Great Group!

[codemonk]

Hi everyone.

I have a ASUS P4P8X motherboard with a Pentium 1.8 chip and 512Meg PC2700
installed. I just purchased a Pentium 3.0 800Mhz FSB chip and an additional
512 meg PC2700 chip. Sadly, because I am a moron I installed everything and
had nothing but problems. The bios and windows would crash. It was just
plain ugly. I also found that after running a performance test that the
computer was actually slower with the new CPU installed.

After reading the manual it mentioned that you needed DDR400 memory to work
reliably with an 800Mhz FSB chip so I replaced all my memory with a 512 meg
DDR 400 stick. Now everything works fine and my performance tests so a 40%
increase. Not bad.

My first question concerns noise. The CPU's fan is much, much louder then my
1.8. Is this normal? If so, what can I do about it?

Two, is there anything else that might be done to increase the performance
of my chip? My motherboard does not have a 800mhz FSB so I assume I need a
newer motherboard although the Asus P4P8X is fairly new.

Three, will going from 512 megs to 1024 make a big difference?

Thanks for your help,
Codemonk

 

[Simon Bussey]

Hi everyone.

I have a ASUS P4P8X motherboard with a Pentium 1.8 chip and 512Meg PC2700
installed. I just purchased a Pentium 3.0 800Mhz FSB chip and an
additional 512 meg PC2700 chip. Sadly, because I am a moron I installed
everything and had nothing but problems. The bios and windows would crash.
It was just plain ugly. I also found that after running a performance test
that the computer was actually slower with the new CPU installed.

After reading the manual it mentioned that you needed DDR400 memory to
work reliably with an 800Mhz FSB chip so I replaced all my memory with a
512 meg DDR 400 stick. Now everything works fine and my performance tests
so a 40% increase. Not bad.

My first question concerns noise. The CPU's fan is much, much louder then
my 1.8. Is this normal? If so, what can I do about it?

Your new faster CPU will use more power and hence generate more heat.. so a
faster, (and noiser) fan is required to keep it cool. What you can do is
replace the heatsink and fan for a third party product.. there is a huge
range available and plenty that are designed to make little noise.

Two, is there anything else that might be done to increase the performance
of my chip? My motherboard does not have a 800mhz FSB so I assume I need a
newer motherboard although the Asus P4P8X is fairly new.

First of all you can 'tweak' your bios, some of the options can be made more
'aggressive' and increase performance. You can ofcourse try to 'overclock'
your CPU and/or Memory, that is to run them above spec.. however this leads
to more heat, thus better cooling is required..

Three, will going from 512 megs to 1024 make a big difference?

Depends entirely on what you use your computer for.. clicking around
windows, surfing the net.. office... won't make much difference. However if
you work with video editing/large image files etc there could be a huge
performance increase. As far as I see it.. memory is cheap, and it can't
hurt to have too much!

 

[Gareth Tuckwell]

Depends entirely on what you use your computer for.. clicking around
windows, surfing the net.. office... won't make much difference. However
if
you work with video editing/large image files etc there could be a huge
performance increase. As far as I see it.. memory is cheap, and it can't
hurt to have too much!

I agree completely - I do lots of digital photo manipulation and the more
RAM, the better! I have 2GB now and things are really smooth - have turned
off the swap file (virtual memory), so everything runs entirely in RAM. XP
hybernate facility has been long since turned off though - more memory =
larger memory image file = longer shutdown + startup than normal!!