VOGONS


First post, by sprcorreia

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I've been digging stuff out of the closet, and today i was testing a Slot A Athlon @ 1GHz.

First test i ran was superpi, and the result was unexpected... It takes more than 3 minutes to complete 1M. I can do better with my Slot 1 P3 @ 800, not to mention that the 1 GHz version simply runs it way much faster...

My Slot A mobo uses AMD Irongate chipset, the Slot 1 uses Intel 440BX.

Any thoughts?

Reply 1 of 54, by Mau1wurf1977

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

I know that the 440BX is a legendary chipset. Likely has some impact here...

My website with reviews, demos, drivers, tutorials and more...
My YouTube channel

Reply 2 of 54, by RogueTrip2012

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

The Athlon classic 1ghz runs its caches on a 1/3 divider making it pretty slow. The Irongate chipset wasn't very great either.

Read more about a review here: http://active-hardware.com/english/reviews/pr … cessor/1ghz.htm

> W98SE . P3 1.4S . 512MB . Q.FX3K . SB Live! . 64GB SSD
>WXP/W8.1 . AMD 960T . 8GB . GTX285 . SB X-Fi . 128GB SSD
> Win XI . i7 12700k . 32GB . GTX1070TI . 512GB NVME

Reply 3 of 54, by sprcorreia

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
RogueTrip2012 wrote:

The Athlon classic 1ghz runs its caches on a 1/3 divider making it pretty slow. The Irongate chipset wasn't very great either.

Read more about a review here: http://active-hardware.com/english/reviews/pr … cessor/1ghz.htm

It's the first review i read that shows results more close to what i'm experiencing.

I have an Asus K7V (Via) and i'll test the cpu to see if it makes any difference from MSI K7 Pro (Irongate).

Reply 4 of 54, by noshutdown

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

for the slota athlon, is your sdram running at 100mhz?
but that sounds too bad, because even a coppermine core celeron running at 100*8 can hit 3minutes, on a system well wired tight.

Reply 5 of 54, by sprcorreia

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
noshutdown wrote:

for the slota athlon, is your sdram running at 100mhz?
but that sounds too bad, because even a coppermine core celeron running at 100*8 can hit 3minutes, on a system well wired tight.

Ram is running at full speed, super bypass is enabled.

I tried the Asus K7V and the best result i got is 11 seconds better, putting it @ 2m 52.087s. The best with irongate motherboard was 3m 03.334s.

Tomorrow i'll rerun the slot 1 P3 800 and the 1 GHz.

Reply 6 of 54, by noshutdown

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

is your athlon pluto or thunderbird core? if its pluto then it uses slow 1/3 speed cache and also runs at 100*2 fsb(so sdram may be running at pc100) so it can really be that slow, 2:52 may be a reasonable time, just slightly faster than a celeron-800.

Reply 7 of 54, by RogueTrip2012

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I used to own a MSI K7 Pro with a 750MHz cpu. It was a fun setup till the caps blew. People said the Prescott was a hot CPU but I remember that I could never cool that K7 down!!

11sec improvement isn't bad at all. Are you using Cas2 ram?

Next are you running any VIA patches. Dunno how much they will help but there are the Via Latency patch and the Via interleave patches that may also gain some speed. http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/

It won't really compete with Coppermine again as the Athlon Classic has external cache with higher latency the fact it runs at that divider. You would think the strong FPU would help out but it doesn't in all cases.

is your athlon pluto or thunderbird core? if its pluto then it uses slow 1/3 speed cache and also runs at 100*2 fsb(so sdram may be running at pc100) so it can really be that slow, 2:52 may be a reasonable time, just slightly faster than a celeron-800.

AFAIK Slot A never had Thunderbird. Only Socket A (462)

> W98SE . P3 1.4S . 512MB . Q.FX3K . SB Live! . 64GB SSD
>WXP/W8.1 . AMD 960T . 8GB . GTX285 . SB X-Fi . 128GB SSD
> Win XI . i7 12700k . 32GB . GTX1070TI . 512GB NVME

Reply 8 of 54, by RogueTrip2012

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Back again. Looking at our repository of SuperPi scores ( The All-amazing super-de-douper SuperPi thread! ) Your doing very well now.

Coppermine 1000 PC-133 256MB SDRAM(cl3) WinME i815 chipset
2m 58.616s

<- This is a score from Tetrium in that thread. Just an example

> W98SE . P3 1.4S . 512MB . Q.FX3K . SB Live! . 64GB SSD
>WXP/W8.1 . AMD 960T . 8GB . GTX285 . SB X-Fi . 128GB SSD
> Win XI . i7 12700k . 32GB . GTX1070TI . 512GB NVME

Reply 9 of 54, by DonutKing

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

There were some Thunderbird Slot A's - I have an 850MHz Thunderbird myself 😀 You can easily tell by the lack of cache chips on the PCB, as Thunderbirds had the L2 cache integrated into the CPU core.

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

Reply 10 of 54, by maddmaxstar

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

I think the Cache Architecture, and not just Cache speeds were more efficient on the PIII Chips compared to the Athlon, and SuperPi makes extensive use of Cache. The difference is even greater when you're comparing a Slot A Athlon (except for TBird) to a Coppermine Slot 1 chip due to the Intel Part using On-die L2 vs a separate chip on a sluggish backside bus.

It's not a huge difference though really and SuperPi isn't completely indicative of real world performance anyway.

= Phenom II X6 1090T(HD4850) =
= K7-550(V3-3000) =
= K6-2+ 500(V3-2000) =
= Pentium 75 Gold(Voodoo1) =
= Am486DX4-120(3DXpression+) =
= TI486DLC-40(T8900D) =
= i386sx-16+i387(T8900D) =

Reply 11 of 54, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Yeah my bet would be on the 1/3 speed L2. I guess this means that SuperPi doesn't fit in Athlon's 64KB L1D cache.

I want one of those 1 GHz "K75" Athlons. Would be a nice piece for the junk collection. The great GHz race.

Reply 12 of 54, by sprcorreia

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

All Slot A Athlons i have are non Thunderbird. I have a 600MHz Pluto, a 950MHz Orion and the 1GHZ Orion.

Ram is PC133 CAS2, and the K7V runs mem @ 133MHz.

SuperPi number can be improved once you move past win98. I run all tests in w2k because it's more efficient.

I know it's a dual setup and that it helps, but SuperPi is single threaded, and i get 02m 42.750s running dual Slot 1 P3 800 FSB100.

Edit: i installed the Slot 1 P3 1GHz FSB100 in the Asus P2B and voilá! 1M in 2m 28.654s! It's running circles around the Athlon...

Reply 13 of 54, by elianda

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

How does your Slot Athlon compares to a Slot P2 or P3 (Katmai) with external cache?
Usually the Athlon gets some push due to EV6.

Retronn.de - Vintage Hardware Gallery, Drivers, Guides, Videos. Now with file search
Youtube Channel
FTP Server - Driver Archive and more
DVI2PCIe alignment and 2D image quality measurement tool

Reply 14 of 54, by sprcorreia

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
elianda wrote:

How does your Slot Athlon compares to a Slot P2 or P3 (Katmai) with external cache?
Usually the Athlon gets some push due to EV6.

I can run the tests with the 600MHz Pluto Athlon and the 600MHz Katmai P3 to find out.

Edit: My P3 600 is Coppermine, not Katmai. I'll just have to test with P3 550MHz...

Reply 15 of 54, by jaqie

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

IMO the slot athlons were rather poor for performance especially with the irongate chipset. That is the era I was working as a computer tech professionally, and after trying a couple customer systems the dollar/performance ratio was so bad we waited until socket A came out and tried again - that is when things started to get good for the athlons. At that time I myself put together a duron 600 system, via KT133A chipset, and ran the duron 600 alu interconnect at 952MHz which was very close to the non copper interconnect hard-limit for them. I do admit I did not know about core differences in the athlons at that time - the town I grew up in and was working in had 33.6k dialup which was filtered at the server level by the local christian college which was running it, that was the only internet available. They filtered A LOT.

Reply 16 of 54, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

The early Athlon motherboard hardware had a pre production feel to it. Little refinement, bugs, high sensitivity to power supply output, AGP instability, etc. There are a few boards with huge areas of unused, unnecessary PCB (very sloppy work). AMD 750 was AMD's contribution there because that chipset has broken AGP 2x. The CPUs themselves were perfectly fine AFAIK.

I think it took nForce2 to really get that platform solid and fast across the board.

Reply 17 of 54, by sprcorreia

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Did some more testing.

Slot 1 P3 550 Katmai - 3m 54.808s
Slot A Athlon 600 Pluto - 3m 32.616s

So it seems that older Athlon did good against Katmai, but Coppermine was another story.

Reply 18 of 54, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
sprcorreia wrote:
Did some more testing. […]
Show full quote

Did some more testing.

Slot 1 P3 550 Katmai - 3m 54.808s
Slot A Athlon 600 Pluto - 3m 32.616s

So it seems that older Athlon did good against Katmai, but Coppermine was another story.

Sounds right. Coppermine is just a touch slower than Thunderbird and it's the same way with Katmai vs K75/Argon/Pluto.