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Critique the specs of my possible $799 ($779 after MIR) PC upgrade...

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G

goodcow

Member
Going from a P4 1.7GHz on an 845 to:

ANTEC Black Performance Series II Mini Tower Case with 350W Power Supply, Model "SX635BII" -RETAIL

Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA Hard Drive, Model WD740GD, OEM Drive Only

Intel Pentium 4/ 3.0E GHz 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, Hyper Threading Technology - Retail

Intel D865PERLL i865PE P4 800FSB Skt478 DDR ATX Motherboard w/Audio, LAN, RAID/Serial ATA Retail (Prescott Ready) *** Free 2nd Day ***

PMI PMI3200-1024DGH 1GB Kit DDR400 PC3200 CAS 2.5-3-3-7 Dual-Channel Turbo Memory w/Gold Heat Spreader Retail ***Free 2nd Day***

$799, $779 after $20 mail in rebate for the Raptor drive...

I don't know... critique this for me.
 
D

DaCocoBrova

Finally bought a new PSP, but then pushed the demon onto someone else. Jesus.
The 3.0E runs hot, are expensive and can be surpassed by the 2.8.
 
S

Sander

Member
The Raptors are fine drives, but the real world performance is not that much above other drives as many people believe. Check http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2073&p=5 to see what I mean (also has a game loading benchmarks, thought that was nice).

for the most part, all of the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives perform about the same. Although there are much more significant differences between the three current-gen contenders here in the synthetic tests, in the real world, we see that they all perform just about the same.

Our tests have also shown us that the 10,000RPM Raptor can offer a noticeable, but not dramatic, performance improvement over the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives. While the performance improvement is there, it's not as significant as the synthetic tests would have you believe.
Click to expand...
You can have more storage for less, with a bit of a performance hit that you'll likely not notice anyway (but you will notice the extra GBs)

As far as power supplies go, watts is not the main thing you should look at. Instead, check the amperage the 12V rails (and 3,3/5V rails, but those are almost always well within what you would need) can deliver. The CPU uses the 12V rail, t is critical! Especially with P4 (and even more with a Prescott) which draws a lot of power. There are 400W PSUs with lower amperage 12V rails than quality 300W PSUs. Unfortunately, newegg doesn't list those specs as far as I can tell? Maybe a google search for the cases might produce some info.

//edit Should have checked the links more thoroughly before ranting :p I see they are all Antec cases, you should be fine. They produce quality PSUs.
 
D

DaCocoBrova

Finally bought a new PSP, but then pushed the demon onto someone else. Jesus.
The 3.0E is a Prescott chip. They run hotter, consequently making them more difficult to overclock.
 
L

LinesInTheSand

Banned
goodcow said:
I saw that, but didn't like the flip door.

What are the main advantages to this one other than the other? Is a 30W difference really going to matter?
Click to expand...
You can remove the flip door on any of those cases.
 
B

BigGreenMat

Member
Northwood has 512kb L2 cache with a 20(am I right here?) step pipeline. Prescott has a 1mb L2 cache with a 31 step pipeline. Basically the Prescott needs that larger L2 to hold all the different things it wants to do in that insanely long pipeline. Northwood is a more efficient processor for its clocks sort of like an Athlon is more effiecient than a P4. Prescott was supposed to allow a much higher clock scaling than Northwood because of its longer pipeline(and be faster at higher clocks although this is not showing to be the case), however, Intel has found that increasing clocks is getting very ineffective at increasing performance and they are hitting a ceiling that they hadn't anticipated so they are switching to a more clock efficient architecture based on their Pentium M designs. I am not 100% on this, but that is pretty much the story off the top of my head.
 
B

Bregor

Member
The Abit IS7 is also excellent, and is cheaper (I'm using it right now). It depends whether you are looking for features or value.
 
T

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
Get a Prescott if you're big on video encoding and you have excellent cooling.

Otherwise, Northwood hands down. It runs about 10-20 C cooler, can OC insanely, runs on par with prescott on everything outside video encoding, doesn't require mobo bios upgrades to work, etc.

I've seeen Prescotts run at 50 idle and 65 load at stock speeds.

My 3.0 Northwood, which is OCed to 3.5 GHz runs at 40 idle and 50 load, and beats the crap out of a Prescott at stock settings.




The abit IC7 Max II Advance is good I think. I have Max III. I hear that Max II can overclock as good as the Max III but has less features.

Don't go OCing like a n00b. That can lead to disaster. Visit Abit's forums and follow this guide:

http://www.jscustomcomputers.com/overclocking.htm
 
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