Re: Disappointing upgrade: Sempron 2200+ --> Phenom II 4X 840

On 6/01/2012 3:27 AM, DK wrote:
> Wanting more raw computing power, I went from Sempron 2200+
> in ASUS Asus A7V400-MX (socket A) to Phenom II 4X 840 in Asus
> M4N68T-M V2 (socket AM3).

I used to have a Sempron 2800+. It was a dog! Just about anything would
run rings around it. I gave the whole computer away a year or two back
after having it in storage. It is still in use today. Did put a braver
video card in it for the new owner though.
>
> I must say I am quite disappointed. I was hoping for about 10X speed
> boost even with applications that can only use a single core. After all,
> more than six years separate the two (expected boost suggested
> by Moore's law would be 64X). The real life tests show nothing
> of this sort! Not even close to 10X.
>
I upgraded to a @6600 Quad in a Gigabyte G33M-DS2R motherboard with an
NVidia 8500GS video card (now Nvidia GeForce GT430) and 2 Gig of RAM
(now 8 Gig). It was way overkill for what I do these days.

For my day to day stuff, I use a Pentium 4 HT @ 3 GHz with 4 GB of RAM
and that seems to cope more than adequately with my workload. The
Quadcore rarely even gets turned on

> DIVX encoding using VirtualDub and DivX 5 codec became
> faster by only about 3X. OK, this may also have something to do
> with the video card change (does it? - I don't really know; went
> from dedicated nVIDIA Quadro FX 3000, 256 MB to integrated
> nVIDIA GeForce 7025, 512 MB - not sure what is supposed to be
> better; I need occasional hardware stereo so Quadro will be
> going back into the slot).
>
> To make sure it's not GPU, I also tested using a program that does
> no graphics (multiparametric fitting anf FFT; essentially raw numbers
> crunching). Alas, a fairly common task that took 23 min on the
> 6.5 years old cheap system now took 9 min - only ~2.5X faster.

On board graphics are always a bit of a dog though there have been some
significant improvements in recent years. I will always favour external
graphics adaptors even if, in my usage, it only provides for snappy
screen updates.
>
> Granted, programs that can use SMP run correspondingly faster
> (about 3.3X over just using a single core) but still... Are my results
> observations fairly typical? If not, what gives? This $200 upgrade
> pales in comparison with the $160 upgrade 6.5 years ago when I
> went from dual Celerons 366 in ABit BP6 to the Sempron 2200+.
> There, the speed boost was of near cosmic proportions.
>
> Any comments? Thanks!
>
> - Dima

I have found that what I need to be done fast is handled adequately by
my P4. For the rest, I have plenty of time so I can afford to wait. I
could overclock my Quadcore and get an even greater speed boost. In
fact, that was one of the reasons I picked this particular CPU as it has
loads of headroom but, apart from some experiments when new, it has
always run at a standard clock speed.

If I was into some serious gaming, I daresay the Quadcore would be more
useful.

--

Krypsis