Fragetti and other Core2 Quad owners

[ME BIGGD01]

I was still having problems with heat with the new system all together and was having Bios issues once in awhile where I had to reset cmos. I decided to check your specs out once again and set bios config exactly as yours. This did wonders and althogh clocked slower, it is cooler and much more stable. One thing I ahave noticed with a question you asked about setting memory speeds at 800 or 1066 and I see not difference. What I did do though is changed the memory which I trully believe was my problem and not at speeds but size. I had 2x 2gigs of ram where this coaused a problem with the latency at high speed over clock. Regardless of me running the memory at 800 instead of 1066, I believe this was an issue and an old rule that more will slow you down. I switched these 4 gigs out and put 2 x 1 gig 4-4-4-15 ddr2 800 and all is well. I have the system pretty much clocked the same as you now and I an happy. I hate the noise when all fans are running at max so this is good. The 100 MHz difference is about 3-5% depending on application.

At this point I am curious to know the difference in performance compared to the chip Jim was talking about. I was contemplating switching out but the price was over 100 bucks more. After looking at the specs of the chip compared to ours, I was curious at the differences which are. native 333 fsb, more cache and most of all 45nm which does run cooler. Now we currently have out fsb clocked at close to 400 but I wonder if the new chip does in fact offer the the difference of money. I am going to try to test oone of these if I can get my hands on one but if the chip does allow you to overclock without killing the chip I may switch. I worry that due to the 45nm, there may be a limit as to how much votage it can take over a period of time. I imagine these chips will run a full 400 fsb because the more expensive and newer chips do. If you know anyone with one of these chips, it may be worth to see how much better this chip is compared to the 65nm 2.4.

Now I am impressed with this system. I have not been this impressed in hardware for a long time. Now most people use desktop hardware compared to the server hardware I have used through the years. As you know I have crap all over and what I see in this is that this product comes much less in prie overall than a workstation put together. Although I find the boards to be extremely expensive, overall this damn thing with the ability to overclock makes it just worth it over all. Due to time limits and problems with wife I have yet to test the encoding ability. I know you and the Fragetti bro's are in to ths and wonder what you think and what have you tested so far. I am no doubt going to use this system as my workstation at home.

As far as the quad AMD stuff I have, it all runs great and no problems. It is at it's limits though and just can not offer the clock speed. Although the multi processing seems to eun better on the AMD side which is weird. I have noticed the AMD quad chips actually run faster if all chips are running at max. What I mean by that is if you run say a binchmark that uses one thread, it will come in with a score lower than if you ran that same BM 4 times at the same time. I have noticed that I get 4 higher scores than the one single score. I wonder what that's all about as it seems if there is something not being utilized in the amd chip to take advantage of the core or the core does not utilize the current software to it's full potential. Either way, I have both platforms which will sit side by side. I do not plan in changing for a couple of years now unless I se something over whelming with performance. I am happy that both of my systems utilize crossfire.

[JIMINATOR]

biggs, you might be experiencing "load balancing", which may attempt to distribute the app over multiple cores and slow them down. You might want to look at the task manager performance tab to see how the cores are being utilized. As for penryn, the Q9300 may be a better deal, some are saying it overclocks better and with more flexibility with the lower FSB. For myself I just may skip this current generation and go with nehalem. I am not currently playing anything and at 3GHz my C2D works fine for browsing. :)

[Grimmy]

I been talking with a guy from EVGA about my rig, and well he explained to me how having 4 x 1G RAM sticks would actually hinder my performance, of course this is on win xp pro. If I was using vista 64, that would be different.

So for now, I have 2 x 1G sticks collecting dust on my desk. Just have to get time to put all the pieces together from all my upgrades, and make another machine to do something. Since I switched games currently, I have a 3rd desktop that just collects dust, but my TV rig is rockin n rolling.

Anyways, he said it was something about having to convert something into 64 bit to use it, and then back to 32 bit, which takes up clock time and hinders performance, since it was a 32 bit os. If I can find the post he talk about it in, I will post it.

[Fragetti]

Good stuff there Biggs ty

What do you use to do your incoding ? maybe we can do a test with the same software and movie.

Yes grimmy winxp 32 will run like crap with 4 gig memory. I think I read it's good to 3 gig. I use 2x1gig works the best for me dual channel

[ME BIGGD01]

I am sorry to say that the EVGA guy does not know what he's talking about if he is sayong 4 gigs will slow your system down. This is not true in that aspect. Yes WIndows 32 bit will use only 3.25 but it won't run slower.

On a side note, what will slow your system down is having 4 sticks of ram in your system. This highers your latency and adds an extra 2 clock cycles to your memory timing. Maybe more sometimes depending on your ram.

Now if you have 2 x 2 gig sticks, your system will slow down only because of the latency of the modules.

The difference with a 64 bit os is that the OS will use all and more memory if you have it. There are other advantages also but too bad no applications really take advantage of it.