CPU info
 

OK, clueless technology question. (You wouldn't know I work in the IT field, would you? But these days I spend more time pushing papers and developing budgets than tinkering with computers. An older friend who's the CIO of a medium-sized state university told me he knew the exact moment when he mentally checked out of keeping track of every single detail of technology advances--during a discussion two of his employees were having about interlaced monitors. I haven't gotten there yet but I'm close. :cool: )

Anyway. I came to the realization today that I've replaced or upgraded damn near every piece of my home computer except the motherboard, processor, and case. (For the record, it's a Gateway originally purchased in Feb. 1998 with a 233MHz MMX , 32MB of RAM, and a 4 GM hard drive--$1500.) I have enough spares that I'm darned close to being able to get the case, mobo, and processor, and make 2 computers.

But I'm wondering about processors. What are the pros and cons of the various lines? How much am I sacrificing with a 2.0GHz Celeron vs. a 1.4GHz Pentium 4? And I have no clue about the AMD products and how they stack up against Intel chips. Enlightment would be welcome.

Oh, my needs are modest. I don't want to underbuy, but really we mostly just do web surfing, email, and light image processing, some of which results you've seen here. Though DVD burning s a tempting prospect as prices come down.....

Short answer:
How much horsepower are you looking at?
Under catagory of "best bang for the buck" is the Barton core Athlon 2500+.
As for Intel stuff, the 2.0Ghz celeron and 1.4Ghz P4 benchmark almost identically.
Long answer:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...mparison_table

Toms is always a good place to go for hardware questions.

Re: CPU info
 

I have always used AMD processors because of the "bang for the buck" issue. Both chips have their strengths and weaknesses, which the Tom's Hardware review points out.

What exactly do you mean by "DVD burning"? If you mean simply putting a lot of data onto a DVD (such as backing up your hard drive), your CPU won't be much of a factor -- just the write speed of your drive will be. If you mean editing and burning home movies, that will require a good deal bit more CPU power, in which case you'd do well to get a mid-high end chip. If you mean copying movie DVD's, that is almost entirely processor-dependent, because you must decrypt and decompress the entire movie, do some postprocessing, then re-compress and encrypt it when written.

An Athlon 2500+ would probably be an excellent choice for what you describe, and the retail version (with heat sink and fan) is on sale now at newegg. Even a 2600+ isn't that much more, but there's a big $ jump to 2700.

Also, you could be an ideal candidate to switch to Linux. The price of a Windows license would be a really large percentage of any system you could possibly build, but I could legally give you Red Hat 9 install disks for free.

Yeah, I've been toying with that too. Thanks for the Tom's Hardware link, it's just what I need.

AMDs have improved a lot since the days of K5 and K6, to the point that they are arguably better than Intels in many ways. Personally, I think they overtook Intel pretty handily when the Athlon came out, but then they lost their lead about a year later, and Intel is once again the better chip (though not the better deal).

My home machine is an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with 512mb RAM, and it easily handles everything I throw at it... high-res photo editing and processing, 3D games, compiling code, etc. If you want 90% of the speed at 50% of the cost, I'd recommend you go Athlon.

Thanks for the suggestions. I ended up buying a case/powersupply/mobo package with an Athlon XP 2100+ CPU. The motherboard has a VIA KM266 chipset and includes onboard video, sound, and ethernet. Add on the 256MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, and CD-RW that I have on my existing computer, and I ought to be set pretty well for a while!

Are you sure the RAM is compatible? I ask, 'cause an old Pentium 2 at 233MHz (I seem to recall that was your speed) will run at 66MHz FSB, whereas that Athlon is running at at least 166MHz DDR... besides, the DDR is 184 pin vs whatever the P2 RAM was (I forgot... 162? something like that)

At the very least, the very slow FSB speed of your old RAM (assuming it even fits...) will put a great big hand brake on the performance of the new processor.

Yeah, I should be OK. I've got PC100 memory in my computer now and the motherboard has slots for both SDRAM and DDR. (Not at the same time, though.)

The only thing I'm mildly worried about is moving the hard drive over and whether Winblows (98SE) will be happy in its new home without a complete reinstall, which I'm not eager to do cause I just did it when I upgraded the hard disk last month.

Man, I'd be really leery of just plopping your existing OS install onto a new computer with all that different hardware. It <I>should</I> recognize all the new hardware, and disable the drivers for the old stuff, but I'd still do a fresh install if that's a possibility. Maybe I'm just anal though.

Your older RAM will fit, and you may as well use it for now since you have it, but if you find that your new 'puter isn't performing as you hoped it would that's definitely where you should upgrade first. PC100 SDRAM is pretty ancient by today's standards, and you should be able to get 512 MB of PC2100 for $cheap.

About $70, actually.

Yeah I think I probably just bite the bullet and do a reinstall.

And I will get definitely get some more RAM later.. for now it's just a matter of "get it done" with as few new parts as possible. (partly an academic exercise, partly an exercise in reducing the dollar amount as much as possible for spousal consumption. Though she won't complain after she uses it--they've got shit for computers where she works so she doesn't have a clue what a newer computer will run like. The first time she runs her music notation editing software she'll be in business!)

Wait! Steve, check this out first:

Swapping your board without so much as a reinstall (243kB of images)

Ars is very cool. A reinstall might be in order anyway, but just wanted to give you this option.

Outstanding. My MB is showing signs of running its CPU hotter and hotter for no good reason, so I'm going to put in that same Asus MB that we got for Syc, and an AMD 2600. Also for no good reason.

Thanks Uryoces I'll check it out! I don't actually mind re-doing windows that much... it's allllll the applications.

So would you recommedn Red Hat? Or any other distros? I'm looking at SuSE also... in spite of all the distro flame-wars it's never been apparent to me that there's a huge difference between any of the choices. I've decided to dual-boot the new machine... I'm going to shelve the old system temporarily so I can use the Windows license off that one, but I want to get more familiar with Linux as a desktop OS. I've got a few years under my belt running a mail/web server on it with command-line mode only.

I don't really follow the differences between distros all that closely. The tools that I personally use would be pretty much identical in all of them.

I like what Red Hat has done as a company, treating open source correctly and developing a business model around it that works. Now that they have shown a profit and gotten consistent earnings, it looks like they will be around for a while and aren't a "bubble" company.

Use Red Hat, because they've done a good job at making it possible for a relatively new user to use it. All these distros had it wrong - setup isn't the issue. It's making it usable as a desktop.

SuSE is nice, but it *is* different. Use whatever you're comfortable with. init modes are different on SuSE, for instance. 2 is multiuser, whereas it's 3 under Red Hat. init files are in different places. Red Hat is the most popular, so it's easier to find RPMs for when you don't feel like downloading 30 megs of source to spend an hour compiling when you could just snag a 15 meg binary.

Red Hat 9 is actually a pretty usable distribution. I'm impressed with it, and run it on two machines (neither of which is a "main" machine, but both of which get a whole lot of use).

I'd recommend playing with each for a week or two before settling on one. That way you can find which works for you. And since you really need to install Linux after Windows anyway, it'll be no problem to switch.

Another feather in Red Hat's cap is Red Hat Network (RHN). Although they've switched to making you answer a survey every month or two for their free single-machine accounts, it's a nice feature to have.

A daemon on your 'puter checks in with RH every few hours to see if there are updates, bug fixes, etc. available. If there are, you get an email explaining the problem and the fix. If you decide you need it, open up the GUI tool, click through the prompts, and your system is up-to-date. You don't even need to reboot unless there's a kernel update.

You can also update your system by logging in to the website and choosing which patches to apply. The next time your 'puter checks in, it applies the patch. Of course, for just a desktop system, this won't be a huge issue (except for kernel patches to fix security holes), but for someone like me on the other side of the world and no one at home who knows enough about my server to maintain it, it's been wonderful.

OK, I'm convinced. After doing further reading, and on the recommendations here, I decided to go for the Red Hat Network. I'm downloading the ISOs even as we speak. (This is also partially a work project so I can justify doing some exploration!)

Oh and one thing that really pushed me over the edge was the Windows licensing structure. I've never bought a "new" copy of Windows before. I can't believe the price! $250 and they aren't even offering any academic discounts. They're definitely in bed with the manufacturers, because it's clear they're doing everything they can to discourage "build-your-own" hobbyists from getting lefit copies.

Ah, well.. it's academic for a couple weeks it looks like... the place I ordered my stuff from is not shipping it till next week apparently. ("Backed up for the 4th of July", they said. I'm not even going to ask how a one-day holiday backed them up a week. Yeah, I know, I was taking a risk.)

OK, I confess myself to be thoroughly impressed. I started by loading Red Hat 9 on an old laptop at work. (I want to investigate the feasibility of using Linux Terminal Server in some places where we want to have some computers for basic browsing and word processing, but there's really no security so we wouldn't want to put anything valuable in terms of hardware.) The last time I used linux with a GUI was in 1998. The whole process seemed so pointless (I was setting up a web/mail server box) that I never bothered with it again. Things have come so far!! Not only did it detect my wireless card (and believe me, PCMCIA used to be a bitch), it even automatically picked up my compact flash card reader when I plugged it into the USB. I'm definitely going to dual-boot when my new hardware comes in--I'd consider going cold-turkey but the wife isn't that adventurous. I only have three complaints so far:

1. Video--I can't get it to go into 1024x768 mode. I don't care much tho--on this old thing it will only do 256 colors in 1024x768. If I want 16 bit color I have to stick with 800x600.
2. Audio--no sound. I think I found the right module to load for it, but it's too late to do it tonight! :cool:
3. The trackpad--I absolutely hate the feature where you tap the trackpad and it duplicates a button click. I often end up clicking things by accident. But I'm not (yet) clear how to turn it off.

Good luck getting the last of your problems fixed. Often things which should be very simple take a lot of digging around in Linux, which unfortunately will probably continue to be the case for years to come. As much attention as it's gotten in the backroom, it's still not ready for primetime in the consumer market, and drivers for much hardware is still written by hackers instead of the company that makes it.

Video resolution -- this used to be an absolute nightmare only a short while ago. I spent a week trying to get anything besides 640x480x256. Turns out I had to edit some obscure text config file to manually input the supported refresh rates of my monitor (thank God I still had its owners manual to retrieve this info) because the auto-config had gotten one of them a fraction of a MHz off. With RH9 it isn't nearly as bad, but unfortunately, laptops usually have more obscure video chipsets and thus it's more difficult to find updated drivers for them.

Trackpad -- I'm guessing it just loaded a generic PS/2 mouse driver, which is what the trackpad appears as without its special drivers. And without a specific driver for your trackpad, there's probably no way to turn off the tap-clicking. I think most laptops use a Synaptics Touchpad, but I don't know if they make Linux drivers.

I'm not even going to try, except maybe for the sound--this is just an old one we had at work. The point is mostly for me to familiarize myself. When school starts I'll probably reformat it and put its original installation of Winblows 98 on it to use as a spare when people's regular desktops are busted & can't be fixed quickly.

OK, I did it. I ordered an Asus A7-N266 motherboard, an Athlon XP 2200+ processor, and and Codegen case with 400W power supply and 2 cooling fans. With any luck it'll be here in time for me to put it together over Labor Day weekend. I'm got a piece of 512MB memory, and decided to splurge on an on-sale 40GB hard disk so I can have 2 40s, and dual-boot Red Hat and Winblows.

Awesome sir! Well done!

Heh. I would have sold you the following system:

- Tyan Tiger MP motherboard
- 1GB (4x256) registered Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM
- 2 x AMD Athlon MP 1600+ processors
- 2 x Seagate Cheetah 36GB Ultra 160 SCSI hard drives
- 3Com 3C905TXM 10/100 ethernet card
- Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 sound card
- Adaptec 19160 Ultra 160 SCSI card
- SIIG 5-port USB 2.0 PCI card
- VisionTek Xtasy 6964 GeForce 3 Ti500 video card
- Samsung 16x DVD drive
- LiteOn 48x CD-RW drive
- BayBus 4 fan control knob system
- Enermax EG465P-VE 431-watt power supply
- all wrapped in a super sexy Lian Li PC-61 aluminum case
- (basically this machine, but with upgrades! how do you upgrade such a smokin' machine?)

for <b>way more</b> than you'd want to pay!

Man oh man, it is one sweet Linux machine, though. Whew.

I just sold my machine that I built with the A7N266-VM. Matt's brother needed a machine for Linux and he asked me if I had any spares. I just wasn't really using it, so I let it go. Man. I had an attachment to that machine though. :)

It's a great motherboard, you'll like it.

I'm looking forward to it... in reading customer reviews at Newegg, the only real complaint seemed to be compatibility with Winblows 98. But I looked at the manual on the Asus web site and they seem pretty explicit about what drivers you have to install where if you go with 98, so we'll see how it goes. I'm not running anything at all that requires 2000 or XP, so I'd rather not toss in another $110 for an upgrade if I don't have to.

arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh
 

Well, I got the stuff. But no dice. Everything went together apparently with no problems. It was tricky to get the heat sink attached, but a little patience and I prevailed. (The last time I did this was with a Pentium 4; it snapped on much more easily.) So by this morning after breakfast I had the case assembled with motherboard, CPU, RAM, virgin 40GB Maxtor hard drive, CD-RW, 512MB PNY RAM.

No dice, though. To all accounts everything worked fine--it POSTs fine, will boot up to floppy or CD-ROM, etc. But it crashes out halfway thru installation of Winblows 98. Or sooner--I tried several times. The plan is for Red Hat to go on the second hard drive (not yet installed--still in the old computer with all our docs & apps till the new unit is working). So, I threw in the Red Hat 9 install CD, and it choked about halfway through the first CD worth of packages. The error was something like "The X server is no longer available, I'm not sure why".

So. Seems to me that barring a spectacularly weird problem with the hard drive that's not found by scandisk, it's the motherboard or the memory. I'm gonna try to pick up another piec of memory tonight & test it. Any other suggestions? Any good way to really test memory besides just throwing it in and seeing if it crashes? (I checked download.com for burn-in tests, but the ones that looked useful in terms of their features required Windows. :rolleyes: )

wheeee...
 

Looks like it was the ram... I grannrf 256MB tonight & it's fine. But I still don't know if the first one is defective or not--it's PC2700, and you're supposed to use PC2100 for this motherboard. I had gotten the 2700 to use with my ill-fated original purchase. But it's now running quite happily with 256 of the 2100 & I'm enjoying the speed boost.

Now to reinstall all the applications.. ho hum.. and I hope my wife can dig up her Finale CD, that's the only thing really important that I don't know where it is immediately.

Most RAM will scale back; some will not. Either way, I would get it replaced.

I would highly recommend buying ALL your RAM from www.crucial.com in the future. They warranty it for life and won't give you any problem getting it exchanged. They also guarantee it to work with your computer, so you'll be set.

Yeah, memory isn't a place to skimp; stuff that's rated the same might perform very very differently. You may find a place that's cheaper than Crucial, but they're not that much more, and it's definitely worth it.

Speaking of...Dave still owes me 256MB of RAM.

I owe you 256MB of RAM in the sense that I said I would <b>give</b> you 256MB of RAM, and I haven't <b>given</b> it to you yet.

Ask Kyle what happened with our cars and then you'll understand why I haven't.

So...as I was saying, you owe me 256MB of RAM. :)

And you couldn't just explain what happened earlier...why?

(I get the RAM when I get it...it's not like I really NEED 512MB of RAM...)

Alright Kyle...what happened with your cars?

Nah dude, with my cars.

The short of it is that I spent about $2,300 this month that I wasn't expecting to (in addition to the $2,000 I *was* expecting to spend) , and my last paycheck got fucked up, so I got it late, meaning that I was about broke.

Where I am now, I am in considerably better condition ('cause I got a paycheck), but I don't want to spend for a little bit because I need to build up a buffer again. Combine the house, the cars, and a couple eBay purchases and that buffer was -gone-.

And we only have one working car.

And that car needs more work done on it.

The Volvo pooped?

When it rains, it pours.

Something died with the Volvo; the battery is suspect, with the positive terminal being highly corroded. I have purchased a Haynes service manual and I'll be working on that shortly.

The Beetle needed new tires, has a coolant leak (which may or may not be fixing itself) and has, in all probability, a broken motor mount which will hopefully be fixed tomorrow.

It doesn't matter about the Volvo, because the DMV fucked up my registration and I need to get that redone. But I'm not going to be able to, because I just got a letter yesterday stating that State Farm is cancelling my insurance because I haven't been licensed for 36 consecutive months prior to issuance of the insurance - something they COULD HAVE FUCKING ASKED ME BEFORE THEY GRANTED ME INSURANCE.

I hope all the insurance companies have identical rules. That way, I won't be able to get a car registered for ANOTHER THREE YEARS!

Naw, that just means you go into the pool of drivers that pay more for ins.
In PA they call it "assigned risk pool" and any ins. co. doing business in the state has to take a share. Since the pool consists of people who have been dropped by their ins. co.( for any reason including late payment) or unproven risks (new drivers) you get to pay more.
They would never make you wait three years when they could be fleecing you. Just bad business.;)

Well, that's part of my strategy to keep them from cancelling it (it isn't cancelled <b>yet</b> - but it will be in about a week). I'm not going to write out how I expect the conversation to go, but I'm going to remind them that I was going to buy renter's insurance from them in the next month or two and that Jenni and I are looking to buy a condo soon, and I was going to purchase insurance on that from them as well. Not only that, but I'm not so stupid as to think that a 1990 240 is going to last me forever and I've been planning on buying another car as a primary transport and keeping the 240 as a project car/backup (I want to drop a Mustang engine in there - more on that in another thread). And I'll sell myself as a safe driver who, even though he hasn't been driving for 36 consecutive months, has watched a lot of other people make mistakes and has learned from them. And I'll say "Do you really think that the risk with me is so great that it's worth throwing away all this future business? Because I assure you, I am not going to be sending out checks to five different insurance companies each month. Whoever I start with, I'm going to stick with. Are you really that eager to not be that company?"

We'll see what happens. I'm operating on the assumption that I'm going to be uninsured in a week, which is fine because MY FUCKING CAR DOESN'T GO.

(It, uh, broke down on the way home after getting it registered. No joke. God has a sense of humor.)

That bites--We were in the assigned risk pool when we moved to PA in 1990. I had only had my license for about a year, and Mrs. Dallas' last legal residence was in NJ, and apparently having NJ car insurance is almost as bad as having no insurance as far as PA insurance companies are concerned.

(Even funnier, Jenni's car battery died that same night, as she was starting the car to come pick me up. Yeah, that ruled. The battery had been in there since the car was new, or about 5 years. GG special shaped $100 batteries.)

Dave, that 36 month thing may be a State Farm thing. If you can find another company to insure you BEFORE State farm drops you, you may be able to skirt the "assigned Risk" stigma and its associated cost.
Your arguments are rational and logical and won't work with State Farm. If you have an independent agent, it should make him scramble to find another company so he can keep you as a customer. If he's strictly a SF agent, his hands are tied.
If the letter came from SF make sure the agent is aware of it because often they're the last to know.
If they're unreasonable, get one of these. :eek:

I was shoved in PA assigned risk when I moved here, because I'd been in MD assigned risk. MD was $1500/yr. PA was $4100/yr. I declined :finger: to pay that amount, and drove uninsured. There are lower-priced alternatives than PA assigned risk; most of the major companies have a high risk division.

Rho and I got thrown into that too when we moved here...same situation as Matt's. We started the policy, then they tried to jack up the price. After I argued kindly with the insurance rep and asked for a supervisor, it was returned to its original amount.

Matt, I'm assuming you either didn't change your plates and/or this was before proof of insurance was required to get plates in either state, right?

(Note to you folks out there: Don't go with Progressive. They make it sound so cutesy and simple on the television, but they're an incredible pain in the ass when trying to start a policy. Plus, I think I hit the same situation as Steve's wife when I put my own car under Allstate in April.)

Dave, out of curiosity, why State Farm? From my own personal experience and that of others I know, I've heard few good things about them. When I first tried to get car insurance in 1991, they wouldn't give it to me b/c I hadn't had my license for a year. They were willing to do it if my mom was on the policy, but then they wanted to inspect the car I was driving...and the premiums would have been through the roof.

My policy is done next month, so my renewal should be cheaper than the $74 a month I currently pay. My renters (also through Allstate) renewal is 15% cheaper than last year, so I'm hoping for a similar drop on the car.

I miss paying only $22 a month in St. Louis though.

I've had no complaints with Allstate. The rates seem reasonable and both claims we had (neither one our fault, fortunately) were handled well.

I drove on a Maryland paper temporary tag I had lying around. Long since expired, but it had no year on it so for three months it actually looked valid, though I drove on it longer than that. I never got pulled over during that time, fortunately. I eventually ended up getting legal with Allstate Indemnity, which "only" charged $2200.

USB trouble..
 

Hey, has anybody using one of the Asus A7N266-based systems had any trouble with USB devices under Red Hat? I just got around to installing Red Hat on the second hard drive, and it chokes when I plug in my compact flash card reader. So now I'm trying to track down if it's this particular device, or a more general USB storage device issue.

Everything else worked fine, except it was more trouble than I expected to get it to recognize the on-board network interface.