Fry's Electronics Cheap Combo woes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Don W. McCollough
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Don W. McCollough

Hello. About 6 months ago I bought a ECS RC410L motherboard with a Pentium
D 805 from Fry's. I was amazed at how much performance $140 could buy. It
overclocked to 3.4Ghz and was stable and I could play games and everything.
Well for X-Mas I bought what I thought would be a "better" combo consisting
of p4m800pro-m motherboard and a E6300 duo processor for $160.

This second combo does not live up to expectations whatsoever. I'm using
PC2-5300 memory and I can barely overclock the CPU at all. And running at
full speed I see about 25% performance loss on all benchmarks. For
example, instead of getting 66fps converting a DVD to Divx I get about
48fps. This is really dissapointing.

Is this new ECS board a piece of crap or
do I have to overclock the E6300 quite a bit to get the performance of the
overclocked D 805? This E6300 chip should out perform the 805 even not
overclocked...but I don't see it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I don't want to spend $150 on a board to get comparable performance to the
old D 805 cheap system.
 
Don W. McCollough said:
Hello. About 6 months ago I bought a ECS RC410L motherboard with a
Pentium D 805 from Fry's. I was amazed at how much performance $140
could buy. It overclocked to 3.4Ghz and was stable and I could play games
and everything. Well for X-Mas I bought what I thought would be a "better"
combo consisting of p4m800pro-m motherboard and a E6300 duo processor for
$160.

This second combo does not live up to expectations whatsoever. I'm using
PC2-5300 memory and I can barely overclock the CPU at all. And running
at full speed I see about 25% performance loss on all benchmarks. For
example, instead of getting 66fps converting a DVD to Divx I get about
48fps. This is really dissapointing.
Click to expand...

(snip)

But predictable. You downgraded clock speed, significantly. I'd have to
look it up to verify, but I think you dropped from something like 2.6GHz
down to less than 2GHz. You are a victim of Intel's new marketing strategy,
where they have steered away from advertising clock speed. The core duo
chips are a newer design than the Pentium D 805 that you had. However, the
E6300 is a budget processor with a low clock speed. It will out-perform a
Pentium D 805 easily, BUT only on multithreaded tasks, if you are running an
operating system and application(s) that can take full advantage of the 2nd
core on that chip. In other words, if you are benchmarking the E6300 on
Windows (which is not multi-core aware), then expect the E6300 to perform
poorly.

To simplify:
You are comparing a SINGLE core (because only one of them is being used)
processor at less than 2GHz (the E6300) to a
SINGLE core processor of about 2.6GHz (The Pentium D 805)

Even if your Pentium D 805 was not overclocked, I think the E6300 would be
doing pretty good to come within ~75% of the benchmark scores of the Pentium
D 805.

Both processors you tried are pretty darn nice. But benchmarks on a single
core OS running single core applications will definitely favor the older
chip with the single core and the higher clock speed. That's exactly what
your tests confirmed. -Dave
 
Hello. About 6 months ago I bought a ECS RC410L motherboard with a
Pentium D 805 from Fry's. I was amazed at how much performance $140
could buy. It overclocked to 3.4Ghz and was stable and I could play games
and everything. Well for X-Mas I bought what I thought would be a "better"
combo consisting of p4m800pro-m motherboard and a E6300 duo processor for
$160.

This second combo does not live up to expectations whatsoever. I'm using
PC2-5300 memory and I can barely overclock the CPU at all. And running
at full speed I see about 25% performance loss on all benchmarks. For
example, instead of getting 66fps converting a DVD to Divx I get about
48fps. This is really dissapointing.

Is this new ECS board a piece of crap or do I have to overclock the E6300
quite a bit to get the performance of the overclocked D 805? This E6300
chip should out perform the 805 even not overclocked...but I don't see it.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. I don't want to spend $150 on a
board to get comparable performance to the old D 805 cheap system.
Click to expand...

Great thing about Frys is you can get your money back within 14 days of
purchase if you return everything in it's original packaging.
 
Don said:
Hello. About 6 months ago I bought a ECS RC410L motherboard with a Pentium
D 805 from Fry's. I was amazed at how much performance $140 could buy. It
overclocked to 3.4Ghz and was stable and I could play games and everything.
Well for X-Mas I bought what I thought would be a "better" combo consisting
of p4m800pro-m motherboard and a E6300 duo processor for $160.

This second combo does not live up to expectations whatsoever. I'm using
PC2-5300 memory and I can barely overclock the CPU at all. And running at
full speed I see about 25% performance loss on all benchmarks. For
example, instead of getting 66fps converting a DVD to Divx I get about
48fps. This is really dissapointing.

Is this new ECS board a piece of crap or
do I have to overclock the E6300 quite a bit to get the performance of the
overclocked D 805? This E6300 chip should out perform the 805 even not
overclocked...but I don't see it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I don't want to spend $150 on a board to get comparable performance to the
old D 805 cheap system.
Click to expand...

Tomshardware has some performance charts. This one is floating point performance.
Because the folks at Toms, refuse to bench a E6300, you have to scale the E6400
results down to get a result. 1866/2130 = 0.876. Multiply the 13688 the E6400
gets, by 0.876, gives 11990. Now, take the D 840 result, which is 11838 at
3.2GHz, scale by 3.4/3.2 to be representative of your overclocked D 805,
gives 12578. Thus, you would expect the overclocked D 805, to beat the E6300 at
stock.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=433&model2=446&chart=159

You can repeat the exercise for ALU integer performance, with this chart. I'll
leave the math and the suspense, to you. Note that not all the charts scale
well by clock rate, and I selected these two charts for best scaling properties.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=433&model2=446&chart=158

As for your motherboard choice, the p4m800pro-m could well be one of those
overclocked VIA chipsets. VIA took some FSB800 chipsets, and re-rated them
for FSB1066. So one reason for not being able to overclock, could be that
the chipset was already overclocked just running the E6300 at stock. If
you want a chipset "with legs", find an Intel chipset, or at least look
around at some reviews of newer boards, with an eye to how high the FSB
can be raised. And with Intel chipsets, some of the best performance is
obtained, by overclocking with programs like Clockgen, while you are
in Windows. You get better performance that way, than by setting the same
clock in the BIOS (due to how the Northbridge is configured - when the BIOS
sets a high clock, it sets the Northbridge up with higher latency setting).

Also, with regard to your overclocked D 805 - have you touched the components
of the Vcore circuit around the processor socket ? Are they getting hot ?
Try running Prime95, then touch the components. If the components burn you,
then don't expect the motherboard running your D 805 to last forever. By
calculation, the power consumption on overclocked D 805's is astronomically
high. If you actually managed to get to 4GHz, the consumption is over 200W.
If the components don't burn you, while running Prime95, then you are
all right. One motherboard got so hot, while doing an overclock like that,
that it melted plastic foam placed underneath the motherboard for support.

Paul
 
Don said:
Hello. About 6 months ago I bought a ECS RC410L motherboard with a Pentium
D 805 from Fry's. I was amazed at how much performance $140 could buy. It
overclocked to 3.4Ghz and was stable and I could play games and everything.
Well for X-Mas I bought what I thought would be a "better" combo consisting
of p4m800pro-m motherboard and a E6300 duo processor for $160.

This second combo does not live up to expectations whatsoever. I'm using
PC2-5300 memory and I can barely overclock the CPU at all. And running at
full speed I see about 25% performance loss on all benchmarks. For
example, instead of getting 66fps converting a DVD to Divx I get about
48fps. This is really dissapointing.

Is this new ECS board a piece of crap or
do I have to overclock the E6300 quite a bit to get the performance of the
overclocked D 805? This E6300 chip should out perform the 805 even not
overclocked...but I don't see it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I don't want to spend $150 on a board to get comparable performance to the
old D 805 cheap system.
Click to expand...

If you cannot overclock the chipset on a new board, it could be that
the chipset was an FSB800 one, that is being run at FSB1066. Some of
those cannot overclock at all. You want a chipset designed for
FSB1066. But I take it you are choosing motherboards for their
AGP slot, and I don't think there are *any* good chipsets for
overclocking at FSB1066, that are AGP. If using something like
an E6300, if ya wanna go fast, then video will be PCI Express (or PCI).

(A PCI Express motherboard for E6300 - remember to flash upgrade the BIOS)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/CustratingReview.asp?Item=N82E16813128017

Paul
 
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