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Topic: My Perfect Computer

Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 10-26-2000 01:31 PM

We have one iMac and a Mac notebook in the store that is for sale if anyone is interested. Its been our rental computer for 4 months and has been replaced by a 1000mhz Athlon P.C. that cost less to build than the Mac did when it was new. The new computer runs rings around the Mac. Things are digested about as fast as you can hit the enter Key. If you ask me the iMac is a pretty pathetic computer, so slow. It may have its uses but not here in our store......
Mark
mark@getgts.com

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Randy Stankey
Film God

Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99

posted 10-25-2000 11:02 PM

How long does it take to calculate 1,000,000 Primes?

Get the code at http://www.codewell.com/Misc/bench.txt

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 10-27-2000 11:50 AM

Randy,
With the P-2 300 mhz(which is a dinosaur by standards) rated at 65 seconds I would estimate that the Athlon at 1000mhz would take about 10 to 15 seconds. Please remember that the new Ultra 100 Drive spec brings EIDE with a fraction of SCSI drive read write performance and will soon surpass SCSI. This would also make a difference in doing that test so it may well indeed take lass than 10 seconds.
Our quickbooks file which takes on average 30 seconds to load up and update from our network. With the 1000mgh machine it only takes 4 seconds.
Again, we have one iMAC in green and a notebook in Blue for sale.........reasonably priced.
Mark

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Jason Burroughs
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 654
From: Allen, TX
Registered: Jun 99

posted 10-30-2000 05:18 PM

My dream computer. Dual (maybe quad) Athalon Ultra processors maybe even their upcomming "hammer" series Those puppies are going to be 32/64bit processors

Add in a nice RAID arrray oh wait, this is just suppsoed to be a desktop? Yeah that'll work. I recently installed some Dell 6300 and 6400's quad pentium III Zeons running at 550Mhz They ran VERY nicely. But WHEW what a pain trying to get them into a rack!

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-10-2000 08:07 PM

Just upgraded my CPU from a 500 mhz Katami P-3 slot 1(running at 600 mhz) to a 700 mhz P-3 Coppermine socket 370 in slotket adaptor(running solidly and cool at 814mhz). The 500 running at 600 ran at 138 deg f. The new Coppermine runs at 101 deg f. No water cooling needed here. A drastic difference in efficiency! More transistors, smaller chip, faster speed, smaller heatsink, and less heat. The MB is an A-Bit BE6-2 with 256mb ram. Ultra ATA 100 adapter card instead of the on board Ultra ATA 66.
Mark

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Gordon McLeod
Film God

Posts: 9532
From: Toronto Ontario Canada
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-10-2000 08:30 PM

I just finished replaceing the main machine in my shop
The machine I built is a
AMD K6 500MHz MMX processor
256Meg ram
Scsi 40 gig raid array
ATI 16meg video card
THe system is setup with BootMAgic for the following OS's in their own partitions
OS2 Warp4 Connect
Win98
PC Dos7.2
BeOS
Linnux

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-13-2000 08:31 AM

Just was able to nudge my 700mhz coppermine from 845 to 903mhz and is still rock stable. Had to increase the core vcc from 1.65 to 1.7 volts and this resulted in a slightly hotter cpu temperature but still way within reasonable limits and with nothing other than a standard Aavid heatsink and fan! I do have a small program that calculates the first 30,000 prime numbers and that takes .359 seconds. If this is a linear process which I would assume it is then it would take 11.9547 seconds to do the first 1,000,000 primes.
Mark

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Randy Stankey
Film God

Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-13-2000 06:23 PM

It would depend on what the method of calculating is...

"Brute Force" would not be linear because prime numbers get farther and farther apart as they get bigger. If you used a "seive" (which is what smart programmers do) then it might be linear up to a point.

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-14-2000 12:57 PM

At any rate I'm really happy with the performance so far. There is obviously a huge difference between the old P-3 and the Coppermine version. I couldn't get that much extra speed out of my 500 mhz P-3 no matter what. I have built several Athlons but none could come close to overclocking 200 mhz faster. They all started to crash after about 50 mhz speed increase for what ever reason. Don't know if it was the CPU or the motherboard there. The board I am using now is an A-bit BE6-2.
Mark

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Jason Burroughs
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 654
From: Allen, TX
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-15-2000 02:15 PM

I know that most people on here already know this, but over clocking a CPU does several things, 1 it voids the warranty on the CPU, 2 it voids teh warranty on the motherboard, 3 it may also void the warranty on other components ie video cards. 4 it can introduce instability that is unseen by the user, it may seem to be running fine, but beneath the surface problems may be lurking. There is not much manufacturing difference between say a 700Mhz processor and a 900Mhz processor, infact they are usually the exact same chip, sometimes even off the same waffer, but thorough testing, known as speed binning, establishes what speed the processor can be run reliably.

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John Pytlak
Film God

Posts: 9987
From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922
Registered: Jan 2000

posted 11-15-2000 02:45 PM

Ah! But pushing the limit is fun

Until it crashes.

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com

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Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-16-2000 06:37 AM

IMHO, overclocking isn't worthwhile at this point. In most desktop machines, the limiting factor for performance is not the CPU, but rather disk I/O. The difference between, say, 800 and 900 MHz should be minimal for most typical end-user tasks.

Personally, I'd rather have a slower multiprocessor machine than a fast single-processor machine. I'm surprised that dual processor hardware hasn't become more common lately, since the performance gain is significant. (OK, raw speed is good for some uses, but is not super-critical for the typical end-user.)

I keep seeing PC hardware for sale which is equipped in very odd ways, usually with super-fast processors, but slow 5400 rpm IDE disks and low (64 megs) RAM. This sort of configuration is pretty crazy, since the fast processor speed is wasted due to bottlenecks in other areas, but I suppose that this sort of thing is done for marketing reasons (since speed sells) rather than purposes of achieving good performance.

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Ian Price
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1714
From: Denver, CO
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-16-2000 01:44 PM

I agree with you Scott.

I cruise the web, answer email, update my website and play, very minimally with photos on my computer. I write the odd letter and create a few small spreadsheets. I am sure that my Compaq laptop with 500 MHZ ADM with 64 MEG RAM is grossely overpowered for what I do.

My Father has an old Toshiba laptop with 100 mhz and I don't know how much ram running Win '95. What are the two or three things I can do to improve his performance? Will installing '98 help or hurt? I guess more ram is a good thing.

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-16-2000 06:43 PM

Actually Scott, there is a huge difference in performance both in benchmark testing and visually on the monitor. I don't really care if it voids the warranty or not, this isn't big bucks were talking about here. Its really all in the fun like John P. says and getting the extra performance you can squeek out of a computer for free. But what it does boil down to is that certain processors are more overclockable than others and also as you may not know Intel has sold the 300 mhz Celeron CPU under different higher rated speeds even though they were really not. They got away with it because it performs so well and is so overclockable. AMD Athlons typically won't overclock much, unless you modify the laser cut points on the CPU itself. While this is easy to do and many have done it they still run alot hotter than the Coppermine P-3 does. My last CPU ran for over a year overclocked from 500 to 600 mhz. I just replaced it with the 700 running at 900 cause the new CPU was cheap but I am now 100 mhz past the limit of my MB as well. For the old P-3 100 to 150 mhz over was about the limit without fancy water cooling. Since my computer has an ATA 100 hard drive that spins 7200 rpm I can take more advantage of that. My HD benchmark now pegs out! My old drive an ATA 66 tests only a little better than it did. I can certainly see yours and others point about not putting in faster drives as well. You'd choke the CPU for want of throughput. Sure if you upgrade one without the other....not much gained. Now, with ATA 100, SCSI may soon become a thing of the past. ATA-100 will soon be exceeded as well by ATA ??? and right now ATA 100 is not far behind SCSI, so yes, if done right allot is gained for little or no cost in some instances.
Mark

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Jason Burroughs
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 654
From: Allen, TX
Registered: Jun 99

posted 11-16-2000 07:51 PM

Ian, for the Win95 Laptop, I'd stay with 95, 98 is a little bit more resource intensive, and probably wouldn't provide much improvement. Best way to better performance for any computer is RAM. I've literally seen a 286 runnig Windows 98 but it had a BUNCH of RAM.

AMD is acutally marking some of their 1.2Ghz as 800,900,1000Mhz processors, and selling them accordingly, however they perform at 1.2Ghz. They're doing this because the value of the FAB declines as time goes on, and untill demand can catch up with supply it makes more sense to that. They've also lowered the price of the 1.2Ghz's as well.

Main reason the coppermine runs cooler is that is uses .15micron copper technology instead of .18 aluminum that the predecesors did, same goes for the newer Athalons produced in FAB30 in Germany, FAB25 in Austin still uses aluminum, but they primarily make K6's etc. I'm sure Intel is about on par wiht the abilities of AMD in manufacturing, FAB30 can produce chips all the way down to .10microns, providing possibilities for 3 and 4Ghz processors VERY soon.

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