"Markie" said:
Hello
A few days ago i bought a new PC with the following components:
Asus P5GD1 mainboard
400 Watt powersupply
P4 550 3.4 Ghz With HT
4x 512MB Corsair DDR2 PC3200 memory
200 GB Western Digital SATA HD
160 GB Western Digital ATA IDE HD
120 GB Seagate ATA IDE HD
Asus DVD writer (Double layer)
Aopen DVD drive
128 MB Asus XT 600 PCI express videocard
2 extra fans
The speed of this machine is not what I've been expected.
Next to this machine I have a P4 2.6Ghz (no hypertrading) and
768 Ram.
The speed of the new machine is not as fast as the old one: it takes 35
seconds to boot Windows XP Professional (after the POST)
Booting on the old machine takes about 20 seconds (Win XP home).
On the two computers are the same programs, exept the OS.
My question is: what's wrong with this computer???
I hope to hear from you soon,
kind regards from Holland,
Mark
I would question whether boot time is a good metric. Perhaps the
drives are not in DMA mode during the boot, and are being operated
in PIO mode. It would be pretty hard to debug the thing during the
boot interval, to find out the nature of the difference.
One thing you have to watch for with the new processors, is
thermally limited performance. There have been a couple of
reports of processors that are operating at 70C, and if that is
happening to you, the processor will enter thermal throttle mode.
This reduces the processing rate, and can make your new computer
slower than your old computer. I don't really understand why those
particular processors were running at an elevated temperature - one
thing that cannot be inspected, is whether there is thermal compound
between the processor die and the heat spreader on the top of the
processor.
So, benchmark the old computer while the OS is running, and
compare it to the same benchmark on the new computer. Super PI
(ftp://pi.super-computing.org/pub/) is one benchmark you can use.
3DMark (futuremark.com/download) is another. Select a version of
3DMark that lines up with the level of hardware DirectX support in
your video card. SiSoft Sandra is a third source of benchmarking.
For stability testing, there is memtest86+ from memtest.org (a
standalone bootable tool, from floppy or CD). There is also
Prime95, from mersenne.org, for testing that the processor and
the memory allow correct computing. I recently discovered I had
bad RAM by using Prime95, even though memtest86 passed the memory
as being good.
The Prime95 "Torture Test" allows a 100% load on the processor,
so is a way of validating the cooling system on the processor. If
launched from Linux, multiple copies of Prime95 can be run, and
by using two or more copies, you can even test Hyperthreading.
Install Asus Probe or get a copy of motherboard monitor (MBM5)
from mbm.livewiredev.com , to monitor temperatures. (For Linux,
I used xmbmon and it supported the motherboard I was testing.
It may not understand your new motherboard.) Since active
development of MBM5 has ceased, Asus Probe is more likely to work
correctly on a new motherboard. If you find the processor
temperature reaches 70C while running Prime95, then you
need to improve case cooling and processor cooling. Some people
use water cooling for hot processors, but I haven't looked
recently, to see if water blocks for LGA775 are available yet.
I see there are several third party heatsink/fans that have come
out, but none of them has impressed me yet (swifttech one looks
pretty ordinary, there is one which is a tower and too heavy and
big, and a third one looks to be no better than the Intel solution).
So, first evaluate whether the computer is operating correctly
and temperature remains below the thermal throttle threshold,
before doing any serious benchmarking.
Also note, that DDR2 PC3200 ram is slower than DDR PC3200 ram.
You need to use faster DDR2 ram, to match or exceed the performance
of DDR PC3200.
I haven't been keeping up with the 915/925 platform, and it is
possible Anandtech or Tomshardware has some info on the best way
to set up one of these boards, including the best kind of ram to
buy for them.
HTH,
Paul
