Richard said:
Another question... might be pushing my luck here but hey, it's Christmas so
why not.
The PC I bought is a refurbished Dell OptiPlex GX620 mid tower.
Intel P4 3.8GHz HT
Socket 775
800FSB
Intel i945G Chipset
Phoenix / Dell BIOS A11 (11/30/06)
Motherboard MFG by Intel for Dell
Intel claims the chipset will support a higher buss speed as well as the
Core2Duo CPU.
Everything I've read says the Dell BIOS is locked at 800FSB and can't handle
the Core2Duo CPU.
Award no longer sells aftermarket BIOS's.
Would anyone know how I might "unlock" the BIOS?
I would like to be able to either...
a) overclock ~10% to yield a 4.0+GHz P4 CPU
b) mod the BIOS to accept a Core2Duo @ 800FSB
c) mod the BIOS to accept a Core2Duo @ 1066FSB
Now someone is going to tell me I'm nuts and I'm asking to fry something....
but again, hey... it's Christmas and I have 3 of these things.
Thanks again!
Richard in Va.
++++++++++++++++
I think the first question I'd start with, is how much benefit
would additional performance give you ?
To give an example, I upgraded from a P4 with Hyperthreading to
a Core2Duo, and while I can quote you some benchmarks I've run,
I also see things in real usage patterns, that don't seem to
be that much faster. For example, I assumed in a game that I used,
that the limitation was not the read rate of the hard drive, but the
fact that the files being read were in ZIP format, and had to be
decompressed. I figured the Core2 would make short work of them,
but the game load time is just as obnoxious as it was before.
I tried Windows Movie Maker, and in that application, writing out
a movie uses both cores. But the performance was still less than
impressive.
So the first question would be, whether such an upgrade will only
be useful for winning benchmarks.
The "improvements" coming from the computing industry now, are
more of a niche thing, than a mainstream thing. I don't use
Windows Movie Maker that much, so don't get to see both
cores busy very often. Much of the software I use, tends
to be single threaded.
I use SuperPI as a single threaded benchmark. The P4 at 3.1GHz
did that benchmark (generate 1 million digits of PI), in 45 to
50 seconds. The 50 second mark, is with antivirus software running
in the background. The Core2Duo at 2.6GHz, has a time of 24 seconds.
If I overclock the Core2Duo 2.6GHz to 3.46GHz or so, the time drops
to 18 seconds. (The World's Record is somewhere around 7 seconds.)
These numbers appear impressive, but real usage patterns seem to
be dominated by other issues. So I'm not sure whether getting you
all excited about Core2Duo, is really the best answer. There has
to be a reason, and there has to be proof, that it is worth doing.
http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/super_pi_mod-1.5.zip
When I did the upgrade, it cost me
1) $70 for the cheapest motherboard with the slots I needed.
2) $140 for an OEM processor without cooler.
3) ~$35 for a cooler. Turns out, because of the low cooling
requirement, I would have been better off with a retail processor
which includes a cheesy cooler.
4) New RAM, about $65 worth.
I kept the power supply and case, drives, keyboard, mouse, video
card and so on, from the previous system. With the Dell, there'd
be the issue of how you'd restore the OS to a "foreign" motherboard,
so potentially there is the cost of a new OS as well. (The Dell OS
scheme is only a good deal, if you keep the Dell hardware configuration.)
My Core2Duo is easy on power. The processor has a TDP of 65W, but
when measured with my clamp-on ammeter, won't draw more than 36W,
even with both cores running 100%. But to justify the upgrade
based on power savings, would require a very long payback
period.
Paul
a 2nd system box with an Athlon 64 6000 2x1mb L2 Windsor 89w