Totally OT: Value of my PC?

Yoiks!

Just built two Intel P4 740 systems. Run at 35 degree idle, completely quiet, 925 chipset and EMT64. So how can the Athlon be better????

Cos its cheaper?

Douglas

in news: snipped-for-privacy@news4.newsguy.com, "Nom" slurred :

In my experience SP2 sucks donkey balls. Every PC I've installed it on has taken about 50% longer to boot and has explorer brain farts about 10 times as frequently. It might be more secure but it'd need about a million virii running to slow down SP1 as much as SP2 does :-)

Is this is for ActiveX spyware? I run Spybot on a regular basis, and haven't had any significant influx on spyware on SP1, so it wouldn't save me any time at all :-)

Um, the been-around-for-a-while Mobile Centrino chips are clearly not as new as the brand-new 64-bit 6xx series :)

Except that them and their motherboards cost LOONY money, they won't run

64-bit code, and they aren't available at high-speeds. They're mobile chips - not meant for the desktop !

The Pentium-M chips ? Their performance/pound makes them none-starters for your average desktop - and if you want a high-end system, they aren't an option anyway :)

See for yourself - the CoolNQuiet? gubbins is *very* impressive in operation !

It is cheaper, and it'll run 64-bit code, and it's quicker, etc. etc.

Have a read of

The Mobile chips simply can't compete with their desktop counterparts...

Unless you support a huge number of PCs at work, then my experience is greater than yours. SP2 is great. The end :)

Then you're doing something(s) very wrong ! We have no trouble with it.

None-savvy people do none of the above, and get masses and masses of spyware, which I have to remove.

Yep.

Um, so does XP Home :) You still get the 2 virtual CPUs showing up in task-manager etc.

XP Home supports Hyperthreading in exactly the same way as XP Pro.

But the 64bit chips are better at running 32bit code than the 32bit chips.

Unless you're building bargain-basement with no future-proofing, then it makes no sense to go for a none64. You can pick up an A64-3000 complete with Motherboard for well under £150 these days - add GFX and RAM, and you've got a tidy modern setup for minimal money...

Crucial say it takes wierdo spacker RAM that they can't supply.

Kingston also say you have either wierdo spacker SDRAM that they no longer supply or you have

wierdo spacker RAMBUS sticks that they can't supply.

Basically, you're stuffed. You're gonna need to speak to someone who deals in DELL parts, or get trawling eBay. Put some feelers out on the newsgroups too - someone else will know of something compatible...

in news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net, "DanTXD" slurred :

Why so much? Ebuyer are doing 256MB DDR sticks for under £16 inc vat. SDRAM is only £20 inc vat. Oh, hang on, was that including the purchase price of XP? I've never bought it, so I have no idea what it costs :-)

in news: snipped-for-privacy@news2.newsguy.com, "Nom" slurred :

From the perspective of the lazy-arsed support guy, SP2 is probly funky. From the perspective of the poor sods using the bastard creation, it sucks donkey balls :-)

Maybe, but I dunno what. Everything mostly still works, although explorer keels over with less provocation, but it's all just a bit slower. Googling shows I'm not exactly alone in this experience....

But the latest gereration (Dothan) came aftger the Prescott range.

Who actually runs 64bit code at the moment (even when you do there will only be a very small improvement in speed unless you intend to use the only real benefit of 64bit processing having 64bit memory addresses and have more than 4Gb of ram and over 16 terabytes of paging files)? There are a couple of Linux distros and the XP beta but from my understanding there is still a little bit of a shortage in good 64bit drivers for it and probably will be until the final version is out. So at the moment they are lagging behind the AMD in clock frequency but IIRC it was AMD that pushed the "clock speed is king" as being a myth because there athlons couldn't run at the same speeds as the P4 (hence the rip off of Cyrix's naming policy where they make up a number that the chip is equivalent to based on benchmarks they pick to show the strongest side of the chip) even on a

855GME (4x agp only and single channel memory) board a 2.3ghz Dothan will perform as well in games as an Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4ghz) and better in applications such as MP3 ripping.

That's what I was saying, I find it interesting that it supports the 2nd virtual CPU when the speal from Intel was that it should be invisible that it's HT rather than real SMP to the OS (to make it a simple job to run existing SMP capable OSs) so how dose XP home do HT but not SMP?

What's this fasination with 64bit code you have it will probably be another year after XP64 hits the shop befor we see full implimentation in aplications and even then the speed increase will be negligeble (10%).

See PC format 172 for there in-depth reviews where they show categorically that the Dothan is more than a match for equivalent clocked Athlon 64s

Doom 3:

Pentium-M 2ghz

80fps

P4 3.8

90fps

P4 3.46EE

92fps

Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4ghz)

95fps

Pentium-M 2.3ghz

95fps

MP3 encoding: Athlon 64 4000+

3min 2sec

Pentium-M 2ghz

3min 20sec

Pentium-M 2.3ghz

2min 53sec

Considering the memory limitations of that MB it's quite clear that the mobile chip is hands down faster than the athlon 64 (currently the cream of the crop in the dedicated desktop market)

There's no such thing as future proofing in the PC world. You should know that, even delaying the inevitable isn't cost effective.

As a rule, my PC is about as stable as an italian taxi driver stuck behind two old priests in a Skoda. However, now with SP2 its actually pretty damn stable!

He has s**te old gay Ram :)

My mate had to get some Rambus RIMM (hehehe) Ram for his Dell. Wasn't cheap, but i'll find out where he got it from...