• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Going from 3.06 to 3.4E

C

CCNA

n00b
Joined
Dec 6, 2004
Messages
8
I have a 3.06 with 512KB L2 Cache on my 865Perl. I am not interested in getting a new board right now. The fastest CPU I can put on there is a 3.4 Extreme Edtion

I see where the 3.4E has dropped to a reasonable price, with 1 MB L2 Cache. I can use the Intel Desktop Controller to Overclock it up to 3.54 GHz. Also, due to the 3.06 I have now, my PC3200 RAM is clocked at 333, not 400 MHz, and with the new CPU the board will run the RAM at full speed.

My question is:

Will I get a noticeable improvement from this upgrade?
 
CCNA said:
I have a 3.06 with 512KB L2 Cache on my 865Perl. I am not interested in getting a new board right now. The fastest CPU I can put on there is a 3.4 Extreme Edtion

I see where the 3.4E has dropped to a reasonable price, with 1 MB L2 Cache. I can use the Intel Desktop Controller to Overclock it up to 3.54 GHz. Also, due to the 3.06 I have now, my PC3200 RAM is clocked at 333, not 400 MHz, and with the new CPU the board will run the RAM at full speed.

My question is:

Will I get a noticeable improvement from this upgrade?
Click to expand...

Yes ,higher freq , 800Mhz FSB and DDR400 will allow a solid perf increase.
 
Honestly, I dont think you will see bump in speed that you think you will get. It depends on what you're doing of course but you will see better overall system performance if you spend the money on some fast drives like a Raptor 74gig as your boot drive. The 3.06 is a great CPU. True that the RAM is running at 333 but again, I dont think up to 400 is going to work any miracles.
 
Yes, it will be faster
Is it worth it to upgrade?.... probably not (depends on what you do)

So what do you do with your PC?

if you're just a surfer there's absolutely no reason to upgrade.

If you're an avid gamer, then you'd probably notice the difference from a 11% CPU speed boost & 50% boost in FSB bandwidth.

If you do upgrade, how much do you want for your 3.06?
I've got a 2nd Dell 4550 (845 mobo) that I wouldn't mind upgrading to a 3.06, but I don't feel like paying for a new chip.

P.S. Harddrive upgrade is WORTHLESS! Someone doesn't know what he's talking about. The biggest performance upgrades on a PC are:
CPU for general peformance
Videocard for gaming performance

you probably already have 512Mb or more so ram won't make a big difference as an upgrade. (now if you only have 256Mb you want to get more ram)
 
um ya chris. most people never access their hard drives or load data or write data or multitask or hit the swap file. We're not using dos and windows 3.1 anymore you know. Looks like you've never owned a fast drive to know what the benefits are. Since I build systems for people, work as a network admin where I'm around all kinds of systems as well as having 15k scsi drives in my box and have had every computer under the sun, I am sure you're right on this one :rolleyes:

The fact is nothing makes a system more 'responsive' in real world working situations especially when people might be doing a few things at the same time than a fast hard drive (well a ton of ram helps more but assuing you have the ram you need).
 
So to sum it up, CCNA, if games are not your priority and your intention is not to have the computer just sit and encode or decode video (with no user interaction). I'd say keep your CPU, make sure you have about a Gig of RAM and add a fast drive and make it your startup drive. Put your applications and OS on this drive as well as your swapfile. Use your current slower drive as storage. If you have a lot of stuff on your desktop, you could move them onto your second drive.

As far as drives go, a SATA Western Digital Raptor 74 gig would be ideal if you have SATA connectors on your motherboard. If you dont, you could always buy an SATA add on card. Anyway its really up to you. and how you use the computer. If you run multiple applications at the same time and multitask, then RAM and hard drive are your friends.
 
I must agree with the fast hard-drive being an awesome bonus.

I got the 36GB raptor a couple years ago when it first came out.

That was the single biggest performance boost (coming from a 7200 rpm 8mb buffer drive) I'd seen in 5 years.

Windows SCREAMS! I really 100% honestly full heartdely reccomend a raptor or other 10,000 rpm drive.

4ms seek times, HALF what other drives are...it makes a system seem SO much faster in everyday use. The guy who posted otherwise, chrisf6969, is the one who has no clue what he's talking about - most everyone who berates the raptors has never used them, or any faster drive for that matter. People Rage on about the maxtor 16MB cache drives and how they notice a big performance with they install those...The raptors will blow the 16MB buffer maxtor drives out of the water.

I'm 26 been into computers since I was about 7. I work at the Federal Reserve Bank as a Senior System Analyst on the Help Desk. I know hardware as well and the raptor drives are well worth the money.
 
I'm also interested in the 3.06 to replace an overclocked celeron 3.0 :)

Rob
 
I am an avid gamer so the performance increase will be well worth it to me. I also do network monitoring and support and design and need the better multitasking of Intel over AMD, having about 10 things going on at once in my world. :)

I do have one GB of Corsair PC3200.

I have run some 3D Mark scores as a baseline and I will post the befores and afters for your after I pop the chip in.

As far as the 3.06, it is about 11 months old, never overclocked (except for one week with the Intel Desktop Controller giving a 4% boost for about a week recently). It has been sitting under an Arctic Cooler and has never gone over 145 degrees Farenheit under load, usually it gets to about 135 with most games, so it is in good condition. I did get the retail version, and I am willing to sell it if the offer is right.

So, bring on the bids..... :D
 
chrisf6969 said:
P.S. Harddrive upgrade is WORTHLESS! Someone doesn't know what he's talking about. The biggest performance upgrades on a PC are:
CPU for general peformance
Videocard for gaming performance
Click to expand...
u know that the hard drive is the main bottle neck in a PC?
 
Thanks for agreeing with me Archaea. For people who dont know how much of an impact it makes, the only way to make them realize is to give it to them, let them have the drive for a few months and give them their old crap back :)

I forced one of my good friends to go for a deal I found on ebay against his will. 1 year later now and he cant shut up about how all the computers at work feel 'broken' :) He's got an AMD Thunderbird 1400 with 512mb RAM, Adaptec 2940U2W controller and two Quantum Atlas 10K III drives (18gig as boot and 73gig as data). I think at the time he ended up paying something crazy like $100 for the drives, controller and LVD cable. They just gave him a brand new box which is an HP EVO desktop with a P4 3Ghz and an 80gig SATA drive and 512mb RAM (pretty low end but its way more CPU than he's got) but he says it pretty much grinds to a halt if you give it more than one or two tasks to do that might be disk intensive vs his home machine which he says feels unstoppable :)

I've never personally tried the raptors in any of my boxes but if I was going to go with a 10K drive, I'd go that route. The only reason I still have my SCSI stuff is that nobody has made a 15K version of the raptor yet. I love SCSI but the Raptor pretty much closed the gap and then some for desktop performance - heavy server usage is a different story but in my case for home use, it doesnt apply.

Anyway I've rambled on long enough now :)
 
contoursvt said:
Thanks for agreeing with me Archaea. in my case for home use, it doesnt apply.
Click to expand...
thanks for the flame :rolleyes: ... just because i have the name doesn't mean i do not deal with intel... I do pc repair for the airforce and they use dell and intel cpus. i perfer for my personal use AMD.
 
ALL4AMD, I have no idea what flaming you're talking about :) I mentioned nothing about AMD or anything negative about anything you've said so i'm confused. I was just mentioning that I'm glad someone agreed with me about the hard drive speed being a huge importance and gave an example of my friends amd 1400 feeling faster with the fast drive than a 3ghz P4 at his work....
 
Oh I think I see whats going on. You think I was insulting you by calling you something that resembles a single celled organism? Well if you're so self centered to think the world is revolving around you then you deserve it. Why dont you actually start from the top and go down until the 7th post and notice that a user on this message board has the name Archaea and that I was actually talking to him and not you. Its his freaking name so next time you think someone is talking about you, think to yourself for a sec "hey have I covered all my bases or am I just jumping into something not knowing exactly whats going on"

I'm sorry for coming across so harsh but its really irritating to get attitude from someone and the stupid rolling eyes when they make all kinds of assumptions and give short answers, yet have not even bothered to read the rest of the posts.
 
man I missed all the bashing on me for hating on fast harddrives b/c I've never owned one!?! lol !

BTW, I have a WD 74Gb in my main rig. SO before you say I'm basing it on inexperience maybe you should see the specs of my rigs.
http://www.crowdcontrolusa.com/overclock/

The Raptor is great for some HD intensive stuff like virus scans. But in general the difference between it and a decent 7200 120+GB harddrive is not that much, not worth the price premium for most people.

Now if you're rich and you want the best of everything well get it. Yes it does blow everything else away in HD benchmarks. But like I said a fast CPU is the biggest performance factor in a PC, then videocard (for gaming), then ram, then HD. So I was saying the HD should be last on his list of concerns if he's got a 7200rpm HD already. Now if you've only got 256Mb of ram and you're constantly accessing your HD for the swap file it might come more in to play. (but more ram would be the answer, not faster HD)

Ram could be the biggest performance factor if you're <= 256Mb, but since you have 1Gb already and you're gamer you should look at your CPU & GPU.
 
Hi Chris, well its good to see you have one, so maybe your point of view is more processor speed oriented. All I know is that I've made huge jumps in CPU speed in the last few years but I've kept my SCSI drives and controller with me as I upgraded. The CPU jumps seemed to help little except for encoding and gaming. If the goal was to have a fast general purpose computer, then nothing beats fast drives because general apps are not processor intensive. Word, Excel, IE, outlook, burning CDs, MP3 listening..etc these are what most people like to spend time doing and a fast drives make the system responsive to user input especially if an application is already using the drive for something. God forbid you're zipping something big and you decide to open photoshop :) This is where access time is really important.

Again, it depends. I didnt know the guy was a gamer or else I would have said dont bother with the drive. Heck for a gamer, I'd say keep the 3.06 and spend all the money on a 6800ultra or GT (since he's probably got an AGP board). I dont know. The CPU seems plenty fast. I dont think that would be much slower than say a 2.8C for gaming which doesnt seem bad :)
 
Well, if he's doing a lot of database work, with HUGE database files, I'd say get some SCSI, etc... but for most people any 7200rpm 8Mb drive is fast enough.

Don't get me wrong I love my Raptor, I just know its not for everyone. And for most people on a limited budget the money could just be better spent on a faster CPU or GPU or more ram 1st.
 
ALL4AMD said:
u know that the hard drive is the main bottle neck in a PC?
Click to expand...

I know its the slowest thing on a computer. But even an SCSI Raid 0 is still slow compared to system ram.

SO until we get flash ram based harddrive, its all slow, or slightly less slow.

Now when some type of solid state drives come out cheap that would be great!! Kinda like those PCI boards that can take 4 slots of ram and connect to your SATA port. But it needs to be an integrated, closed piece of hardware, the same size as a normal drive with a great backup battery in case your PC is unplugged for an extended period of time, easy to use/config AND be reasonably priced.
 
Don't forget, a 3.4E is NOT an extreme edition, it's just a prescott :)
Wouldn't be the first time somebody was confused about it, saw a client today who swore they were the same thing :)
 
ScHpAnKy said:
Don't forget, a 3.4E is NOT an extreme edition, it's just a prescott :)
Wouldn't be the first time somebody was confused about it, saw a client today who swore they were the same thing :)
Click to expand...

I don't think anyone thought that.....but you never know!!

BTW, I like meh 3.4EE, makes me not want to give up socket 478, especially considering the SUPER SMALL performance improvements that the 775 socket offers.
 
ScHpAnKy said:
Don't forget, a 3.4E is NOT an extreme edition, it's just a prescott :)
Wouldn't be the first time somebody was confused about it, saw a client today who swore they were the same thing :)
Click to expand...

I may have mistyped, Intel calls it the 3.4E, so whatever the E means. I think Intel calls it the 3.4 Extreme,I know it is not the EE edition with 2MB of Cache.

And, how did this thread turn into a flame war on Hard Drives? If I cared about hard drives I would have asked or I would have asked what are the many various ways to speed up my system.. I was asking about this one singular change a CPU swap.

Keep the Hard Drive comments in the Hard Drive Section, please. If you want to talk about the CPU swap, let's talk.

PS, should be here in about 20 minutes, love NewEgg.
 
Here are the percentage increases after doing the swap, and applying a 4% overclock.

GT1 - Wings of Fury 15.63%
GT2 - Battle of Proxycon 8.61%
GT3 - Troll's Lair 7.07%
GT4 - Mother Nature 12.16%
CPU Score 23.39%
CPU Test 1 29.28%
CPU Test 2 17.87%
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 0.00%
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 0.00%
Vertex Shader 5.07%
Pixel Shader 2.0 15.79%
Ragtroll 2.82%
No sounds 29.88%
24 sounds 30.29%
60 sounds 29.62%
 
E means prescott core, I think. You can check the stepping using cpu-z. E0's are the best on 478... nice results, thanks for posting those up for clarification :)
 
Mounds,

did you even read the article you linked? :eek: That's perfect proof that the raptor is worth EVERY penny as an OS drive.

Quoted from your link!

from the section on the hardrive

To this day, the WD740 Raptor remains the fastest Serial ATA hard disk on the market - it is the best in terms of average transfer rates, access times, and both I/O and application performance.




from the conclusion




The Western Digital Raptor drives provide outstanding exceptions to this rule. Despite being introduced nearly two years ago, they continue to trump all 7,200 RPM counterparts in performance, and by a pretty wide margin at that. In concert with the trend in the IT market sector to provide exclusive products to important customers, there's no current premium drive that gives the Raptor a run for the money.

The benchmarks showed about a 50% increase in most every category on the Raptors besting everything else.


http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/hd_round_up-32.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/hd_round_up-33.html




Chris - - So you use a raptor 74MB drive - awesome - next time you reformat - make one of your 7,200 RPM 8 MB buffer drive your primary OS drive and then come back here and tell us the drive makes no difference. There is absolutely no way you could truthfully come back in here and say you didn't notice a HUGE difference. If your 74GB raptor is a game drive you'd probably notice a lot less difference than if it's your OS drive, but when the raptors (or SCSII) drives are your OS drive there is a night and day difference.
 
Well I for one still feel that going with fast hard drives has made my computer more enjoyable to use than any other single upgrade I've ever done and its also lasted longer than any other upgrade. My four year old Fujitsu MAM drive which was my startup drive until a few months ago will still wipe the floor with a 7200rpm IDE or SATA drive in real world usage when put in the hands of someone who does more than one thing at a time on their computer :)
 
contoursvt said:
Well I for one still feel that going with fast hard drives has made my computer more enjoyable to use than any other single upgrade I've ever done and its also lasted longer than any other upgrade. My four year old Fujitsu MAM drive which was my startup drive until a few months ago will still wipe the floor with a 7200rpm IDE or SATA drive in real world usage when put in the hands of someone who does more than one thing at a time on their computer :)
Click to expand...

How are you ears doing?
:p
 
Archaea said:
Chris - - So you use a raptor 74MB drive - awesome - next time you reformat - make one of your 7,200 RPM 8 MB buffer drive your primary OS drive and then come back here and tell us the drive makes no difference. There is absolutely no way you could truthfully come back in here and say you didn't notice a HUGE difference. If your 74GB raptor is a game drive you'd probably notice a lot less difference than if it's your OS drive, but when the raptors (or SCSII) drives are your OS drive there is a night and day difference.
Click to expand...

The Raptor does own everything in benchmarks. No doubt about it, it is the fastest non SCSI HD around. I said I did notice an improvement. I never used a stop watch on my boot time before & after.... yes it feels faster.... is it worth 3x more than a regular WD 80Gb 7200 8mb harddrive.... probably not.

I do notice that it finishes a virus scan quite a bit faster. But game load times "feel" about the same. BF2 is still fairly "slow" to load. Granted, I'm usually the 1st or 2nd person loaded on a new map, so I get the chopper! :)

But it didn't make my system feel a lot faster like upgrading RAM can if you don't have enough. Or when I made the jump from 2.4Ghz(oc'd 1.6a) on a SIS645 (single channel ram) mobo to a Hyerthreaded 3.6Ghz (oc'd 2.4c) CPU on an Abit IC-7 (dual channel ram)
 
Hey sHpAnKy :) or was it the other way. LOL.... anyway my ears are doing fine. My drives are marginally louder than an IDE drive drive such as a Western Digital 7200RPM. Of course I dont notice the extra noise because my drives are in a proper case so I dont really hear them or if I do, its pretty quiet. I've got a Fuji MAU series as boot now and my two MAM series as my data drives... This case rocks by the way.

mydual.jpg

side.jpg
 
contoursvt said:
Hey sHpAnKy :) or was it the other way. LOL....
Click to expand...
Close ;)

contoursvt said:
anyway my ears are doing fine. My drives are marginally louder than an IDE drive drive such as a Western Digital 7200RPM. Of course I dont notice the extra noise because my drives are in a proper case so I dont really hear them or if I do, its pretty quiet. I've got a Fuji MAU series as boot now and my two MAM series as my data drives... This case rocks by the way.

[lMG]http://powerthings.com/pics/mydual.jpg[/IMG]
[lMG]http://powerthings.com/pics/side.jpg[/IMG]
Click to expand...

For me, if it's not silent, it's too loud! Case looks neat, supermicro? Reminds me of an older chenming I used to work with
 
Ya well definitly not silent and definitly not when the gods of the fans get angry and spin those Delta fans full blast (I set my 'trigger' temp at 55C for the CPU and 36C for the case). The case itelf is a Chenbro SR 107. Love the thing but it is pretty big.
 
ScHpAnKy said:
Close ;)
For me, if it's not silent, it's too loud! Case looks neat, supermicro? Reminds me of an older chenming I used to work with
Click to expand...
It's a Chenbro. I've got the black version. It's hellishly loud until you do something about the 2 120mm high speed deltas mounted behind the drives. Or at least that's what mine came with. I swapped them out for thermally controlled fans. Oddly enough, the exhaust fan isn't nearly as bad. Despite being a 120x32 or whatver instead of the usual 120x25, it actually draws less power than the front fans.
 
Zandor, I've left all my delta fans in place. The bios of my Asus board lets me choose temperatures to use as triggers (where when it hits those temps, it starts to ramp up the fans to full speed). My rear fan usually spins at 690 RPM and the fronts around 1200RPM. Its actually nearly silent until the trigger temp is hit where it basically doubles in speed and then if it doesnt go down or keeps climbing, it will throw them to full speed.
 
chrisf6969 said:
I know its the slowest thing on a computer. But even an SCSI Raid 0 is still slow compared to system ram.

SO until we get flash ram based harddrive, its all slow, or slightly less slow.
Click to expand...
ur missing the point of what i was trying to say. the computer is only as strong as the weakest link.

when did we start comparing ram vs HD?
 
contoursvt said:
Ya well definitly not silent and definitly not when the gods of the fans get angry and spin those Delta fans full blast (I set my 'trigger' temp at 55C for the CPU and 36C for the case). The case itelf is a Chenbro SR 107. Love the thing but it is pretty big.
Click to expand...

Chenbro! That's what I was looking for, not chenming :p

I've worked with them before, sliced my thumb open and I have a long-lasting scar! :D
Great case, otherwise :cool:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top