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Intel Dual core - How can I tell?

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

FatRakoon

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I have just bought a P4 3.6 for a song.

The thing is, that although its not hot or anything, I am a bit dubious about it all because of a few things...

First of all, its a P4 3.6 so its not too bad ( Slower than all my AMDs however, but its full of junk like Norton & AOL etc so its needing an F&R to get rid of that crud ), however, a few thigns I need to know.

This is the first intel I have had for a hell of a long time now, and I was wondering how can I tell if this CPU is a duel core or not? Its got the hyperthreadign thingy, and in the DevManager, it does come up as 2 CPUs but then, they do dont they?

The AMD dual core CPUs show up like this, but I was under the impression that a dual core Intel will actually show up as 4? - anyway, I dont have a clue on that one.

Also, even though everythign says its a 3.6 including the BIOS and DXDIAG, when I right click on my Computer - Properties, it shows up s a Pentium 4 3.60Ghz and its 2.7Ghz with 2GB RAM?

So, is it 2.7 or 3.6?

SuperPI is giving me similar speeds of my 8 year old's Sempron 3100 FFS!

Again, that could be because its still got the awful junk that the shop put in, and those scores must surely go up... Or down in this case.

Also, its got a 7800 PCIE card in it, but its actually slower according to Aquamark3 and 3DMark2003 than a Radeon9800Pro in a ClawHammer3700... Thats surely way out isnt it?

Anyway, as I said its been a while since I had an intel and so far, I am starting to see why, but surely this PC should not be so slow???

Its a Fujitsu siemens
 
No such thing as a 3.6Ghz Intel Dual Core. From what you are saying it sounds like a single core Pentium 4 660 3.6Ghz.

Mul
 
What version of windows do you have? if its home you wont be able to see 4 processors anyway. It then wont show up in cpu-z either.

The easiest place to look is in the device manager under processors, if it shows 2 its a single, if it shows 4 its a dual core.
 
Hey up you lot...

Been into the BIOS now.

CPUs are 1... Says so in the BIOS.

Idling down to 2.7 is correct too... Thats also in the BIOS, forget what its called, but I have disabled it and it came up at 3.6, so its now 3.6 as it should be.

So, there it is, and yes, its a single core P4 660, as verified by CPUz

I had only just got it when I posted the above, and I didnt have time to install anything and this also meant CPUZ, but its on now.

And yes, its got a 2MB L2 Cache, so theoretically it should be a good un, but only 16k L1?

Erm, ran SuperPI at the 3.6 and its now down to 43Seconds so way off what the Sempron3100 gives me, and miles away from my Winchester and X2-48 so still got lots needed for me to think about using it as my main PC, but still...

That double thingy with the CPU's - HyperThreading as I thought, and I have disabled it in the BIOS, and DevManager is now only showing up the one, so I will have a few piddles about in a few minutes when it has finished re-installing.

It previously had Media Center on, but under CPUZ I noticed that the instructions its capabl;e of, is the usuals like SSE2,3 but also X86-64 too??? - Oh, so its 64Bit then? - Enough said, I am throwing on XP64 right now... A bit naughty I know, but I knocked up the ClawHammer 3700 just to piddle with XP64, so if this P4 runs well enough on it, I will let my daughter have the ClawHammer 3700 and I will take XP64 onto tyhis PC instead and give her one of my spare XP Home's instead... Shes only 8 so she wont care... As long as its got Little Mermaid on the desktop I can probably get away with Win95

Anyway, its definitely installing XP64 thats for sure.

Lets see how well the Card reader in it runs cos the one I got in the Claw does not work at all under any drivers I can find for XP64 ( Of which there are none )

What else?

Erm, nothign for now... Its now registering the components of the XP64 installation, so I will do that, get it playing as well as I can, and get back to you on the results of my next bout of benchies yeah?

Thanks for the advise all.
 
HyperThreading = on

Oh yeah, I recon it would - Otherwise, they wouldnt be pimping it so much would they?

The thing is, like I said, I have not had an Intel for some time now, so I am doing a few tests on this and that.

Its like when I got the x2 4800 and compared it against my Winchester, I was expecting so much more than I actually got... To be fair, the winchester is clocked to the hilt ( Currently at 2.5 but it runs just fine at 3.0 ) and I expected the 4800 tobe double that of the Winchester, but to find that it was a long way off, was fun... Showed me how Dual CPUS really are... Not so much twice the performance, but rather the same performance, but twice as it were.

So, I suppose it could be a similar thign with this.

I notice that 3DMark2000 kept hanging or rather not bothering to start up properly, and in the DEvice Manager, the CPU was used up at 50% by 3DMark and this I suppose is the hyperthreading bit maybe? - Not enough tests to really check, and also I have had a lot of errors too, which annoyingly point to RAM, however, this could be anythign right now, they have just been minor and only after I have tried to run some apps that didnt go down too well anyway, so early days on that.

I am now out hunting for drivers... The Mobo is an Asus P5GD1 so can anyone shed some light on whether its a good un or not?

Its only got the one IDE line, but 4 SATA, so, again, if this is set to replace one of my AMD PCs, no doubt I will do some chopping about and get the raptors into this one, and it already has 2x200GB WD Drives in, so I will RAID those ( Windows' Software Raid though! )

Might have a look about clocking it now that I know the CPU can do it, but this board???? Hmmm... Hey, if it dont clock, I dont really care too much... I mean, my most used PC at this time, the DFI LanParty and thats only cos I need to use it to try to cure its many many many many issues, otherwise, my other PCs are just there doing nothing!

Sod it, Im getting tired and starting to waffle.

Yes, hyperthreading will be turned back on, like I said, I want to play first... See what it does etc..
 
Not had time to do any real tests, but the silly tests I have done today, have all shown me that this P4 is nowhere near as quick as the AMDs.

Its got XP64 on, but of course, I will be killing that off very soon, and I will probably turn this P4 into a Server with Linux on.

Hyperthreading is definitely proving to be better than not having it, not realyl more so for simple straight forward apps, but definitely when I try to load it up thats for sure.

I cannot believe my gullibility, but the GFX are not 7800... I should have checked it out properly, but its an ATI X700, and an LE at that!

How the hell can

(a) - The previous guy think that?
(b) - I be so thick as to believe him?
(c) - Could I make such a massive mistake?

Ah well, the wonders of getting a good deal blinded me I recon.

Still,. for the price, its still a good PC.

Right, all I need to do now, is get it reliable with some new RAM, and maybe splash out on a GFX card for it... Shame its not SLI... I fancied getting a couple of cheap and nasty cards just to have a play.

Come back Voodoo2 - All is forgiven.
 
I have a 550J (3.6GHz/1Mb Cache) that does SuperPi 1M in 32s on a clean install of Windows XP Pro x64 (2GB RAM) so yours seems well off the pace. A bit of tweaking required maybe?

And Only the 840EE shows up as 4 processors as it's the only one with Dual Core and hyper-threading.

Most benchmarks show no improvement in performance between the 5xx, 6xx and 8xx series at stock settings.
 
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