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Going to build an Atom D525 system.... betterh than 3Ghz P4 ?

Atom D525 with SSD vs. 3.06Ghz P4 with old 7200rpm HD

  • Atom will be smoother / faster

    Votes: 26 61.9%

  • It will be a wash -about the same, but smaller, lower power system.

    Votes: 8 19.0%

  • Atom will be slower - DON'T DO IT.

    Votes: 8 19.0%
  • Total voters
    42
C

C-rizzle

Gawd
Joined
Jun 16, 2009
Messages
783
So my secretary has an old Dell 4500 system, bought around 7 years ago, the ram & CPU were upgraded a few years back.

Its got a 3.06Ghz (533FSB) with HT CPU, a 7 year old harddrive (whatever came with it), 2Gb of ddr dram, & I think a GeForce5200 videocard in it.

I was thinking of getting a barebone Atom D525 (dual core 1.8Ghz) system with ION 2 motherboard, putting in a 2Gb stick of ddr2800 (upgradeable later to 2x2Gb= 4Gb), and an X25-V 40Gb SSD. I'm wondering how much faster it will feel in overall usage.

I know the P4 at 3.06Ghz with HT could be faster in some single threaded situations, however, the dual core Atom should smooth things, and having an SSD should make the overall system FEEL faster right ?

What are your thoughts on it? You think it will overall feel faster, be very similar or feel slower for general office/internet usage ?

I like that the system will be smaller & power savings. However, the last time I swapped someone to a similar but slower) Asus EEE box with 1.6Ghz single core Atom, they complained it was slower than their old Celeron box. (which it was slightly slower, but I made them keep it! )
 
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The Atom will wipe the P4 across the floor especially with an SSD. I have used a netbook with a D525 (EeePc 1215N) and my god was i impressed. Don't forget the D525 has HT as well, you've got 4 threads to use and the SSD will be lightening compared to a NEW hard drive let alone a 7 year old one.

As for the Jetway, that's just pretty much the same as the Asus, go for it, nice little things :)
 
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Rossi~ said:
The Atom will wipe the P4 across the floor especially with an SSD. I have used a netbook with a D525 (EeePc 1215N) and my god was i impressed. Don't forget the D525 has HT as well, you've got 4 threads to use and the SSD will be lightening compared to a NEW hard drive let alone a 7 year old one.

As for the Jetway, that's just pretty much the same as the Asus, go for it, nice little things :)
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I liked it b/c its barebones. So I get to put in the SSD.

The asus EEE box, comes with ram & slow HD, so I couldn't pick my own (higher quality / performance) parts with out scrapping their parts out the system.
 
Rossi~ said:
The Atom will wipe the P4 across the floor especially with an SSD. :)
Click to expand...

Agreed. I've worked on a pair of similar systems, although the atom is a 510 with lousy 945 graphics. With the ion it will be even better. The SSD and to a lesser degree the extra core make most of the difference. Ion acceleration should make Flash much less painful.
 
Ruiner said:
Agreed. I've worked on a pair of similar systems, although the atom is a 510 with lousy 945 graphics. With the ion it will be even better. The SSD and to a lesser degree the extra core make most of the difference. Ion acceleration should make Flash much less painful.
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he said it
 
The new machine you're putting together will be better than the Dell 4500 in every way.
 
Here's a very good real world comparison for you:

Atom Box:
  • Intel Atom 330
  • Nvidia Ion Graphics
  • 4 GB DDR2
  • Kingston 64 GB SSD

Custom P4 Box:
  • P4 3.2 Ghz HT
  • 6 GB Ram
  • 7200 rpm drive
  • XFX 7600GT 512 MB graphics card

Both were set up as my HTPC. The Atom box could decode 720p and 1080p as well as do High def skype calls with absolutely no lag or dropped frames. I use CoreAVC to decode (takes advantage of CUDA) and I can run with all quality settings checked. The P4 box could handle 720p fine, but both 1080p and Skype HD calls were a nightmare to get working. I literally had to quit every non-essential service, set quality settings on low, and quit explorer, and even then the video was just bearable.

BTW make sure you install all of the available drivers from nvidia, including chipset, graphics, and audio if applicable.
 
Cool, I figured it would be better across the board for media stuff, since the ION should offload a lot of it, and the ATOM is optimized with later versions of SSE and some HT and dual core enhancements.

My only concern was the single threaded performance for running something like Quickbooks Pro, etc.

I was pretty sure it SHOULDN'T be slower, but wasn't sure how much a performance improvement it would be. My parts arrive Weds, and I should have everything put together by Thurs/Fri. So I'll benchmark both systems then with some old school single threaded apps to see how it does on the "lowest common denominator" (legacy) stuff.
 
Did a little benchmarking.

On an old school single threaded benchmark that I like to run. The P4 3.06Ghz is technically about 2.3x faster on average. However, I'm sure that has to do with the P4's double speed ALU's as this is an old benchmark, that only tests up to SSE2 and it tests all stuff on the CPU only. ie: 1Mb or less stuff generally, lots of basic math tests.

In real world use, I installed Quickbooks Pro 2011 on both PC's. The Atom was started a few minutes after and it still finished a few minutes before. ie: a HUGE difference, I'm sure greatly due to the SSD. Overall it definitely feels faster.
 
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C-rizzle said:
Did a little benchmarking.

On an old school single threaded benchmark that I like to run. The P4 3.06Ghz is technically about 2.3x faster on average. However, I'm sure that has to do with the P4's double speed ALU's as this is an old benchmark, that only tests up to SSE2 and it tests all stuff on the CPU only. ie: 1Mb or less stuff generally, lots of basic math tests.

In real world use, I installed Quickbooks Pro 2011 on both PC's. The Atom was started a few minutes after and it still finished a few minutes before. ie: a HUGE difference, I'm sure greatly due to the SSD.
Click to expand...

Sweet, glad to hear the system is working out for you! Although applications like Quickbooks and Office are not specifically designed with multi-core systems in mind (as far as I know, that is), in my experience applications like these always end up benefiting from the addition of an extra core (or 5 ;) ). Also a thing to remember is that although applications may not be designed specifically to work multi-threaded or multi-core, your operating system is, and that will even out the load when running other applications.
 
So questioned my secretary on how she likes it thus far. And she's said EVERYTHING is faster & that she loves it.

So the 4 people who voted it would be slower were wrong. :0

The combination of SSD + 4 threads/dual core seems to make it worlds faster in pretty much everything. I think it mostly has to do with the SSD vs old HD. Since I think the Atom CPU is only marginally faster, and the much better GPU doesn't really come in to play in her daily office use.

If the price hadn't gone back up to $270 from the $200 sale price, I might have bought another one to build for someone else in the office, as I've been very impressed with the speed, (lack of) noise, and low power consumption (compare to big box PC).
 
Color me surprised. I'll keep atom in mind for low-powered cpu builds from now on.
 
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