the Pentium. I've been trying to do some rendering comparisons too, but I haven't got anything definitive on that yet.
fishtank wrote on 2/24/2003, 1:39 PM
How is the system *faster*? You claim a higher CPU usage with the P4 versus the dual AMD. The only thing I can think of is that you have a fresh uncluttered OS load now. I have wiped out systems and started over from scratch loading the OS and apps and noticed the machine was considerably faster.

I'm not sure how much my dual processor machine is being used by V4 (seems to be very little of the second CPU used), but I can tell you that V2 was much better. I have not had any stability problems here though I am using the newer Tiger MPX M\B. Heat has not been a big problem for me though at the expense of added fan noise - I agree that a quieter system is a huge plus.