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Got a Northwood Pentium4 3.2 system with 1gig Ram and 9800XT. Its main task is graphics manipulation and video work. Would I notice much benefit from getting a s939 AGP board (eg MSI Neo 2) and putting a Dual Core Opteron in it?
Keep s478 or upgrade to s939
- Thread starter goreblast
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Soldato
Get a s939, it will be far more powerful. Send the Northy to me for free 
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The programs I use are the Pegasus TMpeg ones which are supposidly optimised for Pentium 4s
Oh and what s939 AGP motherboard would every recommend? I have the Abit AV8 3rd Eye and the MSI Neo2 Plat here in different systems. I was thinking the DFI NF3-Ultra
Soldato
get NF4 rather than 3
NF4 is all PCIE (I think) - it must be AGP
Soldato
i'd go for the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2... its PCIe and AGP... so you can keep your old card, and upgrade to PCIe when needed 
Its a non-starter - no Gigabit LAN - that is a must. I also need 3 PCI slots.
I'd recomend the ASUS A8N-E. I have heard excelent things abotu the ASrock board though, but if you want to go PCI-E right off the bat the A8N-E isn't bad. Though I have seen posts saying that it's chip set cooler has a habit of stopping and I have heard whines out of my chipset fan since I put the system together 8 months ago. But it runs at a constant speed as far as I know, and if it does quite, the fan can simply be replaced. Over all I'd have to say its a fantastic single PCI-E board.
id go 939, but if your looking for a good board on a budget that will let you use AGP for now and upgrade to PCI-E when you are ready( as it has both sockets with NO performance loss), a board that comes with the future AMD socket M2 support, whose parent company is asus and whose chipsets parent company is Nvidia,
take a look at the Asrock 939 SATA2
personally i dont think dual cores that advantageous and wont be for at least 2 or 3 years, not untill software is multithreaded as standard with a good OS to back it up. i wanted a dual core CPU when i built my new pc back in august, but then i realised i wouldnt use the second core, today for the first time since then i realised i could have used it, but only for today and only once in 5 months, the cost and core to core performance against an operon 939 of the same price isnt worth it.
get yourself a nice 939 opteron cpu unless your doing specialist tasks such as massive calculations, pushing network wide updates for a few hundred pc`s or encoding masses of video, your better with a single core option.
take a look at the Asrock 939 SATA2
personally i dont think dual cores that advantageous and wont be for at least 2 or 3 years, not untill software is multithreaded as standard with a good OS to back it up. i wanted a dual core CPU when i built my new pc back in august, but then i realised i wouldnt use the second core, today for the first time since then i realised i could have used it, but only for today and only once in 5 months, the cost and core to core performance against an operon 939 of the same price isnt worth it.
get yourself a nice 939 opteron cpu
unless your doing specialist tasks such as massive calculations, pushing network wide updates for a few hundred pc`s or encoding masses of video, your better with a single core option.
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I had a chance to play with a dual core instead of my p4 3.2 northwood htt, and all I can say is that most stuff felt a lot more smooth.
I normaly have Photoshop, Painter and a couple of webprograms open, and switching between 'em felt a lot better.
But this could also just be "a clean system" vs an old system perhaps...
I am still getting a dual core though, Photoshop should benefit from it a lot from the real world tests I have seen.
I normaly have Photoshop, Painter and a couple of webprograms open, and switching between 'em felt a lot better.
But this could also just be "a clean system" vs an old system perhaps...
I am still getting a dual core though, Photoshop should benefit from it a lot from the real world tests I have seen.
Soldato
I'd keep the P4 or upgrade to a Prescott, or best of all, get a 2Mb Cache P4 and go Windows XP 64-bit. Those programs are strongly biased to HT processors and are written to take advantage of memory and processor bandwidth so you should see a significant benefit in the bigger cache and 800MHz FSB of the newer P4's. A RAM upgrade in your current system would also give a noticeable increase for very little money these days.
This is an AMD centric forum and the previous poster even said
"unless your doing specialist tasks such as massive calculations, pushing network wide updates for a few hundred pc`s or encoding masses of video"
Two of which you are doing, yet he's recommending a S939 CPU? Where software is specifically written to push instructions at a processor (and Pegasus was modified for multi-threaded Pentium 4's in 2002 remember!) you are better off with that processor.
If you want to keep the AGP card, and I would argue that if you are replacing the processor and motherboard then why buy old technology so you can keep your old video card, then I would be looking at the DFI Lanparty 875 P-T which has Gigabit LAN, 8x VGA, takes DDR RAM and has compatibility with the 6xx series P4's. It's officially delisted, but if you look on Froogle for "DFI Lanparty 875 P-T" you can still find some.
If it were me, I'd buy a P4 640, an Abit AL-8 and a new PCI-E video card and RAM. That will keep you in headroom (1066 FSB) for a while and you're not investing in dead technology.
Please also remember that Northwoods have silly-money status on auction websites because they are perceived to run cooler and therefore better than Prescotts. A 3.2GHz Northwood P4 at auction will probably get £100-£120 that you can invest back into your 6xx series. Likewise, 9800XT's in good condition go for £70-£100! and a 6800GS or x800 GTO2 are only £130 these days and they'll just blast a 9800 (even the XT) for speed.
This is an AMD centric forum and the previous poster even said
"unless your doing specialist tasks such as massive calculations, pushing network wide updates for a few hundred pc`s or encoding masses of video"
Two of which you are doing, yet he's recommending a S939 CPU? Where software is specifically written to push instructions at a processor (and Pegasus was modified for multi-threaded Pentium 4's in 2002 remember!) you are better off with that processor.
If you want to keep the AGP card, and I would argue that if you are replacing the processor and motherboard then why buy old technology so you can keep your old video card, then I would be looking at the DFI Lanparty 875 P-T which has Gigabit LAN, 8x VGA, takes DDR RAM and has compatibility with the 6xx series P4's. It's officially delisted, but if you look on Froogle for "DFI Lanparty 875 P-T" you can still find some.
If it were me, I'd buy a P4 640, an Abit AL-8 and a new PCI-E video card and RAM. That will keep you in headroom (1066 FSB) for a while and you're not investing in dead technology.
Please also remember that Northwoods have silly-money status on auction websites because they are perceived to run cooler and therefore better than Prescotts. A 3.2GHz Northwood P4 at auction will probably get £100-£120 that you can invest back into your 6xx series. Likewise, 9800XT's in good condition go for £70-£100! and a 6800GS or x800 GTO2 are only £130 these days and they'll just blast a 9800 (even the XT) for speed.
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epoxy5 said:
Multi aplications works VERY VERY well in multi app open situations. I'm writing this whilst also having farcry and EQII open ( don't ask
). All working silky smooth on a single core something would probably have swallowed most of the core and left the rest floundering.
Just need to clarify a couple of things - I have extra DDR dual channel RAM here, including a spare 2gb kit, so dont want to have to move to ddr2 unless I have to. Also already got both a 165 and 170 dual-channel opterons here. Also video card performance for gaming isnt an issue, got a another PC I use for that.
That said if video encoding performance would be significantly better with a new pentium 4 and ddr2 ram etc I would have a big sale and go for that.
Of course the other option would be to upgrade the cooler and overclock the 3.2 northwood for better performance.
That said if video encoding performance would be significantly better with a new pentium 4 and ddr2 ram etc I would have a big sale and go for that.
Of course the other option would be to upgrade the cooler and overclock the 3.2 northwood for better performance.
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I tried raising the FSB by 7 to 207 and system will not boot. Seems something doesnt like running out of spec.