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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 ;)
We finally had the chance to hear 'I hate Microsoft and Intel' in *one sentence*! How rare!
A winner is you!
ahh, but see... When OS's get older they should get faster. GNOME and KDE have the age advantage. They are too young yet to have increased their speed. XP on the other hand has come from a long line of slow OS's.
You get what you pay for (or at least that's what should be the case). If you are going to pay $200 for something you should at least have a decent speed at which to work at.
I hear everyday, "I really need to upgrade my computer, it's only 500mhz". No, what you need to do is have an OS that is actually decent and runs well on a slower CPU.
Well that's just my opinion.
I really don't think that we should have to have a 2.2ghz machine just to open a couple of applications.
a good majority of people don't leave their computers on all the time, that's why.
Also a lot of people are still running ME or 98. Booting takes up to 5-6 mins on some machines. That's why they are so interested in boot times.
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
--
Even in XP, I've seen the fastest bootup times of ANY OS (Win9x's, ME, 2k, Linux, Win 3.x, old old old OS's that I can't remember the names of) I've used.
Windows XP ran fine on a PII 400 with 256MB RAM and 5GB hard drive space. With all the pretty and useless GUI options enabled. Now it was a little slow, but no worse than GNOME on X on my nVidia GeForce2 on my 800MHz Athlon. The only thing that really killed the usability was excessive use of alpha fade effects in certain scenarios (namely, selecting a rectangle of files Windows Explorer) that weren't hardware accellerated due to an older graphics card.
For most "every day" tasks, the PII 400 was fine - you could browse the web, listen to MP3s, and play older XP-compatible games (which, in most cases, is the same as a Win2K compatible game).
Bottom line is that XP is no worse than any other "modern" graphical OS - it's just made by Microsoft. Accept the fact that Windows XP is a decent operating system and far superior to the Win9x line and get back to using your Linux PC. To each their own, but bashing XP without actually using it is pretty foolish, especially because it does run at without noticable slowdown on any new PC and on most older PCs as well.
Unless your desktop is still a Pentium class machine, assuming that your computer has enough disk space and RAM, Windows XP is a decent operating system. If you're going to bash it, bash it on the potential Digital Rights Management that was supposed to be introduced in XP, or on the product activation, or on any other Microsoft expansionist move. Bashing it for being slow is mostly just uninformed.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Ok -- I was amazed at the difference. If I had the money, I'd be tempted to buy two copies of XP to upgrade my two systems just for that feature!
Thanks,
--
Matt
Hmmm, maybe they should chuck that board into their web server....
The operating system is not the only factor that decides system uptime. Many people do not leave their computer on all the time for one reason or another. For example, I turn mine off every night because I can't sleep with the noise. But boot times are important for many other reasons. Boot times are very important for people who dual boot and have to switch operating systems often. My work forces me to switch between Windows and Linux about 6 times per day. If Windows takes 5 minutes to boot, that's a half hour of time that has been lost. It's even more important when doing service work on computers. I used to work at a local tech shop, and the reboot times add up when you have to install a number of different applications or drivers. Also, we used to test parts, so if I had 50 video cards to test, that meant booting Windows 50 times. A great deal of time is wasted depending on how long it takes to load.
BeOS is probably the fastest-booting full-featured operating system, taking about 7 seconds to boot. DOS is of course much faster, although there isn't a whole lot for it to do. MS-DOS 5.0 with no autoexec.bat/config.sys presents a command prompt pretty much instantly after POST, even on a 486. I once got an extremely minimal Linux to boot in 3 seconds on a Pentium 90 when I was designing a car mp3 stereo. However, that was without any daemons running, no unnecessary drivers, etc... so it was not really a usable general-purpose operating system. In the Windows world, I would consider Win95 to be the fastest (contrary to every review and ad for Win98+ that claimed faster boot and shutdown times). A fresh install of Win95 on my Athlon 800 loads in under 10 seconds, although this starts going up when you install a real video driver, Internet Explorer 5, etc. Still, if you carefully monitor what gets loaded on startup, you can keep Win95's boot time under 30 seconds, which helps immensely when rebooting many times daily is necessary. Even in cases of normal use, a short boot time is a great convenience.
But maybe that's just me.
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
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'
Bottom line is that XP is no worse than any other "modern" graphical OS - it's just made by Microsoft. Accept the fact that Windows XP is a decent operating system and far superior to the Win9x line and get back to using your Linux PC.
I will have to respectfully disagree (unlike some of the replies ive seen to you)
We decided to set XP in my families new XP1800 computer. I wil be the first to admit that when it runs, it runs smoothly and the family likes it, but It certainly is much worse in terms of stability to say Mandrak or MacOSx. There is not a day that does not go by the computer iwll up and reboot for no reason or simply crash.
As for being a decent OS being made by Microsoft, all i can say is that we must remember that Microsoft KNEW about a HUGH REMOTE HOLE for almost a month before deciding to let the rest of us know about. That in my opinion makes it a very much worse OS than the others. At the moment, i am trying to get hem used to a linux desktop and will simply replace it all with Linux in a few months.
Thankx!
Sigs are dangerous coy things
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'
Sir, how dare you bring reality into the picture!
By the way, why the hell does CmdrTaco care how fast it runs Windows XP? He only runs Linux, right?
"And like that
Then people need to look into sleep or hibernation. Everyone assumes it's for laptops, but it works just fine on desktops. I hibernate my media system all the time to have a middle of the road between power usage and boot times.
Macs should be using sleep mode if running OS X.
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
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.
It's worth mentioning that since at least NT4, the NT-based OSes 'cheat' about boot times compared to many Unixes... The typical unix will go through it's rc files (or rc.d/nnn dirs) and run the scripts in turn and wait for them to finish. NT plops it's login screen up long before it's finished loading Services (the rough equivalent of things like Sendmail and BIND on your *nix box). Wait and see how much time you need until both systems stop accessing the disk after reboot - the NT system will clatter away running IIS, DNS, DHCPd, whatever you have configured, for quite a while after the login screen has appeared.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Thank you so much for being realistic on slashdot. And thank the moderators for being fucking retards that automatically bash anything that says microsoft. (i'm a moderator too)
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.