Some basic P4 questions.

[NickN]

Okay, I have never in my life owned an Intel processor, so I don't know a lot about them. I have a few questions for you Intel experts.

My parents have a Dell Dimension 3000 with a Celeron D at 2.4GHz. They've been complaining about how slow it is after having used my Sempy 2600 system in my sig. I've been looking into getting a faster processor for them.

Now, they do] multitask a lot. My understanding is that hyperthreading increases multitasking performance. I want to get them a processor with hyperthreading. This includes the 3.06GHz P4B, and all of the P4C's, correct?

Compatibility is not an issue; I know that this Dell supports both 533 and 800 MHz FSB's and the Prescott core.

Does the increased FSB of the C series P4's make a big difference compared to the B series? I'm thinking about getting the 3.06GHz B P4, and I noticed that the 3.0GHz C is generally slightly more expensive, but 60MHz slower. Does the higher FSB actually make that much of a difference?

Then there's cooling. The Dell's cooling is downright pathetic. There's an all-aluminum heatsink on the proc, and in the back of the case there is a 92mm fan. It's very quiet, so I'm assuming it doesn't move much air. There's a shroud going from the heatsink to the fan, so it is only taking air from the heatsink area, which is good. There is no intake fan.

I'm concerned about heat. The Celly D uses the Prescott core, which uses a 0.09nm process, while the P4s that I am looking at use the Northwood core on a 0.13nm process. The Northwoods would be hotter, right? What kind of cooling upgrades am I looking at if I get a Northwood?

Finally, I'm seeing P4-M mobile processors being sold on eBay. What's the difference between one of these and a full-blown desktop processor? I know about the Pentium M's, but I've not heard of these P4-Ms before.

Thank you for your help.

 

[towert7]

Traditionally, the northwood is quite a bit cooler then the presscott. The presscott is the processor you hear people complaining about heat.

Did you just take their word on your computer being faster? Or have you extensivly used theirs? The reason I say, is it might not be the processor that is slow, but rather other things, such as lots of programs (including malware), not enough memory (dells with 128mb of ram and windows XP, OMG). First check those things out.

Because honestly, they should not be complaining of a 2.4ghz if they do normal tasks. That being said, what do they do in terms of "multitasking" (please dont' say e-mail and playing music, lol)

Cooling as you said is poor on the dell systems, and if you go to a presscott, you will need good cooling. Off the top of my head, im not sure if a Thermalright XP90 will fit with the socket you may upgrade too, but if it does I recommend getting one and some cheap artic silver 5 with a panasonic panaflo 92mm fan on the processor. Chuck that green/black plastic going to the heatsink, and keep the rear 92mm fan.

I'm very interested to hear what type of multitasking they do. I have found even a P3 800mhz computer with 786mb of ram to be plenty for general applications.

 

[YourPaceOrMine]

For your situation, i'd get a 3.0c or a 3.2c with a zalman 7000 or xp90 or xp120. the northwoods run quite a bit cooler than prescotts. temps for me were 45c idle and 55c load... give or take 2-3c for both. You cant get a Pentium-M mobile chip cuz your board doesnt support it but mobile p4s run cooler so overclockers like to get these.

 

[NickN]

They get on both AIM and MSN Messenger, listen to music, have e-mail running at all times, browse the internet, play flash games, and my dad sometimes plays Serious Sam and Star Wars: KOTOR with his AIM/MSN programs running.

Perhaps it would have helped if I mentioned that my dad is a gamer. The next upgrade after a CPU would be a new video card, and the POS dell has no AGP slots.

 

[towert7]

They get on both AIM and MSN Messenger, listen to music, have e-mail running at all times, browse the internet, play flash games, and my dad sometimes plays Serious Sam and Star Wars: KOTOR with his AIM/MSN programs running.

Perhaps it would have helped if I mentioned that my dad is a gamer. The next upgrade after a CPU would be a new video card, and the POS dell has no AGP slots.

In that caes, don't even bother upgrading the Dell POS. Just tell him, save money in the long run, and get a good AMD64 gaming rig. It will perform much better then the Dell, and you don't have to keep worrying about things like "Oh, i can't fit fans in it". "Oh, i don't have an AGP slot". "Oh, I can monitor temps from the bios", "Oh, my system is limited to 2gb of memory"... etc.

They get on both AIM and MSN Messenger, listen to music, have e-mail running at all times, browse the internet, play flash games, and my dad sometimes plays Serious Sam and Star Wars: KOTOR with his AIM/MSN programs running.

That is not what I would really call, multitasking. A pentium 3 800mhz can do most of that without even a sweet. Gaming with AIM & MSN open is really not any more CPU intensive then just Gaming.......................................
Playing music, having e-mail open, browsing the internet, having two instant messaging clients open at once, usually does not take more then 35% of a P3's 800mhz processor.......... Its rare that using any of those would EVER max the processor for more then 5 seconds if you have enough ram.

Now, if you said he likes to watch TV, while recording TV, burning a DVD, and watching another DVD on his other monitor......... then I would say he needs two processors, or at least one processor and a virtual one.

Again, I know you might not realize it this point in time, but the best thing to do is just build a new one from scratch. If your dad says, no......... that's too much work, I would just say "Ok, enjoy your dell".

 

[GVX]

That is not what I would really call, multitasking. A pentium 3 800mhz can do most of that without even a sweet. Gaming with AIM & MSN open is really not any more CPU intensive then just Gaming.......................................
Playing music, having e-mail open, browsing the internet, having two instant messaging clients open at once, usually does not take more then 35% of a P3's 800mhz processor.......... Its rare that using any of those would EVER max the processor for more then 5 seconds if you have enough ram.

Now, if you said he likes to watch TV, while recording TV, burning a DVD, and watching another DVD on his other monitor......... then I would say he needs two processors, or at least one processor and a virtual one.

Again, I know you might not realize it this point in time, but the best thing to do is just build a new one from scratch. If your dad says, no......... that's too much work, I would just say "Ok, enjoy your dell".

When I game, listen to music and run a virus scanner in the background(which I do a lot) I get noticeable slowdown on my single threaded CPU. Average PC users should still be able to take advantage of multi-threaded CPUs even if they aren't doing the things that you mentioned.

BTW, modern games almost always run the CPU at 100% all the time. So any additional background processes (even something small like AIM) would start to inhibit gameplay performance.

 

[towert7]

When I game, listen to music and run a virus scanner in the background(which I do a lot) I get noticeable slowdown on my single threaded CPU. Average PC users should still be able to take advantage of multi-threaded CPUs even if they aren't doing the things that you mentioned.

BTW, modern games almost always run the CPU at 100% all the time. So any additional background processes (even something small like AIM) would start to inhibit gameplay performance.

When you say "Run a virus scanner in the background", are you talking about running a scan on the hard drive, or just...... sitting there doing nothing in the background? If your running Windows, open up the taskmanager, find the process for your antivirus, and tell me if it ever spikes past 2% CPU utilization at the desktop. Although, I should'tn say that. Perhaps other antivirus software actually does. I speak from a very limited view, as I only use Norton AV. With auto protect enabled, running in the background doing nothing... it takes up 0%.

As for the game part, if you can notice a 2% hit in games then HT or dual processors would come in handy so they could run that extra 2%.

You get the general gist. (even if I can't spell general)

 

[GVX]

When you say "Run a virus scanner in the background", are you talking about running a scan on the hard drive, or just...... sitting there doing nothing in the background? If your running Windows, open up the taskmanager, find the process for your antivirus, and tell me if it ever spikes past 2% CPU utilization at the desktop. Although, I should'tn say that. Perhaps other antivirus software actually does. I speak from a very limited view, as I only use Norton AV. With auto protect enabled, running in the background doing nothing... it takes up 0%.

I'm running deep system scans, actually. I don't like to keep my system running overnight because of thunderstorms (in the summer) so I have to put up with a monotonous 6 hours of hell every week when I run all of my virus/spyware scanners. My CPU really lags if I try to run more than one scanner at a time and gaming is basically not an option during this time at all.

Right now, I'm typing this message, running an active html desktop shell, doing a full-system Norton Scan, and listening to a playlist and my average CPU utilization is about 25-29%. But this isn't the problem. The main problem occurs when I try to launch another application; it takes about 5-10 seconds longer for it to load and I get serious lag for the first 30 seconds of using it. After that it levels out and I don't notice any lag (except in gaming where there is a constant performance hit). I feel that a processor with hyperthreading would make a huge difference in my case even though I'm not running any professional video editing/capturing software.

EDIT: also, would HT allow me to run multiple scans at once more easily (or is that bottlenecked by my HDD access speed?).

 

[delusion_2005]

Well i got a Prescott its a 3.2ghz 640 series with HT, i don't find the heat issue any problem at all, its runs 37-40 Idle and loads reaches 55-55 or so, and i am using a stock cooler aswell.

 

[NickN]

Okay, I went on my parents' Dell and ran an AVG virus scan, and then an Adaware spyware scan, and found 3 viruses and over 100 spyware/malwares. Removed em all, and their system has sped up a bit, but they still think it's slower than mine.

 

[towert7]

GVX, in that case HT or dual processors would be a big help. (that's a little more cpu intensive then just running both aim and msn at once).

As for HT being able to run multiple scans, im not sure how much Hard Drive utilization they use, so I would not know. I would think it would'nt make much of a diffrence, because if the antivirus requests a scan for a certain file, and the hard drive is reading that file to the program, another program (such as a spyware scan) can not simultaneously read from the same HD. I would venture a guess and say they would each take almost twice as long as just running one at a time. I would not expect any more then a 10% improvement if they are HD intensive.
So for example
If test A takes 10 min, and test B takes 8min,
Then test A + B at the same time will both finish around 17min... who knows.

 

[towert7]

Okay, I went on my parents' Dell and ran an AVG virus scan, and then an Adaware spyware scan, and found 3 viruses and over 100 spyware/malwares. Removed em all, and their system has sped up a bit, but they still think it's slower than mine.

I can only imagine how messed up their computer is. IE tool bars, pop ups.......... yuck. Try removing some of the stuff they never wanted on their computer, and disabling some startup things that they don't use or don't want. That can help alot. Free's up RAM too. Heck, if a format and reinstall of the OS is a viable option, might be worth that.... Just plop firefox on it and say, here you go ^_^. (I bet this is not the case though).

Hey, if they are using win2000 or newer, I highly recommend you download and run Microsoft Antispyware Beta. Its free, and can be found on microsoft's offical website. It works good. That might turn up some more things that other scans did not. After you use it, I would leave it on, and enable the 3 auto protect features. And a firewall helps too. Security 101!

It does'nt matter how fast their computer is, once they get it infected, they all act the same it seems. Well, maybe one will load the p0rn pop up faster..

I hate spyware and all that other crap.

 

[NickN]

Okay, I'll do some further crap-removal on their computer. They do use firefox, but it's version 1.0.3. I just updated it to 1.0.5 a few minutes ago.

Question! Could extreme heat lead to reduced performance? They have one of those computer desks that has a little cabinet made for the computer to fit in, and it seems to me like the computer would be roasting in there. After doing the spyware/virus stuff earlier I cracked open their case to clean out any dust, etc, and the heatsink was HOT. I think I almost burned myself on it. After waiting for it to cool, I took it off to find only a TIM pad stuck on the bottom. I took that off and put some Arctic Silver Ceramique on. That's definitely gonna reduce temperatures a bit.

 

[towert7]

If the computer had any intake fans, then I would'nt want to keep it in that little comptuer shelf thing.... but because it does'nt, it might make only 5ºC of diffrence.

Is it one of those desks with just that cheap cardboard fake wood stuff that is nailed in? or is it a more complex wood backing? My desk came with the cardboard, but I never installed it.

As for the reduced performance............ not really..... the CPU wont' throttle back if it gets too hot, it will just keep getting hotter.

 

[NickN]

It has a solid wood backing with a hole cut out of the back for cables to go through. Not much airflow.