Dual Celeron vs P3 vs Athlon

[BadBen]

I got the Abit BP6 and a 466@525 Celeron. I like to upgrade to Pentium or Athlon. I Already have a slot1 Bx board (Micronics C400) so if a buy a athlon i'll have to by a new board wich will cost more. What is better 466 and a 400 Celeron (including Windows NT) or a Pentium 3 650 or a Atlon 650.

Thank you

[Dominus]

It's pretty much a fact that the Athlon beats the P3 at the same frequency. As for K7 vs SMP celerons, the Athlon annihilates a celeron 466 alone, and would only have to compete against both CPUs in SMP capable apps. Even in SMP capable apps, the performance would be about the same.

But of course, I'll admit that I'm a bit biased to the Athlon, as mine kicks ***!

Also, you must take into account the recent problems of the CuMine P3s, in which CuMine PCs don't boot half the time due to a problem in the CPU. Intelwas in such a rush to get them on the market that they didn't do adequate testing, which is making for a rather large errata document...

[bkehoe]

I'd take an Athlon. My 550 easily leaves any equivelent Celeron or P!!! in the dust.

Remember, that a dual setup will only work in applications which take advantage of dual processors. In normal apps, even in Win2000 or NT things won't be much faster than with 1 processor.

If you want to get a monster keyrate in something like RC5 then go dual, but if you get an Athlon you will be able to upgrade to the 1GHz+ versions in the very near future. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif I was also considering a dual Celeron 550 when getting the Athlon (September), but as the current motherboards should work with the future chips, I decided to get the Athlon.

Brendan

[This message has been edited by bkehoe (edited 12-10-1999).]

[AuraEdge]

Also, if you didnt know, the CPUs in a BP6 must be identical in every way but voltage supplied.
It just sounded like u wanted to add a 400 to a 466...which wouldnt work.

I would say get another celeron 466, and clock it to 525,since you already have one and the BP6 so it would be the cheapest upgrade path (By FAR)

[yipikayee]

400Mhz + 400Mhz is not 800Mhz of power using dual mobo. You can't split bitts and bytes... but you can split 2 or more different processes (like rendering with lightwave and listening mp3 with winamp). Of course OS must support multiporcessors. I think W9x and 2K can't do this... Depends on what are you doing....

[Mntsnow]

Yip,
Win2K IS a multiprocessor capable OS. (it's NT5.0 with a new name basically) http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

Mntsnow

[Dkay]

Auraedge your wrong buddy, they can be different clockspeeds.
Just so you know.

[RobRich]

An smp motherboard can accept different speed cpu's, but it will mos likely never make it past the boot up process, if that far. SMP capable Intel chipsets use a timing protocol embedded within the APIC standard to switch processes between cpu's. This means that both cpu's must run at the same bus speed ( a given) and multiplier inorder to function correctly without data loss. When two different speed cpu's are used, this timing information can easily be distorted. If off even by a fraction of a nanosecond, the cpu will not process its intended functions, because (as defined by APIC) the motherboard's i/o will either be lagging with one cpu, or ahead of the other. This at minimum leads to data corruption, at worst a crash.

If you want SMP, run identical cpu's. I even go as far as recommending matching batch/week number cpu's in higher end systems (servers, cad stations, etc.) to ensure the upmost in stabilty and performance.

[skyhawk21]

Just to let all of you know who havent used a dual celeron system under win2k but think you know everything about it. it will out run a single processor system why is that? in windows2000 smp works great, it uses both cpus as one cpu by default so actually you do have 1 processor that is fast, ive tested it out tested my theory and so my celeron 500s is like having a gighertz system. i get more frames playing any game that only uses one cpu but win2k has it use both cpus. when i disable one of the cpus so win2k only DOES realyl use one it goes alot slower in fps than when it uses both. an app doesnt have to use two cpus to really use two cpus, win2k does that for it and does make it faster. i tested it all out. and with two cpus yes its true you can run a couple of game servers on cpu 1, and then on cpu2 be listening to mp3s and playing a game. it works great. two processors or more is good for running appz that run in the background like game and music and other servers for the inet on 1 cpu while your doing all the work with another cpu u cant do that with a single cpu. i mean with a single cpu u can run everything u got but it will lag it down even if its not using all 100% of it. my point is "two is better than one(EG)"

if u got any questions email me at skyhawk21@yahoo.com or check out my page at http://breality.freehosting.net

[bdog]

I've seen a bp6 run stable with a 366 and a 400 in it under nt4. I think the fsb's have to be the same but it does work. It is running right now and has been for about a month.

[otheos]

The reason why you get a better performance in Win2000 when using both cpu's is that one of them gets loaded with all OS related tasks and leaves the other one clear to play... Believe me when you see a 1G athlon running you won't believe your eyes...

Two CPU's are better than one, yes I agree. This is the set up servers follow cause they do too many things in the same time. How many things do you do? You reckon an athlon at 1G won't have the capacity to play an MP3 while you play quake??

Serious number crunchers use one cpu. There is no need for more as they only do one thing at a time (prety much like our use).
The Athlon is a serious CPU and cannot be compared with a value chip like the celeron. It is so powerfull, we are now thinking to adopt athlon based machines running solaris rather than SUNs. Although the athlon is still a 32bit CPu (the UltraSPARC is 64bit)it beats the SUNs in their own environment - solaris. And this is where the intel comparison ends. Any window based benchmarks shows comparable performance between the p3's and the athlons. The P3 would never qualify as a serious number cruncher. The Athlon *creams* everything!
If the scientific community leans towards athlons after all these years of succesful SUN support, it means that the athlon is far more than just the fastest x86 CPU in the world. And this is no politics, we just go for whatever is faster (and cost effective comparatively to the SUNs).

Sometimes watching our 650MHz testbench athlon crunching headless (i.e. no monitor) in the corner of my office I wonder how much wasted this machine will be if bought by an individual as myself for just browsing the net and occasionally building some mpegs...

BTW: overclocking is out of question here, lol!

[otheos]

They only need to have the same stepping!

[AuraEdge]

Thats news ta me...
sorry bout that