[PLUG] Real-life hardware comparison.

[Derek Loree]

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 23:31, Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2004, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> > In your case it sounds like you'd want a low-mid range Athlon. You can
> > get higher-clocked P4s for the money, but the Athlons are far better
> > performers (AMD's performance code numbers are /roughly/ accurate).
> 
> But will a single "low-mid range Athlon" outpace my dual PIIIs?

This depends on what you are doing, what chipset you get to run it, and
the speed of the memory.  It will certainly compile a kernel faster (if
that is the only task running), but may not hold up under many heavy
tasks.  Remember, you can't split a task across two processors, and
faster memory is always a good thing.  

Disk I/O speed is something else to consider, SATA, when coupled to the
right drive (high rpm, large cache), is going to be much faster than the
UDMA33 your old motherboard is capable of doing and less expensive than
SCSI.

Beware that AMD has still not implemented any kind of thermal
protection, the motherboard is still responsible for shutting down an
overheated processor.  However, the nVidia chipset looks like an
impressive performer. 

Sorry, there is no easy answer to your questions.

Derek Loree