!!P4 processor prices plummeting!!!

[Adam8281]

As everyone probably knows, Intel released the Prescott processors today. As a result the P4 "C" (Northwood) processors are all falling drastically in price as vendors are trying to get rid of their stock. The 2.8C has fallen $29 to $179, the 3.0C has fallen $48 to $223, and the 3.2C has fallen $107.95 to $283.00. In AT's review of the Precott they found that Northwood processors actually outperform Prescott's of the same speed (this probably won't be the case once Prescott clock speeds get higher than Northwood's), so this is the perfect time to buy a Northwood processor. I'm about to buy a 2.8C, and just thought I'd pass the info since it really is a hot deal to get such good processors at this price.

 

[Noirish]

I don't believe in upgrade anymore, once i've gotten a CPU over 2.4 Ghz.
There is really no point.
But it's about time they lower the prices.

 

[Slikkster]

Originally posted by: orangel
I don't believe in upgrade anymore, once i've gotten a CPU over 2.4 Ghz.
There is really no point.

May be true right now, but as processing gets faster, programmers will always find ways to bloat their software to exploit it. But for normal business apps, current speeds are more than enough. Gaming? More processing speed, better video processing, more memory...more, more, more!

 

[adams828]

Originally posted by: orangel
I don't believe in upgrade anymore, once i've gotten a CPU over 2.4 Ghz.
There is really no point.

yeah.. we've all heard that one before

 

[roamerr]

If I read correct the Prescott is a manufacturing change. A 3.0ghz P4 will preform the same as a 3.0ghz Prescott. The manufacturing cost of the Prescott is less and it will allow Intel to reach 4ghz by the end of the year -- that's what I read in today's WSJ....

 

[Ketteringo]

You need a faster processor to help TeamAT beat BBR in Seti@home. Go buy a bunch of 3.2's and get crunching!!!

 

[weepul]

Originally posted by: orangel
I don't believe in upgrade anymore, once i've gotten a CPU over 2.4 Ghz.
There is really no point.
But it's about time they lower the prices.

just like how bill gates said we never need more than 64kB of ram. ;p

//krunk (^_^x)

 

[bman46]

SWEET!

 

[Lars]

Nice. My current CPU is almost too slow to play the newest games.

 

[jkj]

Decisions decisions Im trying to decide between the amd64 and p4...

 

[LordSnailz]

noob question - would cpu speed matter if you're burning a DVD, unraring, copying files over from drive to drive and dl'ing at the same time? I usually do this simulatenous and it does slow my computer down a bit, but I want to know if it affects the burn dvds.

 

[FranksAndBeans]

"Unraring"

Creating or extracting Rar files is heavily dependent upon the available processing power.

2.4 PIV ---> PIV 2.8 GHz, not a big deal. Maybe 10% faster.

PIII 700 MHz ----> 2.8 GHz PIV, huge deal, 2x faster.

Having hyperthreading + having the DVDR files and .Rar work being done on separate IDE hard drives would be a very good thing.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Originally posted by: roamerr
If I read correct the Prescott is a manufacturing change. A 3.0ghz P4 will preform the same as a 3.0ghz Prescott. The manufacturing cost of the Prescott is less and it will allow Intel to reach 4ghz by the end of the year -- that's what I read in today's WSJ....

Go read Anandtech's review. They aren't really par for par. Basically, clock for clock, get a northwood (same as it has been every time Intel releases a whole "new" chip, this isn't just a small revision, they messed with the pipeline, that is a MAJOR revision/change). By extending the pipeline by ~50%, it introduces more lad due to a poor branch detection. Intel made a lot of other little changes to try and compensate for this, but clock for clock, it is very hard to fully compensate for an extended pipeline (think of it this way, if there is a 20 stage pipeline on one CPU and a 30 stage pipeline on another, it will take 10 more cycles on the 30 stage pipeline for the first command to be executed. It will also take up to 10 more cycles to flush that same pipeline due to it processing the wrong instructions, which means you would need that 30 stage pipeline cpu to run at 33% faster cycles per sec., then the 20 stage pipeline to process the same commands (assuming all other things are equal, Intel changed some of these things, but it is very hard to fully compensate without an increase in cycles per sec., as that is the MAIN reason for using a longer pipeline in the first place (i.e. split the stage that takes the longest time into smaller bits, thus allowing you to better utilize the other parts of the pipeline which may already be able to run at a faster speed, but can't because it is bottlenecked by this one or two stages that take much longer then the rest to execute).

Well, that was a good processor design 101 for you guys

 

[Adam8281]

noob question - would cpu speed matter if you're burning a DVD, unraring, copying files over from drive to drive and dl'ing at the same time? I usually do this simulatenous and it does slow my computer down a bit, but I want to know if it affects the burn dvds.

Processor would be important with some of these tasks in themselves, like the raring, but RAM is super important given that you're doing a number of tasks at the same time.

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: adams828

Originally posted by: orangel
I don't believe in upgrade anymore, once i've gotten a CPU over 2.4 Ghz.
There is really no point.

yeah.. we've all heard that one before

Hey, for 75% or more of computer users, he's right... Most of them do word processing, email, surf the net, and possible some spreadsheets. (and they still play solitairre, free cell, and mine sweeper)

Very few people use their chips to their potential - gamers, cad, video editting, etc. But that doesn't make up the majority of user (imo)

 

[NucEm]

Do they support SMP? or do you still need Xeon / AMD64?

 

[usernamemax20charact]

Originally posted by: orangel
I don't believe in upgrade anymore, once i've gotten a CPU over 2.4 Ghz.
There is really no point.
But it's about time they lower the prices.

I agree with you... for now. I probably won't need to upgrade until a 6 GHz CPU comes out. My 3.0 Ghz P4 is plenty fast. But as software gets more bloated, it'll probably seem slow in a couple of years.

 

[Marauder-]

Actually - for video gaming, wouldn't the video card processing be the most important part after a certain CPU speed - say 2Ghz? The only performance that I can detect from just a processor standpoint right now is that you can load intensive games faster. Everything else would be from the GPU.

 

[KwikEMartGuy]

Go for the AMD64. Especially if you run linux.

AMD64 Kicks ass, even intel is making new chips that will conform to AMD64 ISA.

 

[v8envy]

Actually - for video gaming, wouldn't the video card processing be the most important part after a certain CPU speed - say 2Ghz?

Not really. Give a game programmer more cycles, and they can do better (more realistic) AI and/or better pathfinding. Graphics cards are good for displaying more and more polygons, but if you want a large number of objects doing interesting things rather than a few photorealistic objects doing interesting things you'll need as much CPU as you can muster.

Newer games like X2: the threat can bring any rig you care to build to their knees. Whether this is bad programming or the effect of trying to determine the behavior of tens of thousands of independent objects at once I don't know. 2ghz is not nearly enough.

 

[VulnoX]

I used to upgrade my computer all the time, but then I got into college and dont have quite as much money as I used to. I won a motherboard and proc combo from a LAN party I went to. The motherboard is some no-name board and the proc is an 1800+ XP. I still use those to this day, and its been over a year. I can play any game you throw at me without so much as a framerate drop. Max Payne 2, full settings at 1280x1024. Same with SW Galaxies, Halo, Call of Duty, BF1942, basically any game I throw at it. My biggest upgrades within the past year have been moving up to about a gig of ram, and my G4 4200 128 DDR. Nothing special about my computer compared to today's standards, and yet I can do everything just as well as everyone else for what I use my computer for. So I just dont see a reason for upgrading.

But I am building a new computer for someone right now. It will have a P4 2.8GHz with HT, 512 megs of ram Dual Channel, 2 120 gig WD SP's in SATA Raid, and probably a 5900FX vid card. So I will be able to compare then.

As I said, right now I dont see the point, we are still pretty bottlenecked by our Hard Drives and until Raptor class drives become cheaper and larger in size, I wont be touching many more large upgrades.

 

[SSibalNom]

Originally posted by: VulnoX
I used to upgrade my computer all the time, but then I got into college and dont have quite as much money as I used to. I won a motherboard and proc combo from a LAN party I went to. The motherboard is some no-name board and the proc is an 1800+ XP. I still use those to this day, and its been over a year. I can play any game you throw at me without so much as a framerate drop. Max Payne 2, full settings at 1280x1024. Same with SW Galaxies, Halo, Call of Duty, BF1942, basically any game I throw at it. My biggest upgrades within the past year have been moving up to about a gig of ram, and my G4 4200 128 DDR. Nothing special about my computer compared to today's standards, and yet I can do everything just as well as everyone else for what I use my computer for. So I just dont see a reason for upgrading.

But I am building a new computer for someone right now. It will have a P4 2.8GHz with HT, 512 megs of ram Dual Channel, 2 120 gig WD SP's in SATA Raid, and probably a 5900FX vid card. So I will be able to compare then.

As I said, right now I dont see the point, we are still pretty bottlenecked by our Hard Drives and until Raptor class drives become cheaper and larger in size, I wont be touching many more large upgrades.

i seriously doubt your running halo smoothly over 640x480

 

[olouie]

Originally posted by: SSibalNom

Originally posted by: VulnoX
I used to upgrade my computer all the time, but then I got into college and dont have quite as much money as I used to. I won a motherboard and proc combo from a LAN party I went to. The motherboard is some no-name board and the proc is an 1800+ XP. I still use those to this day, and its been over a year. I can play any game you throw at me without so much as a framerate drop. Max Payne 2, full settings at 1280x1024. Same with SW Galaxies, Halo, Call of Duty, BF1942, basically any game I throw at it. My biggest upgrades within the past year have been moving up to about a gig of ram, and my G4 4200 128 DDR. Nothing special about my computer compared to today's standards, and yet I can do everything just as well as everyone else for what I use my computer for. So I just dont see a reason for upgrading.

But I am building a new computer for someone right now. It will have a P4 2.8GHz with HT, 512 megs of ram Dual Channel, 2 120 gig WD SP's in SATA Raid, and probably a 5900FX vid card. So I will be able to compare then.

As I said, right now I dont see the point, we are still pretty bottlenecked by our Hard Drives and until Raptor class drives become cheaper and larger in size, I wont be touching many more large upgrades.

i seriously doubt your running halo smoothly over 640x480

agreed that setup does not sound like it will really handle halo great above that

 

[KristopherKubicki]

We have an extensive price guide going up in a few minutes. It specifically covers the advantages and subtlties of the drop.

Kristopher

 

[myusername]

I think I'll stick with my $17 633 celeron from ATHD clocked to 100fsb until the "secure computers" come out. Then I'll upgrade to the last non-secure system