On Tuesday 18 February 2003 04:20 am, Shawn Lindsay wrote:
Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely take another look at dual
Athlons.
I still have some questions, though.
Is Intel's 533 MHz fsb a real advantage? Or only with certain kinds
of RAM? Some benchmarks show the Athlon is a real fast cruncher, so
for most things it probably gives you the most bang for the buck. Btw
did anybody see the review of AMD's Barton chip at Ace's? (
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=5364 --yea! Pricewar!) .
They used a Photoshop benchmark and the P4 3.06 GHz was best at most
but not all filters. Ace's said that Photoshop had been optimized
for SMP and hyperthreading. Would that be true of Gimp? I'd think
stuff like Gaussian blur would be the same or similar. Dang I wish
they'd use Gimp for some benchmarks.
==
Shawn, the only place you will ever see the 533mhz fsb an advantage is
in the lab as Intel will not be releasing the chipset to fully utilize
it anywhere else. That's the information I have gathered thus far.
Those buying the faster Intel cpus will be disappointed when getting
their new box up and running, because of the bottlenecks the
motherboard provides, it's only going to seem as fast probably as what
they replaced. The P4 from Intel, for the most part, has been a very
bad joke played on the buying public, but there may be some hope for
the newer Hyperthreading cpu, if things work as they should. I would
still never consider it over a dual Athlon board though with scsi.
---
Loading up on RAM I know is good, but which kind? RDRAM, DDRAM,
DRDRAM, SDRAM, DDR SDRAM--ECC or not?--ack!--just give me speed,
reliablity and let me keep my shirt.
--
If you decide to go with the Athlons, then your DDR SDRAM will prove to
work well for you and much cheaper too.
Even with a couple gigs of RAM I'm going to be swapping. Is an SCSI
drive worth the extra price? I'm thinking no because I can get a
7200rpm ide for $40, or a 10K RPM IDE drive at a fair price, but if
somebody has good things to say about their 15K SCSI I'd like to hear
it. Do better latency and seek time make much of a difference? Are
the 15Krpm Cheetah's and Fujitsu's really as quiet as the reviewers
say? What's the optimal balance between transfer rate and access
time for working on large .xcfs?
---==
Try to find a system with scsi drives working and then come back with
your questions! You'll probably not have a question about scsi then,
but wonder why you waited so long to use them! :o)
Unix/Linux have been built around scsi for years, do you think that is
just by chance? You'll also probably find in your research that some
IDE drives are quite fast, but then you have the bottleneck of the
motherboard controllers slowing them back down, making the added speed
just a benchmark, nothing else.
---
Finally, would a smaller main drive (with / /usr /home /tmp and swap)
be faster? I was thinking it would be most efficient to have a small
fast drive with a second, larger drive for storage. Am I wrong to
suppose a large main drive would slow me down? Does putting the swap
on the first sector still matter, or have advances in hard disk
technology made this inconsequenstial?
Thanks again.
Peace,
Shawn.
I don't think the last thing will make a difference to you, except maybe
slow both drives down on the same IDE chain. Realize the IDE for the
most part is still 8 16 bit technology. That's a small part of PC
hardware that is still dated, there are more. Remember also that the
IDE system will adjust to the slowest drive attached to it and two hard
drives on the same link causes a slowdown anyway. Two cdroms on a
chain will work satisfactorily as their transfer rates are slow to
begin with, but never add a cdrom to a hard drive chain, unless of
course you just like waiting! Again, this goes back to the advantage
of having scsi Ultra 160 or 320. More drives can be attached, true 32
bit transfer and noticable differences in speed. I think you will find
many of the hard drive probs have been eliminated in Linux with those
last points you bring up.
Good Luck in your Quest!
Patrick
--- KMail v1.5 --- SuSE Linux Pro v8.1 ---
Registered Linux User #225206
On any other day, that might seem strange...
___
Gimp-user mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
