Performance differences?

wavin

currently using a pentium 3 800 mhz with 384mb of pc 133 sdram
i know very little about the performance difference that comes with increase in hertz of the processor.would there be a large performance difference if i was using a pentium4 1.7ghz with 512mb ram?
use it mostly for music production.

thanks

stevenmu

It's very hard to say exactly what the increase would be like, but I'd imagine it would be pretty big. The increase in Mhz, just over double, would help. Depending on how the software you're using is optomised, a P4 should also be able to achieve more per Mhz than a P3. Lastly the extra Ram should help a lot too.

If it's one you're buying second hand, you could always ask them to try it out first, put some of your software on and see how long a particular task takes compared to your current PC.

astrofool

the p4 actually delivers less per mhz than the p3, esp. the early ones, the pentium M is based off the p3 design, and given equal (fsb, memory b/w) the p4mhz = 2/3 the p3mhz

That being said, there would be a substantial jump going to the p4 1.7, for music at least, the p4 should be much better at encoding and decoding.

bpmurray

Depends on what you're doing. If your app is disk-bound, a faster disk will make it go faster, although in general, more memory is easily the best upgrade you can buy. 2GB is probably a good target.

Capt'n Midnight

If you are using windows NT / 2000 / XP then run TASKMGR and look at performance. It will tell you how much memory and CPU you are using.
If using 95 / 98 then you may have WINTOP on the CD to do the same.
Or use PROCEXP from www.sysinternals.com

The Pentium M / Centrino uses PIII technology and as the others have pointed out is much faster at many things than the P4 at the same MHz. But the P4 will have more cache than the PIII and it will use faster memory so that will speed up things too.

How old is the software ?
Older software won't be able to use all of the more advanced features of newer chips. Though that should not matter too much.

zilog_jones

Yeah, the early P4s weren't really that much faster than the last of the P3s - in fact the the first ones around 1.4GHz were slower than the higher Tualitin P3s (1-1.4GHz). But you'd probably notice a difference between an 800 and a 1.7GHz. Just don't expect exactly twice the speed or anything.