Suggestions for Core 2 Duo systems that use PCI - not PCI express?

Maybe if it's overclocked...

With SATA 3 gb, DDR2 memory, and dual core, it would be significantly
faster. However, one can bump up the processor another level to the dual
core E5400 and the CPU would still be under $100.

The new total price would be $185.

If that is still not enough of a bump compared to his P4 system then there
is no answer for him.

--g

"geoff" wrote...
Keep in mind the OP was hoping for 3X the speed of a 2.4GHz
P4, an E1400 isn't likely to achieve this.

This change should:

Intel Pentium E2200 Dual-Core
Foxconn Motherboard
2 gigs memory
160 gb HD

How do you figure 3X speed by going from a 2.4 GHz P4 to a 2.2 GHz C2D? What
app will work with 3X the speed?

"JR Weiss" wrote in message
...
How do you figure 3X speed by going from a 2.4 GHz P4 to a 2.2 GHz C2D?
What app will work with 3X the speed?

Point 1:
The P4 is a single core, the C2D is a dual core (the clue is in the
name!)
Point 2:
Each C2D core does about 30-40% more per MHz than the P4.

This means a 2.2GHz C2D is about 2.5x as fast as a 2.4GHz P4... then you
overclock it! Almost all the C2Ds are easily overclockable with standard air
cooling (I am not talking expensive coolers either!). It would EASILY be
able to overclock a C2D from 2.2GHz up to 3GHz. I took my C2Q from 2.4 to
3.2!

As for "What app will work with 3x the speed?"... Most of them! Try doing
some heavy Photoshop or video encoding, or play a game or two!

Rarius

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:00:11 -0400, "geoff"
wrote:

Maybe if it's overclocked...

With SATA 3 gb, DDR2 memory, and dual core, it would be significantly
faster. However, one can bump up the processor another level to the dual
core E5400 and the CPU would still be under $100.

The new total price would be $185.

If that is still not enough of a bump compared to his P4 system then there
is no answer for him.

You seem focused more on general system building than what
was asked for. If that's not enough of a bump it's same
story as always, spend a little more. Generally the fun
starts at E7xxx series, and they o'c better than E5xxx
series too.

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:16:49 +0100, "Rarius"
wrote:


"JR Weiss" wrote in message
...
How do you figure 3X speed by going from a 2.4 GHz P4 to a 2.2 GHz C2D?
What app will work with 3X the speed?

Point 1:
The P4 is a single core, the C2D is a dual core (the clue is in the
name!)
Point 2:
Each C2D core does about 30-40% more per MHz than the P4.

This means a 2.2GHz C2D is about 2.5x as fast as a 2.4GHz P4... then you
overclock it! Almost all the C2Ds are easily overclockable with standard air
cooling (I am not talking expensive coolers either!). It would EASILY be
able to overclock a C2D from 2.2GHz up to 3GHz. I took my C2Q from 2.4 to
3.2!

As for "What app will work with 3x the speed?"... Most of them! Try doing
some heavy Photoshop or video encoding, or play a game or two!

Rarius


Actually, most apps are either not multithreaded or not
optimized enough that two cores equals double performance
of one core. On average a 2.2GHz E2xxx series will not be
3X as fast as a 2.4GHz P4. It comes a lot closer
overclocked, but it'll still depend on the apps...
mentioning one like photoshop is valid but not mentioning it
as if it is the rule rather than one of the few, high-cost,
professional apps that will benefit. Gaming will seldom
have 3X benefit, of those games modern enough to be well
optimized, they'll tend to be bottlenecked by the video
card.

Granted, 3X benefit over a P4 2.4GHz is somewhat of an
arbitrary stipulation, it could've been 2.5X or 5X...
whatever, so another way to look at the situation is the
buyer's preference, certain people look to certain price
points of systems and the modern day equivalent of a P4
would be a processor costing in the roughly $120 to $300
range depending on when the P4 was purchased.

You seem focused more on general system building than what
was asked for. If that's not enough of a bump it's same
story as always, spend a little more.

That is how marketing works, with cars, for example, if you want more HP,
you pay more.

At $185, that is pretty bottom of the barrel but would still be a lot faster
than a P4.

The OP wrote:

I dont need to be on the cutting edge, what Core 2 chips should I look
for that would net me about 3x the speed of that 2.4gig P4?

The above system is so far away from cutting edge that one could drive an
airplane through a gap as wide as that.

--g

Somewhere on teh intarwebs Paul wrote:
muzician21 wrote:
On Apr 9, 1:32 pm, "JR Weiss" wrote:
"muzician21" wrote...

I dont need to be on the cutting edge, what Core 2 chips should I
look for that would net me about 3x the speed of that 2.4gig P4?

See below. I'd say an E7300 or better, depending on what you are doing with
it.

None.

While you would see improvement from any C2D over 2.4GHz, you won't
likely see anywhere near 3X the speed on anything.


Hmm. Looking at a chart like this

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html

gives the impression there are CPU's that are many times faster.

What I'm mostly looking at is rendering times for processing video
such as through VirtuaDub and for creating DVD's. You feel I I won't
see "anywhere near" 3x the speed? If that's correct maybe just
maxing out the board with a faster socket 478 CPU isn't such a bad
idea.


VirtualDub is multi-core aware no? If that's right then even the entry-level
core2 Duo should do what you want.

A magazine article, or a web site now, will tend to use
benchmarks that emphasize processor performance this way.

(clock_speed * instructions_per_clock) * number_of_cores

What they do, is test multithreaded software. Multithreading works
best in multimedia applications, because a number of problems there
(processing large data sets) benefit from a divide and conquer
algorithm.

For example, Photoshop could split a picture in two pieces, and
a processor core could work on each half of the picture.

But the truth is, activities on a computer consist of a mix
of single threaded ones and multithreaded ones. So a typical
user doesn't see the huge speedup the above equation might
suggest.

[snip]

I use a benchmark designed by Australian PC User magazine (they made it
available to their users on a cover disk) called 'UserBench Encode 2009'
http://darrenyates.com.au/?p=573 that uses a mix of single threaded and
multi threaded work, to simulate real-world use. It only benches
CPU/FSB/RAM. They set the score of 10 to represent a 2GHz Pentium 4 with a
533 FSB running 1GB RAM running XP SP2.

Examples of machines I'm using here, all running XP SP3:

[IBM R51 ThinkPad] Dothan 1.7GHz/400MHz/2GB RAM. Sco 13.82
Flatmate's desktop. E4500 2.2GHz/800/2GB RAM. Sco 29.77
My desktop. E7300 2.66GHz/1066/4GB RAM. Sco 39.45
The above with the FSB raised to 1333. Score 48.81


As it's the same benchmark that my favourite magazine uses to test it's
review machines I find it very useful.

Cheers,
--
Shaun.

"Build a man a fire, and he`ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and
he`ll be warm for the rest of his life." Terry Pratchett, Jingo.

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:12:32 +1200, "~misfit~"
wrote:


What I'm mostly looking at is rendering times for processing video
such as through VirtuaDub and for creating DVD's. You feel I I won't
see "anywhere near" 3x the speed? If that's correct maybe just
maxing out the board with a faster socket 478 CPU isn't such a bad
idea.


VirtualDub is multi-core aware no? If that's right then even the entry-level
core2 Duo should do what you want.

I don't know about the app itself, I don't use it for
special effects but as described the task the OP seems to
want to do is decompress various video formats, possibly
resize, and re-encode to MPEG2 for the DVD. I'd suspect
then that the majority of the processing is encoding.

Whether multiple cores are used effectively for that will
have to do with whether the decompressing and/or compressing
codecs are multi-core capable. Virtualdub may be able to
use multiple cores for multiple threads but the video
compression thread tends to be the bottleneck if it's not
using a codec with multi-core capability itself.

To put it another way, with a semi-modern version of Divx
claiming 2 core support, I have been able to keep both CPUs
in a dual core system pegged at 100% using Virtualdub, but I
would not be confident this will happen with all Virtualdub
jobs depending on exactly what they are.

Hello,

It seems more complicated than I thought. I have a 2 ghz pentium M laptop,
with 2 gigs of RAM and XP.

It can run single task apps ok but it also has some programming environments
that multi-task.

If one were to build a desktop with:
1. vista 64-bit
2. case
3. PS
4. MB
5. CPU - at least dual core

.. . . (no monitor) that was 4x faster, total price under $500, which CPU and
MB would you use?

--g

geoff wrote:
Hello,

It seems more complicated than I thought. I have a 2 ghz pentium M laptop,
with 2 gigs of RAM and XP.

It can run single task apps ok but it also has some programming environments
that multi-task.

If one were to build a desktop with:
1. vista 64-bit
2. case
3. PS
4. MB
5. CPU - at least dual core

. . . (no monitor) that was 4x faster, total price under $500, which CPU and
MB would you use?

--g


So you're comparing a laptop to a desktop ?

Pentium M at 2GHz, comes in the 755 and 760 models, with different FSB.
It is probably a single core, but you know that better than I do.

http://processorfinder.intel.com/det...px?sSpec=SL869

SuperPI 1M is 38.83sec at 2GHz. SuperPI 32M is 38:11 minutes.

http://www.hwbot.org/ResultBrowseByP...cpuModelId=365

Compare that to a single core of an E8400 (from my previous post)
SuperPI 1M in 15-16 seconds
SuperPI 32M in 14:10 to 15:59 minutes (say 900 seconds in round numbers)

39/16 = 2.4x
2291/900 = 2.5x

So core to core, a single core of the E8400 is not 4x faster than
the Pentium M 2GHz. You would need a situation and an application
which could use both cores, for the combined effect to be 5x. But
on single threaded applications, you'll come up short. You'd need
to raise the frequency significantly, for the processor to always
be at least 4x faster. The E8400 runs at 3GHz.

If you bought a quad, that will help make the multithreaded situations
even faster, without improving the single threaded ones. On Intel,
the scaling on a quad isn't perfect, due to choking of the FSB.
The caches need to maintain coherence between the two die, so
it is possible there is snoop traffic on the bus. On one of the
multimedia benchmarks known for perfect scaling, the Intel Quad
scales to 3.5x the performance, over a single core. While an
AMD Quad scales to 4x (doesn't choke). The Intel processor
is sufficiently faster than the AMD, that this effect isn't
too important. I haven't seen a Core i7 run on the same
benchmark, but my guess would be the four cores (without
considering HT), would be 4x faster than a single core.

core core core core Q9550, Q9650
| | | | Block Diagram
-+----+- -+----+- Two silicon die, joined inside.
| 6MB L2 | | 6MB L2 |
----+--- ---+----
| |
+-----+------+
|
LGA775 FSB (used for memory access and I/O)

Picking the motherboard isn't an arbitrary exercise. The buyer
has to pick the slot configuration they want, what built-in
peripherals are absolutely essential (firewire?) and so on.
For example, I can find really cheap motherboards with only
two DIMM slots, but who wants that ?

Something in a P45 based board, for around $150, might be
middle of the road. An E8400 at $165, allocate $150 for
a motherboard, say $40 for some DDR2 RAM, and you should be
able to stay under $500. The Q9550 is $270, and is the
cheapest quad with 12MB total cache. You'd still be in
the $500 ballpark.

I used a Core2 Duo 2.6GHz/FSB800 for my upgrade, but I didn't
really save a bundle of money doing it that way. I used a $70
motherboard, for that ghetto touch. I think the hardware was
in the $300 range for the upgrade, and since the motherboard
had an AGP slot, I got to reuse a five year old video card :-)
If I'd wanted to save more, I'd have to go AMD. The AMD
6000+ might be a bit slower, but it's priced at $99.
A 5600+ is $80. So that is one way to shave off a
few bucks. But with $500 to spend, you can do a
bit better than that.

Paul