I have a task for someone

[Brazen]

I think this would be interesting to research. I want someone to underclock a P4 and/or Athlon64 to like 233 mhz and compare it to a legacy pentium or similar running at the same clock speed (233 mhz).

I'm curious to see if the latest processors have become more efficient or less efficient, and I think other people would be interested to know also. I would do it myself, but I have neither the latest processor nor any legacy systems, nor do I have the time to do the benchmarks.

 

[alexruiz]

Seems like an interesting test. You need also to specify OS and applications.

 

[Brazen]

Well, to me the OS is not important as long as it is the same for every test system. I would probably suggest using Win98SE though, to get decent results from the legacy system. Everything should be able to be kept the same except mobo and RAM and even the RAM could be underclocked down to the speed of the RAM in the legacy system.

If someone decides to try this, let us know and keep us updated along the way.

 

[jhu]

how do you underclock any modern cpu to 233mhz?

also, might i suggest running linux and using povray as the benchmark program as the package already contains a scene specifically for benchmarking.

 

[jhu]

btw, tomshardware already did something like this here

 

[bobbyk]

i don't know if you could logically get that low without doing serious things to the memory. It wouldn't be bad, but what kind of fsb would you have. take a 2.8 ghz for example. 14X200. If you lowered the bus to 20 you would only be running ddr 40 ram. Granted they didn't have ddr then, but i am not sure if dram can go that low. Maybe it is possible. You might have to do something like compare a 500 pIII to a p4 or something of the like. Then the comparison would be a little bit closer to reasonable.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: bobbyk
i don't know if you could logically get that low without doing serious things to the memory. It wouldn't be bad, but what kind of fsb would you have. take a 2.8 ghz for example. 14X200. If you lowered the bus to 20 you would only be running ddr 40 ram. Granted they didn't have ddr then, but i am not sure if dram can go that low. Maybe it is possible. You might have to do something like compare a 500 pIII to a p4 or something of the like. Then the comparison would be a little bit closer to reasonable.

Well, are the Athlon64s multiplier unlocked? I don't believe they are, so yeah, I guess that would make it difficult solely underclocking with the FSB. I don't know, I didn't put much thought in to it, that is why I posted this in the forum. What you would have to do I guess is lower the FSB to like 66 (133 DDR) and set the multiplier to 3.5. This will depend on if your mobo supports such low settings and if the processor allows the multiplier to be lowered.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: jhu
btw, tomshardware already did something like this here

Yeah, I remember reading that article, but that is comparing processors at their native speeds.

 

[TerryMathews]

The slowest you can make any relatively modern processor go is an Athlon (32 bit, not 64 bit). Lowest multiplier available is 5x. Problem is, I don't know of an Athlon motherboard that supports a FSB of less than 100MHz. If you could find one that will do 66MHz, you could test out 333MHz. Maybe a KT133 (not A) chipset. I know nForce and NF2 won't.

 

[DaNorthface]

why not just take whatever bench score you get and divide by x mhz of the chip multiplied by y mhz of the leg chip.

 

[DaNorthface]

also, using sandra i believe the PR number it gives you when you bench is the mhz your chip would be if it was a pentium 1. If not, then there should be other benchmark programs that will compare your system and give an approx of what your mhz would be if it was another chip.. anyways, i think the modern chips are faster. From the pentium to pentium 3, it's all been up hill. The first pentium 4 was a little slow, but with all the enhancements intel has done to the chip, i'm sure it's faster than the p3 per clock..

 

[SickBeast]

It takes my Mobile XP at 2500mhz about 25 seconds to un-rar Quake2. On my P233MMX maching w/ 64mb of RAM it took 15 minutes (!).

I know that's not exactly an accurate benchmark, but it really opened my eyes to how powerful our machines have gotten.

Oh, and it ran Quake2 in software mode at 320x240 at only 37fps...my system mangles it at 1600x1200 w/ 16X AF.