At home I've got an admittedly rather old desktop with a Celeron 2.4Ghz in it.

But due to the crazy way the NHS pays for its IT stuff I've just been given a 2.66Ghz Pentium 4 processor.

Will there be much of a difference between a 2.4Ghz Celeron and a 2.66Ghz Pentium?

I'm going to do some 3dMark test before and after but thought I'd check incase it's not worth the time it takes!!! I have a gut feeling it might be worth it....

Suppose it all depends on what you use the system for. if your like me and run mutliple copies of visual studio (in different forms) and have other development tools then yes you will see a huge difference

If you only word process and play on the internet then i wouldnt expect to see much if any difference

The Celeron has less cache than the Pentium, so for an equal clock speed, the pentium should be faster, as it spends less time going out to main memory for stuff.

3D Mark will show you more graphics-related stuff, it's not just processor related.

HTH


Vince

Okay! Looks like its a going concern....
It's the same socket type so the only change will be the bus speed- hopefully I can find the manual online to change to multipler!!

Do they both have the same amount of memory? If there is a difference in amount of RAM I'd expect that to make more of a difference than the cpu speed on a system of that type/age..

Ned.

I would plonk it in there - it will probably make your system more useable in the future - you might want to try Vista.

I've just discovered QUAD CORE - that makes a real difference.

quote:

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Originally posted by ned
Do they both have the same amount of memory? If there is a difference in amount of RAM I'd expect that to make more of a difference than the cpu speed on a system of that type/age..

Ned.

---

You probably won't get much benefit from the extra RAM unless you are using Vista - XP can't really use much more than 1Gb afaik - I could be wrong though.

[Edited on 28-9-07 by RazMan]

Really? Cobblers!

I'm running Adobe Premiere and that thing frags the hard discs doing swap file city.... I was hoping more RAM would get rid of some of the waits....

Just did a search on a geeky site ...
"Windows XP Professional x64 Edition supports 128 GB of RAM and 16 terabytes of virtual memory address space, as compared to 4 GB of both physical RAM and virtual memory address space for 32-bit Windows XP Professional.
There is however a 2GB limit each application can have in the virtual address space."

hth

[Edited on 28-9-07 by RazMan]

Cool! I think if I was going to buy anything more than a gig I'd be tempted to get a new mobo @ the same time. My motherboard will only run pants old PC2100...

if you wait untill sunday evening i'm going to do a trade 24 hours on www.callright.co.uk

if that helps

I was hoping you were going to say something like that I stupidly missed out on the last one!!
I'm looking up the max specs for my mobo!!!

go on then just for locostbuilders and BenB

www.callright.co.uk is trade untill tomorrow morning. i'm still going to do 24 hour trade on sunday as well.

just trying to build up a customer data base

CallRight Computers

Looks like I need a new motherboard!!!
My current one has max bridge 400(!) and max memory speed 2100(!)....
Pants...

That's the way with computers. Unless you upgrade every couple of months you end up having to replace everything anyway.

Case in point, the nice new shiny motherboard I bought from Graeme has a 24pin PSU connector. My 1.5 year old case (!) has a PSU with the 'old fashioned' 20pin connector. Absolutely no point to the change as the fix was to buy a 20 to 24pin adaptor cable - works a treat but shows the way the manufacturers try to force upgrades.

Are you sure there is not a firmware upgrade for your mobo? Often a mobo would be advertised supporting "up to xxxx processor at xxxx speed etc etc" but that's just what was available at the time the advertising was written. As faster stuff comes out firmware upgrades can sometimes add greater support. Worth checking out.

As for memory on windows XP 32 bit, i've got 2GB and have recently seen the light - totally turned off the swap file!! Woooooaaaahhhhhh... scary - none at all! Best thing i've ever done! Even after a chugging photoshop 10 session or a game, a look at the task manager performance readings says max memory committed has never exceeded 1.6 GB, so i've not needed the page file. However no matter how much ram you have, if you have a page file turned on it WILL be used. Now i get any application i've used in the past hours, days, however long the computer's been switched on loading instantly from ram, wheras before anything in memory not used for a while is paged to disk. Really worthwile thing to try when you have a decent amount of ram!

Liam