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How fast can I make my PC?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
I built my own Desktop PC about 4 years ago and very happy with it on a day to day basis doing web surfing, internet, etc, hardly ever play games so that's not an issue.
However from time to time I need to do some number crunching like converting MP3's to WMA's or resizing a whole batch of photos.
It's only got an Athlon XP1800+ with 512MB of DDR 400 RAM which for day to day stuff is fine.
I want to know is
a) what's the fast processor I can put in it,
b) where beside's ebay might sell such processors and
c) what the speed increase might be in a way I can measure.
From the looks of it an Athlon XP 3000+ is the fastest I can get for this motherboard - Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_Model.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=1595&ProductName=GA-7VAXP%20Ultra
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ProductID=1595
It's a really nice motherboard and I got it setup just the way I want it - it's almost totally silent - there's only 1 fan in the entire system on the CPU - the PSU is fanless. I don't want to change motherboards or anything.
It' just today for example I was using DB Power AMP to convert some MP3's to WMA 9.1 format using dual pass and it was going at a speed of x5 (i.e. five times normal speed so a 5 minute song would take 1 minute to convert to WMA 9.1)
Does anyone have any idea roughly what speed I might expect to get with an Athlon XP 3000 XP ? (i.e. how much quicker it would be to convert an MP3 to WMA)
As far as I can tell apart from the clock speed being faster an Athlon Xp 3000+ has double the level 2 cache which should help. But if it's only a slight number crunching difference then I might not bother. But if for instance I could convert MP3's to WMA at x8 or x9 then it's worth it to me.
BTW if anyone's a DB Power AMP user and converts MP3's to WMA 9.1 (2 passes) I'd be interested to know what processor you got and what speed conversion you get.
However from time to time I need to do some number crunching like converting MP3's to WMA's or resizing a whole batch of photos.
It's only got an Athlon XP1800+ with 512MB of DDR 400 RAM which for day to day stuff is fine.
I want to know is
a) what's the fast processor I can put in it,
b) where beside's ebay might sell such processors and
c) what the speed increase might be in a way I can measure.
From the looks of it an Athlon XP 3000+ is the fastest I can get for this motherboard - Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_Model.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=1595&ProductName=GA-7VAXP%20Ultra
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ProductID=1595
It's a really nice motherboard and I got it setup just the way I want it - it's almost totally silent - there's only 1 fan in the entire system on the CPU - the PSU is fanless. I don't want to change motherboards or anything.
It' just today for example I was using DB Power AMP to convert some MP3's to WMA 9.1 format using dual pass and it was going at a speed of x5 (i.e. five times normal speed so a 5 minute song would take 1 minute to convert to WMA 9.1)
Does anyone have any idea roughly what speed I might expect to get with an Athlon XP 3000 XP ? (i.e. how much quicker it would be to convert an MP3 to WMA)
As far as I can tell apart from the clock speed being faster an Athlon Xp 3000+ has double the level 2 cache which should help. But if it's only a slight number crunching difference then I might not bother. But if for instance I could convert MP3's to WMA at x8 or x9 then it's worth it to me.
BTW if anyone's a DB Power AMP user and converts MP3's to WMA 9.1 (2 passes) I'd be interested to know what processor you got and what speed conversion you get.
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Comments
I assume that's due to it having 2048 kB of 2nd level cache as opposed to 256kb in the Athlon 1800XP
I'm not sure what socket your motherboard is so don't know if you could pick up a 939 chip, which includes some of the dual core things.
Make sure you pick up the latest bios revision to add support for faster chips if yours is old.
Unfortunately even socket 939 X2s are no longer being made by AMD, which means its running down residual stock. Catch em whilst you can
I generally encode from Flac/wav to Ogg - it takes around 45-50 seconds per track. When I was still overclocked(I wound mine back down over the summer because I wanted to remove the case fans and put them blowing at me!) I think the average speed went down to around 30 seconds.
Not massively in-line with your original question, but I figured there'd be a couple of different lines of thought for you
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270034622867
Something like the AMD Athlon XP 3200+ would be the best bet I reckon... and if you can overclock it by setting a higher FSB setting it could prove quite powerful. I can't overclock mine as there is only 3 settings for the FSB - 100mhz, 133mhz and 166mhz.
TheSovereign: http://www.tsac.co.uk/linux/ecs-l7vta.html
It's a quality board with dual BIOS chips so if a BIOS upgrade fails or you get a virus you have a backup. And I can add up to 8 IDE drives and 2 SATA's
I have another PC an Asus Terminator with the same exact CPU - Athlon 1800XP and this is much faster then that.
£86 for a CPU that old is a lot £20 to £30 off ebay was more in line to what I was considering..
I just sold my 3.2 GHz HP Server on Ebay - that had hyper threading and was very nice and quick for number crunching things like converting movies to DivX or MP3 to WMA but not much good for anything else, couldn't add a decent graphics card to it and had to use the 1 PCI slot it came with to put a soundcard in it, got 3 times what I paid for it though, but don't want another desktop, already a couple of K6-2 / Pentium Desktops and 15 inch monitors I'm trying to give away.
BTW I use WMA cos it's what my MP3 player supports beside MP3 - I find a 96 kb/s WMA sounds just as good as a 128kb/s to 192 kb/s MP3 - it's only what I use in the Gym and has 256MB of RAM more then enough for a hour in the gym but like to squeeze in a variety of songs to work out to.
so much is changing in PC hardware. - No PS2, no ISA, No PCI now PCI Express, SATA harddiscs/No IDE. it hardly seems worth upgrading anything
To be honest I don't think anywhere apart from ebay will stock these CPU's anymore, pretty much the same for Mobo's. The best overclocking and quickest are the DFI Nforce 2 board, and an ABIT model. If you want to take the most from socket A grab one of those and a mobile cpu and overclock the hell out of it.
But only if you can get everything for very cheap! or else you may as well at least move to socket 754 or 939.
Well a 3000+ will give you an extra 500MHZ so it'll be noticable but it depends on what you want it for. For gaming etc it would just be better to have a complete system upgrade.
There are only 4 things I do which stress my PC
1. resizing and correcting gamma on a big batch of photos
2. converting a DVD to DivX / Xvid
3. converting MP3's to WMA's (so i can fit more songs on my MP3/WMA player)
4. using Proshow to turn my holiday photos into a moving slideshow
Apart from that it's normal web browsing and email for me and PC is totally fine.
Out of the 4 things only number 4 is a direct pain in the butt to me, cos the other 3 I can leave the PC to do it's own thing whilst I watch Tv or go to sleep, whilst number 4 I'm sat there waiting for the PC to catch up to me as I play with the slideshow and tweak the settings, add sound tracks, etc.
Only wish someone else on here had something close to an Athlon XP 3000+ that could give me a figure on how fast they can convert an MP3 to WMA or DVD to Xvid / DivX then I'd have an idea of whether or not it's worth upgrading just the CPU.
What do you want me to do, and I'll give you the times...
Also for making the movie thing I expect more memory might help.
90kbps(VBR), 44100Hz
to:
.wma constant bitrate 192kbps 44100Hz, stero
took approximately 13.2 seconds.
I was using advanced WMA workshop. Any more tests?
Was that using the same program I used and wth a two pass encoding for maximum quality with WMA 9,1?
http://www.dbpoweramp.com/ and this codec
http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codecs/dBpowerAMP-codec-wmav91.exe
Whilst converting it should give a speed readin in the top left that says something like x5 or x8 or more.
Without a 2 pass encoding my laptop encodes at x25 with 2 pass it's down to x8
Converting 1 file to Windows Media Audio v9.1
Type: [x] CBR [ ] VBR [x] 2 Pass
Codec: Windows Media Audio 9.2
Settings: 192kbps, 44kHz, stereo CBR
And it started at x8 and slowed down so it was at x5 by the end!! How peculiar lol
doing it at 48kHz saw it go down to x4!
You got an Athlon XP 2000+ ?
How much ram?
or better still you got Belarc?
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html
Hmm... seems weird have you used something like Speed XP to optimise your windows settings, espacially the I/O setting?
I'm sure yours should be faster then that .. my iccle 1.7 Ghz Laptop is quicker then that .. lol
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600) VIA Technologies, Inc. KT400-8235
Enclosure Type: Desktop
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
1.67 gigahertz AMD Athlon XP
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: KT400-8235
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG 03/12/2003
Drives Memory Modules c,d
282.38 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
199.58 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
HL-DT-ST CD-RW GCE-8400B [CD-ROM drive]
LITE-ON DVDRW SHW-160P6S [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]
HDS728080PLAT20 [Hard drive] (82.35 GB) -- drive 0, s/n PFD215S6U4UK3N, rev PF2OA21B, SMART Status: Healthy
SAMSUNG SP2014N [Hard drive] (200.05 GB) -- drive 1, s/n S088J1NL302837, rev VC100-37, SMART Status: Healthy 1024 Megabytes Installed Memory
Slot 'A0' has 512 MB
Slot 'A1' has 256 MB
Slot 'A2' has 256 MB
Local Drive Volumes
c: (NTFS on drive 0) 82.34 GB 72.16 GB free
g: (NTFS on drive 1) 200.05 GB 127.43 GB free
Network Drives
None detected
And I think, if I remember rightly my old 3000+ took 40 seconds to complete 1M iterations of Pi