Boards are fundraising to help the people of Ukraine via the Red Cross at this horrific time. Please donate and share if you can, you will find the link here. Many thanks.
Naah I'm just clocking the CPU, and leaving the TNT well alone. Tbh, I wish I'd kept with the super 7, and get myself a K6-III <IMG SRC="http://lacerta.ucg.ie/boards/smile.gif" WIDTH=15 HEIGHT=15 BORDER=0 ALT=":)">
That's my current upgrade path, though I think I'm going to have trouble getting my hands on one for a while.. <IMG SRC="http://lacerta.ucg.ie/boards/smile.gif" WIDTH=15 HEIGHT=15 BORDER=0 ALT=":)">
Mind you, the K6-III still looks miserable at 3D games, unless its able to use 3DNow instructions, and they're only well supported with the Voodoo II cards. So I'll stick with the Intel (boo hiss) solution until AMD produce something with a decent FPU (hopefully the K7). Do you think the K7 will be shipping for near-Xeon prices?
Well, once thing is for certain - full speed cache COSTS. *A LOT*. No matter how cheaply AMD can produce the actual CPU, 2MB of 500Mhz cache RAM will increase its cost enormously:
From www.scan.co.uk:
450Mhz Zeon with 512K cache - 700 quid inc
450Mhz Zeon with 1Meg cache - 1600 quid inc
450Mhz Zeon with 2Meg cache - 3000 quid inc
I dunno how of that is Intel/Scan price premium, but you can see what a difference that bad-ass cache makes..
ive overclocked a celeron.. and a p2..
anyone else notice that when you turn off the level 2 cache on the celeron, you get approx 20 fps lower in timerefresh? (20 fps in timerefresh = 10 fps in game normally..)
also, bus speed DOES make a difference for quake, at least on my system..
p2-350 running at 434 MHZ (124mhz bus speed) gave me the exact same performance as a celeron 333 at 500 MHZ (100mhz bus speed).. same motherboard/gfx card etc.
i doubt its the gfx card creating the bottleneck (even though its a 2.5 yr old Virge/VX card), cos the p2-350 at 392 MHZ
gave the same performance as the celeron 333 at 416 MHZ (83 MHZ bus speed)... in quake
the only thing i can think of to account for this relatively large performance difference is the bus speed..
the p2-350 runs at 466 mhz too (133mhz bus speed), but overheats after 5 mins cos i have no cpu fan for it..
The TNT with an AGP 2X bus provides completely ridiculous texture transfer rates to the card. No chance of a bottleneck for years to come. The TNT moves textures at twice the rate of the Voodoo III (yes 3).
As for overclocking your TNT, the Creative Labs one is pretty **** really. Unless you lash a fan and a bigger heat sink onto it. THe Canopus Spectra (or something) one is much better, integrated fan and dirty heat sink jobby. You'll also need software to overclock the memory/core. The software with the Creative only lets you overclock memory speed, but theres a wossname called "Gamer's Assistant" that lets you do both on any TNT. I tried it out, lashed everything up to maximum and my machine kept working. So I know for definite the software DOESN'T work. There is no WAY my TNT runs as fast as it says it is, without melting anyways. You can't overclock the memory by much at the moment because I don't think many TNT's come with good enough performance SGRAM.
It's been that way for 6 months now, not a problem, its fast, camparable to the identicl p2, shure all i use it for is Qoole, Quake, and Frontpage and the loike. I couldn't ask for better,
OHHH and its sooooooooo EASY!
This chaintech motherboard ASKS u waht speed to run it at!
What Todays Viewers should do is,
grab a Celery 300a (last few left in Ireland)
clock them to 450
watch it **** on them diks who bought p2 400+
Talking of 300a's, I'm trying really hard to find one! UK suppliers don't seem to do them, I'm checking out some US sites. Any Irish suppliers with any left??