agent_x007 wrote:What GPU U were using ?
Northwood is around 100MHz faster at the same clock speed (ie. 3,2GHz Prescott = 3,1GHz Northwood or 3,4 […]
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I'm pretty convinced that the Prescott is better than the Northwood for decoding H.264 video, at least in VLC player anyway. It matters because those videos are marginal on a P4. The Prescott can manage to play things smoothly that will stutter on a Northwood. Maybe it's the cache, but I think it's more likely that the reason is the player/codec/whatever is programmed to benefit from SSE3.
What GPU U were using ?
Northwood is around 100MHz faster at the same clock speed (ie. 3,2GHz Prescott = 3,1GHz Northwood or 3,4GHz Northwood = 3,5GHz Prescott).
If U have enough difference in clock speed, Prescott will be faster.
Also, I don't think SSE3 is THAT important.
PS. How fast a Prescott CPU would have to be, to beat this scores ?
Cinebench 2003 : LINK
Cinebench R11.5 : LINK
Press articles from 2004 pretty widely agreed that the Northwood was faster than Prescott at equal clocks, but they were using software from 2004. I question whether those results would be matched when using newer software. I had difficulty trying to find any newer comparisons. The press stopped caring about these CPUs as soon as something newer appeared on retail shelves.
The GPU in the machine currently is a Geforce 7600GS 256MB AGP. It doesn't have any meaningful H.264 acceleration, so playing back those videos is CPU intensive. H.264 acceleration isn't easy to come by on AGP, which is an unfortunate irony since those are the machines that would benefit the most from it.
I've never used Cinebench, but I'm not surprised if Northwood is better at it. My observation though is that Prescott has been performing better at H.264, and this is a major consideration for me.
I'd love to try a Gallatin but I haven't seen any that were cheap enough for me to be willing to buy them.
I didn't realize until the past day that Gallatins were available in LGA775 - and they seem to be cheaper than the mPGA478 versions. I had thought LGA775 P4 boards were condemned to Prescott only. If I had a 775 board that I didn't hate, I'd probably look for one of those chips.
I don't have directly equal Prescott and Northwood CPUs - they're all at slightly different combinations of clock speed, FSB, and HT support. But the pattern I was sensing from the chips I have was that hyperthreading helped a lot, and so did being a Prescott (whether that's because of SSE3 or some other reason). The Prescott advantage was particularly suggested by the comparison of a 2.6/800 Hyperthreaded Northwood vs a 2.8/533 non-HT Prescott - the latter doing measurably better, I felt it was too much to be explained by the slight difference in clock.
I read the description of Cinebench on their web site, and it sounds like it's a test of unaccelerated CPU based high quality 3D rendering performance, like for somebody running 3ds max (or whatever people use now). Is it relevant to 3D games or anything? Otherwise it seems like it doesn't matter.