The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Sam,
Only after Microsoft crippled the hell out of service pack 3, as far as most MS OSes until 2030 go! Before that, XP-Pro was faster! It was a ruse Microsoft pulled to show that Vista was the superior and faster OS. Nothing more than a marketing ploy to try and insure Vista's sales! If you have the original final release of SP3 installed, it's faster than Vista. As far as I know MS won't let you install it anymore. I haven't tried it yet, but I have had people that I gave the original to tell me that it craps out after the Validation process and gives you a link to the new one. I haven't tried to do it yet because I'm on one of the old P-IIs at the moment as I just sent the 7750BE back to AMD today. Besides, with all the security crap and double checking to be sure if you really want to do something, it takes longer to do things anyway. I does have the distinction of being the only other MS OS, besides ME that had incompatibilities with itself! Let's be honest here, most people, at least here in the States, hate Vista. That's why we will have a Win 7 to begin with! Microsoft hasn't decided when to pull the plug on it, but I doubt if it will be very long after Win 7 proves itself in real world use, at the very latest!

Vista support stops in April of 2012 anyway, so it will be supported at least until then, and computer manufacturers have been left completely in the dark as to whether they will even be allowed to ship computers with Vista on them after Win 7 is officially released.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

when this bad boy here gonna be released to the public...I gotta get hold of cooler master and get my order in...

922 MidTower
that would look great sitting next to the 590

Happy Building

 

Will,
Interesting looking case! It wouldn't fare well here though with all those nooks and crannys. Too much dust, and the bay covers would be a bitch to keep clean!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I don't remember SP3 being any slower than SP2.

 

The version after they fixed the AMD/SP3 problem was a good bit (noticeably) faster than SP2. The one you get now is about 10-15% slower. They changed it after comparative testing between Vista and XP, showed that XP was faster. The older version will not work. I just tried to install it and it no longer works at all. That's how Vista suddenly became faster! It was right after all those much publicized shoot-outs and which is faster articles. I mentioned that a while ago on AD that they had crippled something in XP-Pro, and that it suddenly ran slower! I don't know where you were at the time, but there were a number of comments on it.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I haven't noticed that at all on any of my machines. And they all run XP Pro. Can you show me an article telling what they changed? If anything, my performance has been much better since SP3.

 

All it take Russ is a good air compressor to do the Job I don't have one of my own that's y ...I bring mind to work to get the job good and done right every so often I wipe my fan blades and housing down to get the dust down...I can't stand dust build up of my fans


Happy Building

 

Estuansis,
The so called "Final" original was faster. I discovered it quite a while ago when I installed SP3 on my E6750, after a fresh install of XP on another Seagate 160. If I put the drive back in that I removed and the speed comes back. I no longer put SP3 on anything. Like I told Sam, I posted it on the thread, and I'm sorry, but not going to go back and dig through all those posts in the last 6 to 8 months to find it. I'm not even sure which thread it's on!

Nobody seems to know why, but it affects download speeds, throttling, and memory speed under certain conditions. Before that, XP was about 10% faster than Vista.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Russ, I believe I recall you saying SP3 was, in fact, faster than ever.

 

I can perhaps consider SP3 being faster for AMDs, but if I recall, AMDs needed a dual core hotfix for Windows XP. Perhaps the earlier hotfix was incompatible with the newer versions of SP3?

 

wow. i got an ISO with vista 64 retail SP2. and OMG it installs fast. i was at desktop in 22mins.

now been 57mins and i just have to restart to let all drivers work

 

Sam,
You are absolutely correct. The day of it's supposed Final release, thousands of AMDs had massive problems. That's another strike against Beta software! That's what made Win 95 such a huge disappointment. The final Beta of it was super good, and the Official release lacked most of the nice features the final Beta had! It was like a "Broken Promise"! SP3 sucks just as bad on AMDs as it does on Intels, in terms of speed. I haven't used SP3 with XP-Pro since I found it was suddenly much slower than before. Roughly about 20% slower. It makes sense as Vista is about 10% faster than XP now, and XP was about 10% faster before what ever Microsoft did to it!

Russ

 

From the very beginning I've used the AMD Dual Core Optimizer for Windows XP. It's a fix for a loss in clock-sync for multi-core AMDs in XP and works for AMD quads as well. It helps them operate more efficiently in multi-threaded games and helps XP better balance the load on all cores. AMDs have always seemed slightly snappier for me in XP due(in small part) to this fix, my strict rule of low latency memory for AMDs, and obviously the integrated memory controller. They've always had faster memory throughput, but Intels still definitely take the win in raw application performance.

Can I have an example? Any benchmarks or apps that take a noticeable hit? I have some of my scores from before SP3 and it would be interesting to know what this slow down affects. Now that you've mentioned this I want to see a comparison XD

EDIT: It hasn't affected my SuperPI times at all. If anything, they've gotten maybe .2-.5 seconds faster than SP2. If there's a performance drop for SP3 I'm not experiencing it. Everything performs exactly as it should.

LOL I'm addicted to GOM Player now. I use it for everything and it works on ogg vorbis, MKV, DivX, etc. Basically everything but FLAC so far as I can see. It's even my default music player now as the mp3 skin is so simplistic yet useful. It remembers your music directory too so all you need to do is hit "add" and "OK" to load up your songs after the first use. It can actually find its own custom video codecs too. Unlike WMP which needs third party codecs. It's also super resource light and works flawlessly even with movies that are normally glitchy at best in other players. 64MB memory usage right now playing Saving Private Ryan in 720p HD.

 

KMplayer works with everything with all the codecs built in, inc flac, give it a go?

 

Estuansis,
I wouldn't know where to begin looking. One of the things I like to do is play with google. It's amazing just how many variations of the same theme you can come up with. It's all in how you phrase and paraphrase your request! Sometimes, it can be just one word added or removed that turns up something you didn't expect. I generally just paste the links to Notepad, and post them. I almost never save them. I've already checked my PMs, which took hours, and couldn't locate the post. Add to that, it could be on any one of 4 threads, and you begin to see the problem in finding anything, let alone something that old.

With my E6750, I found my superPi improve with the good SP3, and was about the same speed as yours! 1MB superPi was in the 13.84 second range at 3.55GHz, memory at 5-5-5-15, at 1066MHz and a memory bandwith a hair away from 8200, that's right in E8400 country! Before sombody pops of and tells me that the E8400 can go much faster than the E6750, I already know that! Not too shabby for only 1MB of L2 and 2MB of L3! I had it booted up and running at 3.8GHz, and was just starting to fool with it a bit when I found out it was sold. I back to 3.55GHz, as soon as I got off of the phone. I know that at 3.8GHz, even with the memory underclocked and the memory timings tightened, it's easily in the 12 second bracket. Mid 12s! OK, back to the AMD for a moment!

Here's the part I don't understand. I run the benchmarks and look at the numbers, and they are horrible! Yet when I use it for anything, there's very little it does slower than the E6750 did. It sucks to a degree at compressing a Win.rar file, so maybe it takes a minute longer. I don't sit there and watch the file compress, I do the next step to what I'm planning on doing with the compressed file. It's not like you have to sit and wait for it! With video encoding with the new motherboard, with DVDRB/CCE, 2 pass, it wipes the floor with the E6750 that runs .55MHz faster. My personal test CD, Lost in space (7.2GB) shaved an incredible 11 minutes off of my best encode time for that DVD, from 41 to 30 minutes! I have my 9500GT video card overclocked to 594MHz Core clock, 1512MHz Shader clock and 1728MHz memory clock, from 550, 1400 and 1600MHz! I get scores of 14,449 in 3D mark 03, and 7973 in 06! I can't wait to see what it's going to do with the new 7750BE when it comes from AMD. I had the 7750 running at 3.4GHz before the motherboard problems. After that it never went over 3.2GHz, and towards the end I finally had to lower it to 3.1 and then 3.0GHz. I guess something to do with what was wrong with the chipset, messed up the CPU! Note that that's the speed at the time of the above encode and 3D marks as well! How can a machine that scores 25-27% less MIPS than the E6750, do that? I can't wait until I get a Phenom II 940 for it this summer! I like it, and that's all that's matters to me. If I don't care, why should that matter to others! It's none of their business!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

I have VIRTUALLY no complaints thus far! In fact, it multitasks like a dream LOL! Its given me better encode times with Rebuilder than I could have hoped for. VERY satisfied. I ended up in a crunch moment today, and ended up doing at least a half dozen things at one time, and it still was showing only 25% cpu usage on the windows 7 gadget. I realize some tasks vary as to how much strain they put on a cpu. It's still impressive LOL!

 

lol a little touch russ? hehe XD

BTW the E8400 can be OCed haha

oh an im sure the E6750 doesnt have any L3 cache...

 

Interesting, perhaps with the SP2 built Vista they removed the sections where you sit at a blank screen for 10 minutes? That's a lot of the install time.
The reason I made the point about XP SP3 is that I never noticed SP3 being any slower than SP2. I've yet to install SP3 on my XP PC, as it's shortly going to be upgraded to Win7.
I'm still on MediaPlayerClassic for FLAC, MKV, MP3, AVI, you name it.
Rule of thumb Russ, if you run synthetic benchmarks and get worse scores than real life, don't use synthetic benchmarks. Time taken to for example, rip a DVD is one of several 'real life' benchmarks that sites use, and and such tests are what I look at far more closely than synthetic tests for this very reason, they're more accurate, and they're also what people are actually likely to use their CPUs for!

 

yeah not sitting for 10 mins with the little circle going round and round. honestly i couldn't believe how quick it went.


though drivers, installs and settings etc etc took em a while longer