Which P4 2.4Ghz cpu is best?

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JD

There are many revisions of the Pentium 4 2.4Ghz cpu out there ... A, B, C,
some with 1MB cache, etc.

What's the difference and which is the best one? Which is faster? Which
runs hottest/coolest?

Also, do you think getting a P4 2.4A (512K) for $140 CDN is a good deal?
That's around $105 US.
 
There's no way I'd buy a 2.4A processor, unless you're really desparate to
save a few bucks. It runs at a 400MHz FSB speed. If your MB and memory
support it, get the 2.4C. It runs at a 800MHz FSB speed, and has
HyperThreading enabled. I don't know about which one is hottest or coolest,
but all of them should work fine at stock speeds on stock cooling. If you
plan on overclocking, again, I've heard good things about the 2.4C. My 2.4B
did just over 3GHz (3.06, to be precise) with stock cooling. I think the C
will do a little better typically. Don't know about the A.

Clint
 
There are many revisions of the Pentium 4 2.4Ghz cpu out there ... A, B, C,
some with 1MB cache, etc.

What's the difference and which is the best one? Which is faster? Which
runs hottest/coolest?

Also, do you think getting a P4 2.4A (512K) for $140 CDN is a good deal?
That's around $105 US.
Click to expand...

P4C without any doubt! In many scenarios, it outperforms the others by
a good margin. You need to get a dual channel DDR400 mobo though, to
get the most from it. It has HT too, and that is quite nice as well.

I suppose P4B is sort of ok'ish, but as for that 2.4A, I have an old
2.4GHz. I find it quite slow. I was disappointed from the start, and
the Athlons I've got since, are stomping all over it, back and forth.
Get the P4C!
If you're looking for a good deal, you're considering the wrong brand,
wrong manufacturer.
And no, I don't think $105 is a good deal for a used 2.4 P4A.

Differences: The P4 is a very inefficient architecture. For its
average performance it depends heavily on the contribution from its
excellent L2 cache latency, ram latency and ram bandwidth. For this
reason, P4 performance scales with these. With its 800MHz fsb, P4C is
better at these things, if you've got the right chipset and ram.
P4C also sports a feature called HyperThreading. This is a way to take
advantage of 'free' execution capacity in the cpu by running a bit on
a different program thread, provided such exists, and the OS supports
it.
With clumsily programmed Windows applications, HT also improves
multitasking responsiveness.

ancra
 
A good answer really depends on your motherboard and its support.

If with your motherboard you need to stick with a 100MHz FSB, then
the P4 2.4A (I think here "A" means Northwood) should be your best
choice. The ones with 1MB cache would be an "E" and that means a
Prescott, but I don't think there are 2.4E Prescotts around. Even
if there were, you would be paying more for less, and that would make
a 2.4E a poor choice.
 
I suppose P4B is sort of ok'ish, but as for that 2.4A, I have an old
2.4GHz. I find it quite slow. I was disappointed from the start, and
the Athlons I've got since, are stomping all over it, back and forth.
Click to expand...

That's interesting. I have two roughly equivalent machines, one a P4A @ 2.4
GHz (Intel 845 chipset) and the other an Athlon XP 2400+ (VIA KM266 chipset
and CPU "Thoroughbred" core 266 FSB version). Both machines are running
512MB PC2100 Mushkin Enhanced memory with all memory settings tweaked to the
max.

On PCMark2002, my scores are as follows:

Pentium 4 2.4-GHz system -- CPU=5868, Memory=5457, HDD=1309
Athlon XP 2400+ system -- CPU=5281 and Memory=2374, HDD=1196

(Note: The higher disk score on the P4 system is easily
explained by the 8MB cache on the drive. The drive on
the Athlon system has only a 2MB cache.)

Maybe it's the chipsets in question, but the Athlon system is certainly not
"stomping all over" the Pentium 4 system. Even allowing for statistical
errors, the Athlon still trails the Pentium 4 system. In fact, I was a bit
disappointed with the Athlon's performance; I thought for sure that it would
at least match the P4's performance. Again, it may be the VIA chipset that's
slowing down the Athlon XP, but if that's the case, it must be a really
crappy chipset.

And what's up with that memory performance gap?
 
That's interesting. I have two roughly equivalent machines, one a P4A @ 2.4
GHz (Intel 845 chipset) and the other an Athlon XP 2400+ (VIA KM266 chipset
and CPU "Thoroughbred" core 266 FSB version). Both machines are running
512MB PC2100 Mushkin Enhanced memory with all memory settings tweaked to the
max.

On PCMark2002, my scores are as follows:

Pentium 4 2.4-GHz system -- CPU=5868, Memory=5457, HDD=1309
Athlon XP 2400+ system -- CPU=5281 and Memory=2374, HDD=1196

(Note: The higher disk score on the P4 system is easily
explained by the 8MB cache on the drive. The drive on
the Athlon system has only a 2MB cache.)

Maybe it's the chipsets in question, but the Athlon system is certainly not
"stomping all over" the Pentium 4 system. Even allowing for statistical
errors, the Athlon still trails the Pentium 4 system. In fact, I was a bit
disappointed with the Athlon's performance; I thought for sure that it would
at least match the P4's performance. Again, it may be the VIA chipset that's
slowing down the Athlon XP, but if that's the case, it must be a really
crappy chipset.

And what's up with that memory performance gap?
Click to expand...

PCMark favoring P4 is entirely normal.
Your P4 readings also seem fairly normal.
Memory benchmark for your AthlonXP 2400+ is not entirely normal
though. The P4A should have about 50% better reading at PCMark2002,
not above 100%. So something smells fish...

What's your memory config? How many sticks do you have in the boards?
And of course you're running the Athlons fsb-clock at 133MHz?
"KM" - Is that integrated graphics?

PCMark2002 CPU readout, should, I think, be pretty dead even for
2.4P4A and XP 2400+.

Aside from this, I do hope you don't believe that PCMark readings
correlates to general performance on applications?

ancra
 
PCMark favoring P4 is entirely normal.
Your P4 readings also seem fairly normal.
Memory benchmark for your AthlonXP 2400+ is not entirely normal
though. The P4A should have about 50% better reading at PCMark2002,
not above 100%. So something smells fish...

What's your memory config? How many sticks do you have in the boards?
And of course you're running the Athlons fsb-clock at 133MHz?
"KM" - Is that integrated graphics?

PCMark2002 CPU readout, should, I think, be pretty dead even for
2.4P4A and XP 2400+.

Aside from this, I do hope you don't believe that PCMark readings
correlates to general performance on applications?
Click to expand...

Oh, not at all. But for a quick-n-dirty way to grab some empirical data for
a quick-n-dirty comparison, PCMark isn't too bad. Still, even allowing for
PCMark favoring the P4 (which I do recall hearing about), my numbers for the
Athlon system still blow chunks.

To answer your questions:

Yes, I'm using the integrated graphics on the Athlon system. I'm not using
that system for games, at least not yet, so I didn't bother with high-end
graphics on that one. My son and I use the P4 system for occasional games,
and I have a Radeon 9600 Pro in that one. Are you hinting that the
integrated graphics may account for the low memory score on the Athlon
system, perhaps because of the shared-memory issue?

As for the memory config in the Athlon system, it has two 256MB sticks.
Memory bus is indeed 266MHz and the memory settings are on manual and maxed
out. (I ran MemTest86 v. 3.1 all night to make sure that the memory was OK
at the aggressive timings, and everything was fine. Gotta love Mushkin....)

Any ideas? It's got to be either the integrated video or a crappy chipset as
I had suspected earlier. (BTW, I'm running the latest-and-greatest VIA
chipset driver.)
 
Yes, I'm using the integrated graphics on the Athlon system. I'm not using
that system for games, at least not yet, so I didn't bother with high-end
graphics on that one. My son and I use the P4 system for occasional games,
and I have a Radeon 9600 Pro in that one. Are you hinting that the
integrated graphics may account for the low memory score on the Athlon
system, perhaps because of the shared-memory issue?
Click to expand...

I don't know, graphics ram sharing does something. Whether it's enough
to explain your results, I don't know. But maybe.
As for the memory config in the Athlon system, it has two 256MB sticks.
Memory bus is indeed 266MHz and the memory settings are on manual and maxed
out. (I ran MemTest86 v. 3.1 all night to make sure that the memory was OK
at the aggressive timings, and everything was fine. Gotta love Mushkin....)
Click to expand...

Yes, memorybus yes, but that wasn't what I asked about. Since you know
what you're doing, I'm sure it's right, but what I asked about was the
clock, that controls the EV6 fsb speed (2X) between cpu and
Northbridge, as well as CPU speed by the multiplier. As you're
probably perfectly aware, this is often set to 100 by default, which
is wrong, of course.

But you know, surfing very briefly on VIA chipsets, you might be right
about the K?266 chipset. Seems you need K?333 to support DDR266-133MHz
memorybus-266MHzFSB speeds fully. So that might be it.

(Also, your memorybus should not be set at 266MHz, it should be
133MHz, but I'm sure it is, and you already know all that, and just
meant the DDR transfer rate is 266MHz... ? ,... - Oh, never mind
;-)).

ancra
 
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