asus K8V SE Deluxe,Please Help

  • Thread starter Thread starter Neil Catling
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Neil Catling

I've got a asus K8V SE Deluxe with a athlon 64 3400, could someone please
tell me why the computer is only running at 2400 and how to change the speed
safely.
Thanks in advance
 
I've got a asus K8V SE Deluxe with a athlon 64 3400, could someone please
tell me why the computer is only running at 2400 and how to change the speed
safely.
Thanks in advance
Click to expand...

AMD uses what is called a "P.R." rating for the processors.
2400 is the number of actual megahertz (the CPU core clock)
3500+ is what AMD feels an equivalent P4 would have to run
at to match the performance of your processor. So, the 3500+
is the "performance rating".

The "performance rating" is a shell game, in that the Athlon
is compared to the Pentium4, but a Sempron is compared to
a Celeron4. This inflates the Sempron's performance, and
makes it tough to figure out what you are getting - given the
price of the Sempron (for socket 462 at least), stay away
from them.

You can see on this page, how a 3400+ and a 3700+ differ
only in the cache on the die, and they have the same
processor clock. The extra "300 MHz" worth of Pentium
performance, AMD feels, comes from the extra cache.
But in terms of clock rate, if both those processors
execute code that stays within the L1 cache, they will
complete their benchmark in exactly the same time. The
Performance Rating, of necessity, has to include
benchmarking things that have a significant memory bandwidth
component, and that is how they differentiate the 3400+
and the 3700+. (I.e. You would feel a difference in
Photoshop.)

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_9485_9487^10248,00.html

You can also see how the 4000+ for socket 939, gains
its advantage from having a dual channel memory interface.
Apparently that is worth another 300 points in the performance
rating. This is why, if you have a specific program you use
all the time, it pays to find out how that program takes
advantage or not, of memory bandwidth. Your 3400+ already
has the 2.4GHz execution speed, so the other processors only
pay off slightly, when there are more cache misses.

HTH,
Paul
 
Lots of good info there. One thing to keep in mind is that many
applications, especially games, benefit more from a higher clock speed than
they do from the larger cache. This is because they tend to generate a
higher percentage of cache misses. Also, since the memory controllers are
built into the CPU itself, a cache miss isn't nearly as big of a performance
penalty as it is on a Pentium 4 system.

So when shopping around, my preference for outright performance is going to
be the faster clocked Athlon 64. If you're into overclocking though you
might be able to save some money by getting a lower-clocked chip with a
larger cache.
 
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