P3 600 faster than Athlon 800???

[Guest]

I was surprised of my brothers PC been slower than mine. Is this normal, or something should be wrong or missed.
Programs like Lightwave, Quake 3 and/or Unreal T. are working at a higher frame rate in my P3...Look at the specs:
1) P3 600 Mhz, 128 RAM, Leadtek Geforce 256 SDR. Win 2k Professional.

2) AMD Athlon 800, 128 RAM, Creative Geforce 2mx and Win98.

I thought it was a problem with the Geforce setup, but I tried changing the 256 to the AMD and the 2mx to the P3 and the same thing happens...Any ideas or recommendations?

Thx!

 

[ajmcgarry]

You didn't mention anything else about the system.

Obviously there is a bottleneck there somewhere. Could be that the RAM is a different make, maybe cheap RAM in the AMD machine. Could be the Harddrive. Games like Unreal and Quake require loads of space to run and normally require lots of Virtual memory space. Could be the motherboard, have you checked out any review on the boards to get some performance stats on the board. Could be a slow pci device that is hogging some CPU resources. These are things that shouldn't affect CPU performance but they do.

Couple of things to try. Update your bios. Download the latest drivers for everything, I presume you already have the Detonator3 drivers. Check to see that uDMA is properly set up.

If this still doesn't work, strip the PC down to the bones, for a proper benchmark. You've already proven that the Graphics card isn't the problem, so run the machine with just the Harddisk and Graphics Card connected. No modem, soundcard or other PCI or ISA installed. If there is onboard sound then disable it.

If you can, remove all software except the benchmark software (the ones you used before). A fresh windows install would be nice.
Test the machine like this and if it shows any improvement then Put back in any hardware one by one to see if any of these slow down performance. Then when all the hardware is back, start the same with the software.

It could be a bit of a lengthy process but hopefully you can narrow down the cause of the bottleneck. I would presume that it is some PCI device or driver.

Either way your machine will be much better off afterwards.



<b><font color=red>-<AJ :tongue: >-</font color=red><b>

 

[Guest]

You also might want to glance at this article, <A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001017/index.html" target="_new">http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001017/index.html</A>, which shows that the Pentium 3 does outperform a same-speed Athlon in some things. I only glanced at the Quake FPS and didn't really read the test setup, etc., again.

Aside from all the hardware differences, there could also be other things like BIOS parameters that could affect the scores.

Mike

 

[Guest]

You should remember that in many areas the Win2K/NT family can outperform the Win95/98/ME family, by quite a margin at times. OpenGL (Quake) is better on the 2K/NT family (or so I'm told).

I agree with the other posts - are you using the latest drivers? One little thing to consider is UltraDMA 100: If the AMD board is more than a few months old, or a cheap model, it may not support it, whereas all the Intel boards have had support for quite a while. It helps a little in large data transfers with very high speed hard drives.

Check the RAM is the same make, and also ensure that the AMD system's RAM is running at 133MHz and not 100MHz. I suspect the P3's already is. Sound Cards (believe it or not!) can actually make quite a difference to speed as well. Try disabling the sound for both systems in the games before running the test. The VIA KT133 has sound on-board, and many manufacturers use this as a cheap alternative to a sound card. This is true to a lesser extent on Intel solutions, because Intel's sound chip is soooo poor.

Other than that, it's true you may see better performance in games on an Intel processor, but not by the margins you're talking about.

 

[Guest]

Or how about GDRAM? God Damned RAM!