Hi,
If you want to stay with Intel P4, then there is no advantage in swapping
motherboards.
To make it worth while, a performance increase of at least 25% is needed.
Personally, I wouldn't bother unless the performance increase were well over
50% if not 100% - its not worth the cost or effort. People often do
"trivial" upgrades and are quite disappointed.
If all other parameters remain the same then swapping motherboards is
unlikely to give more than 5%, and of that 5% a large part will be due to
sneaked in overclocking by the mother board manufacturer. You always have
the option to overclock, but unless you have purchased components for
overclocking you are unlikely to see any gain worth the effort (IE 10% max
for stock componentry, over 25% is achievable with hand picked parts).
You have two options if you wish to upgrade and cost is no barrier: Intel
Xeon, or AMD 64bit. There are some new Xeon chips out with matching new
motherboards which will give a good memory bandwidth boost (some gain) and
smaller CPU performance gains (from not much to some - the new Xeon is based
on the existing P4 core). Currently I do not see any worthwhile CPU upgrades
coming from Intel for a person with a P4 3GHz already - and do not see any
likely this year. IE if they hit 4GHz this year that is only a 33% increase
so is marginal in its worth for you. Things have never been so slow to
change on the CPU front.
With the AMD's you will see (reportedly) about a 20% performance gain by
going to a matching 64bit chip and still running 32bit Windows (IE a 3000 PR
rated chip). You can always go to the higher bandwidth FX and Opteron chips
and also consider dual processors (real duals, not HT).
A dual Opteron 250 system will set you back quite a bit, but would be a
worthwhile upgrade if you concurrently run a lot of software and often have
long running tasks / server systems and wish to continue other work
unimpeded. However personally, I would still wait a while for some price
drops and better CPU performance gains.
The performance gains depend very much on the type of applications you run:
if it is games, then an upgrade to your graphics card alone (now) will be
worthwhile. If you have systems that are CPU intensive then my comments
stand. Other systems are IO intensive (E.G. database centric systems can be
if the system has too little memory), software development can be... so
upgrading your disc storage system to use E.G. a caching RAID controller
will help. Performance gains from standard SATA RAID 0 (and 1) are largely
theoretical (a common exception is video editing) as in practice most
applications do not impose a suitable workload to benefit from this as much
as people wish to perceive - the only common exception is Windows XP boot.
HTH
- Tim
