Hyperthreading rocks!

Archaea

Archaea

[H]F Junkie
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Oct 19, 2004
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I've had a P4 for the last several generations for my personal machine.

P4 1.6a
P4 2.4b
P4 2.4c
P4 3.2c


My Mainboard crapped out on me a couple months back and and I've been using my wife's AMD 64 3200+

Which should theoretically should be as fast as my P4 3.2C right!?!?!?!


WRONG!

This thing blows! I'm copying 200GB's over to a USB drive and I can't even hardly navigate through IE. It's like the copy takes up all the processing power. I didn't realize how much hyperthreading was helping out those P4's. I never had this much "bog down" on my later P4's.

My other newer system an HP AMD x2 3800+ doesn't seem bad....But this original AMD 64 3200+ = Pathetic! (I've not really used it much before because it was my wife's system - -- - It has XP 64 bit on it and a single GB of RAM), but I am sorely unimpressed.

I think hyperthreading in generic daily use feels as fast as dual core. My p4 3.2C overclocked to 3.8 with 1GB of RAM feels everybit as fast or faster than my X2 3800+ with 2GB of RAM.
 
I can copy files from my usb drive while I browse the web perfectly fine with my 3200+ machine (1GB RAM, 80GB ATA100 WD SE, XP Pro). Defrag lately? USB2.0?

I know what you mean though... My P4 1.8Ghz (160GB WD SE ATA100, XP Pro) feels faster than my P4 3.4Ghz (120GB SG SATA150, XP Pro), lol... go figure. I dunno what it is, but its just snapier, lol.
 
Really can't make an accurate comparison without knowing the hardware and OS's in the systems.

This could be as simple as a USB1.1 vs USB2.0 issue
 
devman said:
Really can't make an accurate comparison without knowing the hardware and OS's in the systems.

This could be as simple as a USB1.1 vs USB2.0 issue
Click to expand...

or a slow hard drive.
 
I would definitely check to make sure the internal drive is running in DMA rather than PIO mode. If it's running in PIO mode it will be slower than dirt no matter what you have for a processor.

My personal experience with hyperthreading is my Dell P4 2.8Ghz Preshott with 512 meg of RAM in dual channel at work (which I had to enable hyperthreading in the BIOS since it was disabled from the factory). When I first got that system I was running a Barton XP-m@2.5Ghz and a single 512 meg stick of RAM on a DFI Lanparty nForce2 board. Both machines ran XPPro w/ SP2. The only real difference would be the hard drive setup. I was running two or three physical drives in my personal system with the swap file on one of the secondary drives.

No matter what, my personal XP-m system felt more fluid when switching from app to app and with more than one thing running at a time (besides F@H on both systems). I had more background tasks running on my home system using up more physical memory, virtual memory and pagefile.

Obviously compared to my current main rig, the P4 Preshott is a hell of a lot slower on everything. However, the XP-m still felt smoother and switched between apps much faster even though my work machine did not have nearly the "application load" and overall memory footprint of the P4. The tasks on my XP-m were generally more intensive also.

I did use the P4 for a couple of days to make sure I wasn't going to have any problems with the hardware before I enabled hyperthreading and it did make a bit of a difference between being turned off and on. However, it seems once McAfee was removed from the system (and I hate McAfee with a passion) which was replaced my Symantec Corp antivirus, most of the advantages I felt with hyperthreading disappeared.

I'm not going to say hyperthreading is worthless by any means. It made a significant change when the system was using McAfee for a virus scanner since I have to use a couple of browser based Java apps and McAfee would go nuts rescanning all the Java files every time I did something with those apps. I did a little extra configuration of my own to McAfee's scanning to ignore a couple of directories in which the java based files were located which helped a little bit even with hyperthreading on. However, since Symantec corp was installed, it isn't setup to do the same scanning of every single file which makes a huge difference. This negated most of the performance increase I received with hyperthreading.

These are just my personal experiences between two systems from a similar timeframe.

 
I've had the "pleasure" of owning two P4 systems during the Netburst era... a first generation 1.5ghz Willamette and a 3.0ghz Northwood (purchased during the short but high peak of Netburst achievement, two months before the introduction of Prescott.)

The 1.5ghz Willamette was obsolete before its time, due to poor 16-bit performance and the high cost of upgrading thanks to Rambus RAM. The Northwood was a respectable machine and held its own until I replaced it with my current rig in March. In fact, with a spare 250 gig hd I just picked up from the office, I look forward to the Northwood being a respectable machine again (just not for gaming.) My Northwood certainly doesn't suffer from Prescott malaise, and the Canterwood moBo has always performed admirably (I've no doubt that it's 4 year old ICH5R raid controller is a more stable than the MediaShield controller on my 680i.)

Still, there's no doubt that throughout much of the P4 generation, AMD was king. Hyperthreading was great for specific multitasking issues, but most P4 chips couldn't match their AMD counterparts in raw performance.

Mark.
 
well for the record.

The AMD 64 3200+ is on XP 64 bit, and the P4 3.2 was on XP 32 bit.

Hard-drives don't matter that much. I was copying about 200GB from one internal drive to an external USB drive.

I've done that before using the P4.

I'm a lead PC tech at a company who supports about 3000 users - both machines are DEFINATELY using USB 2.0.

Both machines have the RAM speeds set at over 400mhz, both had/have 1GB of RAM. PC 3700 in the AMD, and PC 4000 in the P4.

Drive modes set correctly and motherboard drivers downloaded on both systems.

I've always felt the opposite, having hosted a bunch of LAN parties through the years, I've felt that Intel had the upper hand following the AMD thunderbird. When I went from an AMD Thunderbird 1.33 to a 1.6 Ghz P4 it was a huge difference. I remember people of that timeframe still saying 1.5 and 1.6 P4s were horrible chips. I bought it to overclock it. 1.6 = 2.4 easy. That 1.6 at stock clocks would organize my mp3's in short work with no delay in waiting for explorer windows to refresh. My Thunderbird at 1.33 would be struggling to allow for full speed scrolling up and down an explorer view of about 2000-3000 mp3s. AMD may have had the edge on benchmarks during the P4 era, but in everyday feel, Intel was faster - IMO, and it wasn't from lack of using both.

My p4 3.2 overclocked to 3.8 rocked! I hated to see that asus IS7 board die. Processor was stable as a rock.
 
Well, for a PC Tech, you should know how to fix your problem with that 3200+ machine, lol. I'm no tech, just one of the engineers you'd support, but at least my 3200+ Athlon64 can copy 200GB from my internal HDD to my external USB drive, and still allow me to surf the net quite smoothly. :D

Re: Athlon64/X2 vs P4/PD...
For multimedia tasks, Intels were better due to the netburst architecture. For gaming, AMDs were better because Intel was stuck on netburst, lol. If you read up on netburst, you'll understand why it sucked for gaming, but rocked for multimedia... I don't feel like explaining, lol.
 
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