Why Pentium?

[kony]

You've just lost that bet.

I went out of my way to make the PVR as quiet as
possible and that cpu fan certainly doesnt in mine.

Oh?
Is the fan running at stock speed?

If not, you dont' really know WHAT the noise level is.

If the fan IS running at stock speed, you're just plain
ignorant if you feel it's as quiet as possible because NONE
of Intel's fans are as quiet as possible even if they DIDN'T
make the noise.

Perhaps you are just tone deaf, but you sure as hell don't
know jack about fans.

 

[kony]

Pity was never UNIVERSALLY SEEN WITH ALL P3s.

I think you really are tone deaf.
Were there even louder fans than Intel's? Sure, some were a
LOT louder. Problem was that the high-pitched sound from
their fans' bearing whine is more objectionable to some than
same amount of noise at lower frequency.

It's real easy to demonstrate, I can usually tell if a box
has that retail fan in it just by listening to it running,
case closed.

Have fun explaining mine and chrisv's.

Considering I have at least half a dozen used ones and a few
brand-new, still in the clamshell, plus having sold tons of
systems that I'd tried them on, I'm not all that concerned
about it. Then there's the online forums where others
independantly mentioned it without any prior mention by me.

I didnt do a damned thing to mine.

Then you are either tone deaf or have no clue at all just
how quiet a fan can be. Sad really, these older CPUs can be
inaudibly cooled very easily and those fans were nowhere
near that good.

Do tell though, what RPM is it running at? It's pretty much
common knowledge that any ball bearing fan over about 2800,
give or take a few hundred, is audible. Unless your board
has fan speed control, we haven't addressed that possiblity
yet, but it also is same diff as manually changing the
default RPM.

 

[paulmd]

P1 eh? just how big a fan was on those P1's?

Little guys, mostly. If you keep them dust free, they work just fine.

 

[The little lost angel]

That *is* surprising and indicates a severe lack of QA by err, somebody.

Definitely, it was on a new file/print/web server with a Pentium-D for
this office I was attached to on project. After a week or so, it
started rebooting by itself. I fiddled with it while waiting for the
guys who sold it to come, it became obvious very quickly that the
system was overheating. Very shocked to find the fan dead.

The fortunate thing was the fileserver worked fine after I downclocked
it to half speed and undervoltage it so folks could still get things
done without noticeable performance hit. And that was how it stayed
until they replaced the stock fan with a better item.

 

[The little lost angel]

Oh yes, it will. You've never seen those videos on the Web of AMD
processors overheating?

You mean that video by Tom's Hardware? If that was the same cause as
your system failure, then I would have to say the cost and cause of
your loss should be shouldered by the person who yanked off your
heatsink while you were using it and by you for not stopping the
lunatic.

I've done this experiment with my friend. We ran Prime95 on the
AthlonXP with the heatsink WITHOUT a spinning fan, deliberately at
that time to check if the chip would really burn in a more realistic
case of fan failure. The system eventually hang after a few minutes
with temperatures reaching the 90s but nothing burnt. If we had
bothered to set the onboard temperature monitor/shutdown, it would
likely have shutdown way before the system froze. Suffice to say the
chip worked fine after that test and did so until the system was
upgraded.

So I'm inclined to believe that if you had to replace $1000 worth of
parts per system, something else is wrong. In fact, the only thing I
can think of and have known of that's capable of taking out almost
every component in the system during failure, is the PSU.

 

[Rod Speed]

Oh?
Is the fan running at stock speed?
Yep.

If not, you dont' really know WHAT the noise level is.

Pity it is.

If the fan IS running at stock speed, you're just
plain ignorant if you feel it's as quiet as possible
because NONE of Intel's fans are as quiet as
possible even if they DIDN'T make the noise.

I meant that the OTHER COMPONENTS ARE AS QUIET
AS POSSIBLE, SO I WOULD CERTAINLY BE ABLE TO
HEAR BEARING WHINE IN THAT BOXED FAN IF IT
WAS AS YOU PIG IGNORANTLY CLAIMED.

And I run that system with no covers on it too,
right next to where I sit, so if the cpu fan did have
a bearing whine, I'd certainly be able to hear it.

Perhaps you are just tone deaf,

Nope. I changed to the quietest hard drive I could find and
the quietest power supply I could find because that particular
system was producing the most noise from those two
sources until I had changed those two components.

but you sure as hell don't know jack about fans.

Easy to claim, child.

And I dont need to know a damned thing about fans
to know that that particular fan has no bearing whine.

Keep desperately digging, you'll be out in china any day now, AGAIN.

 

[Rod Speed]

I think you really are tone deaf.

Not a shred of evidence that you are actually capable of thought.

Or being able to bullshit your way out of your predicament in spades.

Were there even louder fans than Intel's?

Corse there were.

Sure, some were a LOT louder. Problem was that the high-pitched
sound from their fans' bearing whine is more objectionable to some
than same amount of noise at lower frequency.

Pity it has no bearing whine.

And I have had other fans with bearing whine too, so I cant be deaf.

It's real easy to demonstrate, I can usually tell if a box has
that retail fan in it just by listening to it running, case closed.

Pity your original claim is pure bullshit.

Considering I have at least half a dozen used ones and a
few brand-new, still in the clamshell, plus having sold tons
of systems that I'd tried them on, I'm not all that concerned
about it. Then there's the online forums where others
independantly mentioned it without any prior mention by me.

Says nothing useful what so ever about
whether that problem WAS EVER UNIVERSAL
WITH ALL P3s as you pig ignorantly claimed.

One obvious possibility is that was only ever seen with a
PARTICULAR boxed fan that was shipped with SOME P3s.

Then you are either tone deaf

Cant be when the noise of the other stuff in that box was
irritating enough to get me to change it for quiet stuff,
and when I run that system with no case covers on it.

or have no clue at all just how quiet a fan can be.

I already told you that the Northwood boxed cpu fan
that I installed on a different system, the one that
replaced that one as the main system, WAS SO QUIET
THAT I HAD TO LOOK CLOSELY AT IT TO CHECK IF
IT WAS SPINNING OR NOT, and that was with my face
only inches from the fan, with no case covers on, with no
hard drives yet installed, with a very quiet power supply,
you pathetic excuse for an argumentative bullshit artist.

Sad really, these older CPUs can be inaudibly cooled very easily

It is doing that fine thanks.

and those fans were nowhere near that good.

Wrong, as always.

Do tell though, what RPM is it running at?
2872

It's pretty much common knowledge that any ball bearing
fan over about 2800, give or take a few hundred, is audible.

IRRELEVANT TO WHETHER IT HAS BEARING WHINE.

Unless your board has fan speed control,

It isnt being run as other than the full speed.

we haven't addressed that possiblity yet,

I knew all along that its running at full speed thanks.

but it also is same diff as manually changing the default RPM.

Pity its running at full speed.

Keep desperately diggging, you'll be out in china any day now, AGAIN.

 

[manny]

That's a very limited view of "business computing". As a broad category,
e.g., decision support systems can do some very heavy duty calculations,
whether it be financial analysis or strategic & tactical planning for any
part of a manufacturing business.

Nonsense. Every corp. uses decision support and in just about every part
of their organisation to plan strategic and tactical moves; to not make use
of such valuable tools would be suicide. The tools may be embedded in an
application which presents results in, e.g., HTML but they are there...

That company I worked for had only 50 employees, at its peak, so our
business software needs were modest and could be handled just
accounting and cost estimation packages. Most of the needed strategy
and tactics consisted of making the salesmen go out and find customers
rather than just sit around in the office, providing technicians with
everything they wanted, and keeping the owner's son out of the way.

 

[manny]

You mean that video by Tom's Hardware? If that was the same cause as
your system failure, then I would have to say the cost and cause of
your loss should be shouldered by the person who yanked off your
heatsink while you were using it and by you for not stopping the
lunatic.

What if the heatsink had come off because its clip attached to only
2 plastic hooks on the CPU socket and one of those hooks had
snapped off, aided by the heatsink's tiny contact area with the CPU
package? That's happened when 32-bit AMD computers were
shipped or were merely moved for servicing.

I've done this experiment with my friend. We ran Prime95 on the
AthlonXP with the heatsink WITHOUT a spinning fan, deliberately at
that time to check if the chip would really burn in a more realistic
case of fan failure. The system eventually hang after a few minutes
with temperatures reaching the 90s but nothing burnt. If we had
bothered to set the onboard temperature monitor/shutdown, it would
likely have shutdown way before the system froze. Suffice to say the
chip worked fine after that test and did so until the system was
upgraded.

That's not surprising, considering how much better a CPU with heatsink
conducts heat to air than a CPU alone does, also a heatsink's
efficiency
increases as its temperature increases over ambient.

 

[Mxsmanic]

Oh?
Is the fan running at stock speed?

If not, you dont' really know WHAT the noise level is.

If the fan IS running at stock speed, you're just plain
ignorant if you feel it's as quiet as possible because NONE
of Intel's fans are as quiet as possible even if they DIDN'T
make the noise.

Perhaps you are just tone deaf, but you sure as hell don't
know jack about fans.

CPU fans are not an important source of noise in a closed case. Most
of the noise comes from other case or PSU fans and from the disk
drives.

 

[Mxsmanic]

Yes, but if the memory is used to store the data being
worked on by the CPU (as in photoediting or whatever), it
also takes that much longer to process with a slower CPU.

There are very few operations in photoediting programs that require
large amounts of CPU horsepower. Any slowness perceived by the user
is typically a consequence of limited memory--portions of the image
are being moved to and from a private swap file. Add memory and the
slowness disappears.

 

[Mxsmanic]

How about for apps that do audio or video editing?
Aren't their I/Os for big hunks of data?

Sometimes, but they are doing a lot of disk I/O generally, too, so
access time is still very important. So is memory.

How about for compilers?

Compilers hardly put any strain at all on today's machines.

 

[Mxsmanic]

Not with personal desktop systems.

With any system, unless it is dedicated to a single purpose that by
chance does very little disk I/O.

Yes, but your claim that access times havent improved
much over 30 or 40 years is clearly just plain wrong.

They've improved by a factor of four or so, which is nothing compared
to the improvements in processors speed.

And doesnt explain why drives like the Raptors give a
worthwhile improvement in performance in many situations,
or why 7200 rpm drives are noticeably better performers
than the older 3600 rpm say 1G drives either, let alone the
noticeably slower 200M drives.

Check the access times. High RPM affects latency: at 3600 RPM,
latency is 16 ms; at 7200 RPM, it's 8 ms; at 15000 RPM, it's 4 ms.

The difference is very noticeable if you say put an elderly 1G
drive into a system instead of the current 300G 7200 rpm drive.
In spades with a decent Access database for example.

The more disk I/O you do, the more obvious differences in access time
will be. But even the fastest disks are extremely slow, so much so
that any program doing a significant amount of disk I/O will be
delayed primarily by that I/O.

There is no difference in the access time between those two drives,
both Fujitsu MP*AT drives.

Access times vary from one model of disk to another. Some disks have
similar access times.

Nope, disk delay was then and still is the main bottleneck in personal
desktop systems when it isnt what the user is actually doing.

The bottleneck is much worse now.

Oh bullshit. Word and Excel dont. Neither does Access or Outlook.

Everything does, even the OS.

The major consumer of processor power in Windows and most GUI-based
operating systems is the GUI itself, which can eat 80% or more of
available processor power.

 

[Rod Speed]

Timothy Daniels writes

Sometimes, but they are doing a lot of disk I/O
generally, too, so access time is still very important.

Nope, because there is little random access involved.

So is memory.

Compilers hardly put any strain at all on today's machines.

They do however normally do quite a bit of disk IO and that can
be relatively random compared with say audio and video editing.

 

[Mxsmanic]

Not true, you're ignoring the bottlenecks INBETWEEN disk
accesses... the subsequent accesses only happen AFTER the
data being loaded from disk is processed in many cases. Not
ALL cases, but quite a few. Take adobe acrobat for
instance, or photoshop, or whatever. Just because the most
common tasks aren't such an issue, it doesn't rule out each
machine having some other demanding tasks that may not be as
common on all systems, but it is common for most systems to
have something more demanding.

All you have to do is look at processor time. If a program is using
less than 100% processor and is not waiting for user input or network
I/O, then it's waiting for disk I/O.

No. Multiple application environments are exactly when the
filecache is of the most benefit.

Not so. You need locality of reference in file cache systems, since
they cannot store more than an extremely small portion of the total
data in the file system.

 

[Mxsmanic]

Lack of snappiness on a single CPU is due to lack of
processor speed and/or inproper process priority.

It's mostly a function of OS design. General-purpose operating
systems tend not to be very snappy. A real-time OS will be extremely
snappy no matter what type of processor is used. Of course, real-time
operating systems have their own problems, which is why they aren't
used for ordinary desktops.

 

[Noozer]

CPU fans are not an important source of noise in a closed case. Most
of the noise comes from other case or PSU fans and from the disk
drives.

The CPU fan is the ONLY device in my Media PC that makes any audible noise
at all.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed writes

With any system, unless it is dedicated to a single
purpose that by chance does very little disk I/O.

Wrong, most obviously when the disk IO is almost entirely linear.

Most obviously with video editing today.

They've improved by a factor of four or so,

Your claim that access times havent improved
much over 30 or 40 years is clearly just plain wrong.

which is nothing compared to the improvements in processors speed.

Irrelevant to disk access, which is what is being discussed.

AND the thruput has increased a hell of a lot more than 4 times too.

Check the access times. High RPM affects latency: at 3600 RPM,
latency is 16 ms; at 7200 RPM, it's 8 ms; at 15000 RPM, it's 4 ms.

So much for your claim that access times havent improved
much over 30 or 40 years. That is clearly just plain wrong.

The more disk I/O you do, the more obvious differences in access time will be.

Pity there isnt much improvement in access times with that drive
pair. The improvement is almost entirely in thruput, not access times.

But even the fastest disks are extremely slow, so
much so that any program doing a significant amount
of disk I/O will be delayed primarily by that I/O.

Irrelevant to your claim that access times havent improved
much over 30 or 40 years. That is clearly just plain wrong.

Access times vary from one model of disk to another.

By bugger all with that particular pair.

Some disks have similar access times.

And that pair does, so your claim that access
times are what matters is clearly just plain wrong.


Still isnt.

The bottleneck is much worse now.

Depends entirely on what you are doing. Its hardly ever a bottleneck
now, just when doing video editing now. In spades with transcoding
where the disk delay is completely irrelevant.

Everything does,

Mindlessly silly. Word doesnt, Excel doesnt, Outlook doesnt.

even the OS.

Gets sillier by the minute. IE does, almost entirely due to the
internet cache, the OS does **** all disk IO for the simplest functions.

The major consumer of processor power in Windows
and most GUI-based operating systems is the GUI itself,

Pity we happen to be discussing DISK IO.

which can eat 80% or more of available processor power.

Pure pig ignorant drivel.

 

[The little lost angel]

There are very few operations in photoediting programs that require
large amounts of CPU horsepower. Any slowness perceived by the user
is typically a consequence of limited memory--portions of the image
are being moved to and from a private swap file. Add memory and the
slowness disappears.

Only up to a certain limit. Once you reach a certain image size,
processing power WILL make a difference because there simply is that
many pixels to process. It does not even have to be humongous, in
Photoshop a 300 DPI A3 size poster that a student might do for a
school event can chew up 6 minutes with just one filter like radial
blur, although most other filters on a similar image can take between
15 second to 100 seconds usually. Previews are definitely crawling on
images of this size and very often Windows will think Photoshop has
stopped responding. Definitely noticeable.

No, it's not due to insufficient memory (PS reports 100% memory
efficiency), I have 1.5GB on the machine I do my image editing on
simply because of the need to handle these sizes without hitting the
disk.

 

[The little lost angel]

What if the heatsink had come off because its clip attached to only
2 plastic hooks on the CPU socket and one of those hooks had
snapped off, aided by the heatsink's tiny contact area with the CPU
package? That's happened when 32-bit AMD computers were
shipped or were merely moved for servicing.

The system will probably keep hanging/freezing up from my experience
with a similar situation. The system in question had a bad heatsink
installation, basically one edge was sitting on the raised part of the
socket where the lever hinge is. So there was only minimal contact
between the heatsink and the chip on one edge. The chip didn't die in
the few hours it took for the user to complain about it, for me to
figure out what was wrong with it.