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P4 2.2GHz and D845BG Review
nihilist_1137 writes "GreenJifa.Com has gotten their hands on the new Intel P4 2.2GHz/Intel D845BG DDR Motherboard for review. This is the new P4 that has the 0.13m die and the new "Northwood" core. Check out the review."
This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a
386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably
crazy talk ;)
This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM.
For what it's worth, XP doesn't run all that slowly. It's merely average -- comparable to your typical decked-out Gnome desktop on X...
Man!
Four comments, none above zero, and its already Slashdotted
The Gardener
--
In the last month, I've had to reboot twice, and that was booting when i got the lan party, and when i got back...
It says he needs to upgrade to a "higher service level" or something, cool! So, with .NET you have to pay for eveyrone who views your webpage
(SARCASM)
We finally had the chance to hear 'I hate Microsoft and Intel' in *one sentence*! How rare!
A winner is you!
O Tomshardware, they also have a comparison, it's pretty good. From what I read it doesn't seem like this chip is really anything special. I guess I'll just wait until 3GHz before really getting exited ;).
http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/cpus/intel/p4nw/
does anything beat hardocp when it comes to testing new hardware?
The athlon XP tromples the P4 once again.
This was the system I benchmarked the P4 on. I used 128MB of Micron PC1600 (200MHz) ECC DDR Memory.
The latest, preproduction, Intel CPU, and he only springs for 128 MB of ram? Why bottleneck the thing? No one is going to production ship it like that. I will likely go out the door with 512 or so.
The Gardener
--
With my current setup (1.2ghz and 640mb ram) and my last one (800mhz and 256mb ram), XP still runs pretty damn smooth, even while running 20 some odd windows, running a server, playing music, etc, with both configs. Last time I was in Linux (Bah to Windows installs formating the MBR) with 800 and 256megs of ram, XP was still faster with those stats than GNOME was (I don't care much for KDE).
Features (D845BG Motherboard)
Support for Intel mPGA478 Pentium-4 400MHz FSB Processors up to 2.2GHz+.
Onboard AC'97 Audio with SoundMAX with SPX Technology and Microphone Pre-Amplifiers.
Two 184-pin memory slots with support for up to 2GB PC2100 (DDR266) SDRAM Memory.
4 External USB 1.1 Connections for added peripherals, with support for an additional 3 USB 1.1 connections.
Intel Active Monitor for monitoring of system temperatures, fan speeds, and power supply voltages.
1 1.5V AGP 4X/2X Port for Accelerated 3D Graphics.
6 32-Bit PCI Ports for added components.
Ultra ATA/100 Disk Support.
Onboard 82562ET Intel Pro/100 LAN
Features (Pentium-4 2.2GHz Processor)
Intel Net-Burst Micro-Architecture.
512KB Advanced Transfer Cache (L2) with 8-way associativity and Error Correcting Code (ECC).
System Bus Frequency at 400MHz.
Rapid Execution Engine: Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) run at twice the processor core frequency.
Hyper Pipelined Technology.
Advanced Floating-Point and Multimedia Unit (FPU) for enhanced video, audio, encryption and 3D performance.
144 enhanced Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) instructions.
Advanced Dynamic Execution
Power Management Capabilities
8KB Level 1 Data Cache
Optimized for 32-Bit applications running on advanced 32-Bit operating systems.
Overall it seems like an evolutionary step.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
> This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 ;)
> running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk
Have you actually USED XP, Taco? It's actually quite nippy imho.
Soon CPU fans will require a separate hole in the opposite side of the case. Mounting one will require at least two spare chips, or replaceable cores, since I'll inevitably drop the fan on the core at least once during the mounting process.
BTW, it boots much faster. I guess that is because it boots without negotiating network connections.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
The guy needs some photography courses, badly. Or maybe glasses :-) Look at this, for example! What a sloppy job!
Hmmm, maybe they should chuck that board into their web server....
Hmm, well, if you ran a fullchip RTL simulation of an Athlon XP on a P4 your speed you be somewhere on the order of 10Hz-100Hz (depending on your simulation software). That's pretty slow.
Windows 3.0 on a 386 ran rather decently. 4 megs of ram? I could only have dreamed of having 4 megs of ram on my 386. I DID upgrade to 3 megs at one point. Back then I did it with an add-on isa card.
:)
Windows 3.0 even ran decently on a 286. And you didn't really need much more than 640K of ram, and it didn't complain much about it or spend too much time thrashing.
However, thats not to say it was useful. In fact, I don't quite remember WHAT I did with win 3.0 except maybe something like paintbrush and the scanner software. Everything else back then still used Dos, and so did I. Windows was something that got loaded into a desqview window, along with all the other dos programs.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Fair point. I'd also like to bash it for being rather insecure, but I suppose I'll just have to stand in line behind all the other /.ers who want to bash it for being a Microsoft product.
But what interests me about XP is that so far there's no sign that the people at our office who use 98, NT or 2K want to upgrade. There seems to be a curious lack of keenness about this product. Perhaps it's the digital rights stuff. We developers run partly Microsoft, mostly Linux, so the people I'm talking about are the CEO, sales, marketing, legal, administrative and whatnot. They're more than happy with 9X or 2k, it seems. Or perhaps they're just scared to move in case they end up having to pay out for "upgrades" in the future.
I guess we'll get an XP machine eventually because we are an ISP and we will have to support our users, just as we run tests on Mac (9 and X). But somehow our people don't seem to see XP yet as a gotta-have, the way 95 was.
1.6 GHz and 1.8 GHz Northwood chips are going to be available soon; these will likely be reaching some nice overclocks (maybe up to even 2.4) and these are the chips to get. They're also the only ones most of us will be able to afford, given the way Intel prices their chips (see here).
I'm using an Athlon 1 GHz now and getting nearly a 40% overclock out of it, on an Iwill KK266-R board (KT133A SDRAM), at 155*9; it's not worth it to me to upgrade to an Athlon XP or a DDR chipset.
Overclockers.com, probably my favorite site, has daily bits of news and a lot of information lately on Northwoods. Apparently Intel is working on a dual-channel DDR chipset which should be a treat.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
The additional memory (you should have at least 1GB) is necessary for many things. First, and foremost, we must leave room on our systems to allow the U.S. Government to install their goodies -- you know, to make sure we aren't terrorists. Also, we need the extra space so that corporations can install spyware to monitor our usage of their side of the internet. After all, .com is theirs, isn't it? 128MB is just not enough for all of that, and running an innovative OS that we have all been clamoring for. We know this because Microsoft has told us this.
I wish I was a cool, moron spammer
Hence, I believe that (Myriad's law?):
Boot Time is Inversely Proportionate to Computing Power - The more power you've got, the longer it's going to take.
Ie, my old 486DX50 took longer to bring up DOS than my 386. (The 386 behind my 286, 8086. Hell, the C64 kicked all their asses!) Primarily because of added TSRs, memory managers etc.
Then my P100 took longer to fire up... Good 'ol Windows.
Now the Athlon takes ages... init bloody RAID arrays, UTA100 controllers, SCSI devices, Windows...let windows initialize all the above plus more. Wait wait wait. Go for coffee. Wait some more.
Kind of sick really.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Hardware is still getting faster and faster for the same price.
:)
This is neat for developpers. Soon, source code will be recompiled in real time at every key stroke.
No more need for interpreters
{{.sig}}
From the Jargon Dictionary
Gates's Law: "The speed of software halves every 18 months." This oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware caopacity per dollar predicted by Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Apparantly you've never booted BeOS.
"And like that
utill I installed Windows 95 on it. Right when Win95 first came out I tryed it out on my 386/16 /w 4megs. Talk about slow boot times. I could turn on my computer and take a shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for my day before I would even get close to being able to use my comptuer. But with windows 3.1 on it, it ran like a dream. Well maybe not a dream, but better than 95!
ooh...ooh... and I live on North Woods Trail
This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk ;)
/. the best image in the eyes of the public, and not gaining a reputation for clear, objective content it should (could?) have. I know that, after all, this is CmdrTaco's personal journal, but it has millions of visitors and could be one of the showcases to the world of the linux/open source/it community.
:)
This kind of comments are, sadly, not making
Back to the topic, to those who have used XP little, this is my experience.
The OS is great, I did not expect something as good from MS. It is stable, plug and play really works and reboots are very ocassional. Uptimes are long. And it is quite easy to administer. Performancewise (the real reason for my comment) it needs lots of memory, but I have been running it on slooow machines, with very satisfactory results.
For example, it runs very well on my old Sony Vaio laptop, 266Mhz Pentium (not II) with 192Mbs of Ram. It had Win98 before, and I was tired of that. It runs at very good speed, not blazingly fast but acceptable, browses internet faster, boots in shorter time and is totally stable. Also, contrary to Win2k, I get the power management stuff I really need.
Also, I got some old PCs here at home and it runs pretty well, a 400 Celeron for my mother, 256Mb ram and a 333P2 with 128 Mbs ram. It is a RAM hog, and 128Mb is the minimun acceptable.
Also, as a recommendation for anyone running it, turn off the blue theme and run it in 'classic' time. Not drawing all those bitmaps will make it more responsive. Also turn off system restore, it slows the system down quite a bit.
I know this is a place where linux is the ultimate OS. For me, it is, but for some (critical and important) applications. I use it at work. For end users, XP is great, and we (the linux/opensource community) should appreciate how well it works, learn from it the good things and realize that MS just got a better we have to compete against.
Too bad that (like at work) MS has no way to compete with the pricing of linux
Really, if you know what you're doing, there's nothing wrong with Windows, except the moral issues of supporting a monopoly.
Crashes? Lockups? Maybe once every few months, after installing some crappy shareware.
I'm considering switching to a higher speed processor, but mostly just for the coolness factor. There's really nothing at all wrong with 500mhz.
What gets my goat is that my company gives out 900+ mhz machines to morons who will never appreciate it, because they've got every tsr known to man running. Meanwhile, I do all my developing on a 733mhz. Which is okay, but the coolness factor dictates that I should have the fastest processor, as a power user. Oh well. I sleep at night because I know it's all so much silliness.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
If you are a hobbyist and like to change hardware frequently, plan on having an intimate relationship with Microsofts activation dept.
If you run Windows at work, better make damn sure you know where your licenses are and make sure the average user can't install applications on any machine(a disgruntled employee can easily install applications and then turn you into the BSA, at a cost of up to $150,000 per unlicensed app)
At some time in the near future(will expire. Microsoft has already dropped support for Windows 95 and will drop support for Windows 98 next year. If you use Office, your software becomes useless as soon as the next version comes out because you will no longer be able to read Office documents created by the latest versions.
I could go on and on. But I better stop, since I'm being "silly" and obviously ungrounded in reality.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
We've encountered the same type of hold back from our business segments. They say that they are perfectly happy running Windows NT 4.0.
Of course part of it is that they just don't realize many of the benefits they could see. We do a piss poor job of marketing our IT services internally.
But I don't think it has anything to do with DRM or the other things mentioned here. These users are no more aware of those features than they are of the alpha blending GUI coolness.
It's mostly just a fear of the unknown. Things work fine now don't try to fix them... that sort of thing.
But this same attitude pretty much also dooms the notion of Linux on the desktop. If people are afraid of moving to WinXP for fear of what might no longer work, they aren't about to jump into another plane of in-compatibility with Linux.
Ohwell, the technical people in our company have been using WinXP for several months now and the more they use it, the more they like it. The changes are subtle, but very likeable.
I've used XP on my laptop for the past 2 months (3M, 1.1GHz processor, 0.5 GB Ram). I use Access and Excel extensively, 2 Gig databases, big queries, etc. I crash the son-of-a-bitch 5-10 times a day. ?sp
Ok people, can we do a run down of reasons why people would use XP instead of w2k?
.NET (?)
For XP :
- Remote desktop sharing which actually works
- Super fast reboots
For w2k :
- No useless memory-pig alphableading interface
- No monopolistic digital right management
- No monopolistic centralized driver signing
- No monopolistic integration with
Can you add to the list?
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
Tom's Hardware has a much more in depth (and useful) review of the new P4, comparing it to other incarnations of the p4 and various AMD XP models.
d ex .html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020107/in
I've been a linux user since 1995. I've used linux professionally since 1996. I've used nothing BUT linux on my desktop machines at work since 1998. I'm a huge fan of linux. I don't care for Microsoft... I despise their business practices and I feel that every iteration of windows up until windows 2000 was a hunk of garbage.
However, these comments about 2000 and XP being slow are way out of line. They are the type of baseless, smug, nudge nudge wink wink hey other linux geeks look I'm cool I made fun of microsoft comments that I can't stand, and that I think severely hurt the linux community.
I have a dual boot system at home. Its a dual p2 400, with 393 megs of ram. I have two 10 gig hard drives, one with debian gnu/linux, the other with windows 2000 professional. I use each OS for different purposes. I use debian for my work (development), for my hobby (more development), for some games (quake 1-3 mainly) and for my communications (email, irc, usenet, the www).
I use windows 2000 for my games that don't work on linux, for my childrens' games, and my wife uses it for digital photo editing, browsing the web, and getting her email.
Windows 2000 is a decent operating system (sorry to the zealots in the crowd.. but its true). Its been very stable for me. It runs very well on my hardware. I don't have any speed problems. My windows games play fine under it. All my hardware is easily supported with it. Recently I bought a digital camera and a usb printer, and setting them up was a snap. All in all, I've found it to be a very reasonable operating system for desktop use. I've heard XP is much the same, and geared a little more towards home users than 2000.
All my hardware works under linux just fine as well, and linux runs great on the machine. Setting things up is of course more of a PITA.. when I bought my camera and printer, I had to recompile my kernel because I didn't include usb support in my last kernel. I wrote some scripts for automating downloading images of the camera. These are things an "average" home user does not know how to do, and does not WANT to know how to do.
Windows is much farther along in terms of useability by non technical users than Linux is. Linux is playing a serious catch up game in that arena.
Windows 2000 and XP are not slow. Will they run on a 386 with 32 megs of ram? No. Is Linux, with xfree 4.1, a full GNOME or KDE setup, and mozilla reasonable user on older hardware either? No.
Windows 2000 Professional is also in my experience very stable. I've had IE crash a couple of times on me. Certainly no more times than I've had to kill -9 my mozilla processes.
Linux is a great operating system for many things. I love it. Its been a pleasure to watch Linux evolve from its early beginnings to where it is now. However, it still has a long way to go (at least in the desktop arena).
Making unfounded comments about competing operating systems doesn't accomplish anything, other than making you look cool to the other members of the he-man windows hater club. When someone who is unfamiliar with Linux, and uses XP or 2000, hears snickering and comments bashing Windows, when their Windows system in their experience works well, is reliable, fast, and supports all of their hardware, what do you think they think? Do they think "oh gee, I suppose I should use Linux, because Win-doze is for microsoft slaves and retards!". Or do they more likely think "wtf is that person talking about?".
Only through honestly assessing where we are today can Linux continue to grow and move forward. Standing around patting each other on the back and making fun of other OSes is not a positive activity, and contributes to the negative stereotype of Linux users as an exclusive club of technosnobs.
couldn't have said it better myself...
-
My response is probably flamebait, but I have karma to burn.
That spells the end of Microsoft products for me too. Migrations to Windows 2000 was expensive enough, but the weak security design, security-through-obscurity policy, known vulnerabilities, forced upgrades drives me nuts. And it's bloody expensive on top of all that.
A desktop is a desktop to 90% of my users. If it weren't for our need to run Office... Right now, it's going piecemeal. I'm hoping for a "Microsoft-Free 2003"! Hey, that's catchy...
Read the number of posts that use the exact wording, "Linux is not ready for the desktop." I am amazed that they are soooo obvious... Sad really.
And the tag team that two of them have going is also fun to watch... One makes a statement, then the other one supports it.
Tisk, tisk tisk. They must really be worried about XP getting trashed. We all know that sales of XP really sucked, and that this dragged down computer sales in the last quarter of the year. Maybe people wanted a choice as to what OS came on their machines.
Personally, I build my own machines. My favorite is a 2 year old dual celeron on a BP6, overclocked to 522MHz. It has 512 MB of RAM and 80 GB worth of RAID 5 hard drives. That machine is so fast, you click on a icon and the app pops up almost as you are letting up on the mouse. Even Mozilla starts in about 2 seconds.
I fix the boot sequence to boot to an Xwindows prompt in just a few seconds. All the servers and a lot of the services are started up after X windows is started. I am suprised that we don't have a better boot sequence in Linux yet. Especially since it was so easy to do this.
Maybe the distribution people need to get together and all agree to a new init method that emphasises boot speed for desktop users. Since this seems to be a problem for a lot of people here.
Only running applications that are linked against one set of libraries seems to help by not having to cache a lot of different libraries.
I also would like to see our applications get prelinked against the libraries that they are using, like under OSX. Linking at run time is just too expensive. It is better to do it just the one time and to save the executable prelinked. This can just be another step in the installation process. Prelinking would easily half the load speed of almost every program.
The last thing that I would recommend is using the intel compiler to compile a some of the executables that are taking a lot of processor, like audio/video codexes.
This would make them run much more efficiently and be able to take advantage of special instructions on the various platforms. This could easily result in upto 20% performance increase over gcc compiled executibles. Not because gcc is bad, but because intel is just good at writing x86 optimized compilers.
An increase of 20% will make a 500MHz processor run like a 600MHz processor, and this is the difference between dropping frames and not dropping frames during recording.
Can you imagine a Linux distribution that did these 3 simple steps? It would boot in 5 seconds to a login prompt, would start programs in sub second times and would need 20% less processor for the same performance as a normal Linux distribution. I'd pay good money for that distribution.
I know I recently had to use a 386DX40 running Windows 3.1, and I couldn't believe just how slow it felt.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"This kind of comments are, sadly, not making /. the best image in the eyes of the public, and not gaining a reputation for clear, objective content it should (could?) have."
/. as "The Linux Marketing Department", outsiders don't look at /. period, and insiders talk about stuff that matters.
What?? Slashdot is not about making a good image to "the public", and its most important strength is it's massive subjectiveness: The posts by its users.
News for nerds, stuff that matters, you know. Not selling anything, just talking about stuff that matters. outsiders don't look at
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
10-100 clocks per second on a double digit million transistor chip? That's some efficient simulation software, and/or cheating by using simple RAM models for the cache.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
> This setup might have a chance to run XP ;)
> without it feeling like a 386/16 running
> Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright,
> thats probably crazy talk
Sigh, the crazy talk here is constant assertions like that. I dual boot XP Home against Debian unstable, for a couple of reasons, including testing the DVD playback against Xine and Diablo II ( no, I won't crack it to run it under wine ).
XP runs fine, quite responsively on a dual P3 550 with a half gigabyte of memory. These are not superhuman system statistics.
If we all want to flaunt the technological or other superiority of our chosen operating system, that's fine. But lets do it on hard numbers and reasonable, accuracte statements, not stuff like the above.
A.C.
This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM.
Is it just me or does this sound like a joke you'd hear from Nick Burns - Your Company Computer Guy?
You don't pay with money, you pay with your time. You dedicate many hours of your life to Linux, and it becomes a VERY good OS.
We do not cater to idiots.
Agree totally.
I have an intrinsic dislike for Microsoft because of their abusive monopoly status, and perhaps even a bit of British "support the underdog" attitude.
But I still use Win2k as my primary OS just because I can't do the things I want in Linux without spending hours on the web tracking down obscure bugfixes. Those are hours much better spent down the pub.
Go buy AMD if you don't have the cash for a CPU that'll actually survive if the heatsink falls off, or if a fan fails.
It's your funeral. And if the heatsink falls off, quite literally.
BTW, the new "Prestonia" Xeons implement "Hyper-Threading" (a form of SMT), and report to have two logical processors.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The parent article really resonates with me because my experience is nearly the same as Mr. Coward's. I, too, have been using Linux since around 1995 and use it on my professional desktop now. I also have a dual-boot (uniprocessor) Windows/Linux machine at home, and share his sentiments about that. What's interesting to me, though, is that you could replace all of the Windows references in the parent article with MacOS 9, and it would still be mostly true in my experience (I triple-boot Linux and two versions of MacOS on one box).