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Subject: Re: Pentium 3 + 4 Speeds for Chess Programs

Author: Mike Hood

Date: 05:04:30 06/26/03

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On June 24, 2003 at 17:32:43, Joachim Rang wrote:

>On June 24, 2003 at 13:33:23, Mike Hood wrote:
>
>>In the article recently posted on Chessbase's site John Nunn points out that for
>>applications that use a lot of integer arithmetic (like chess programs) a
>>Pentium 4 is slower than a Pentium 3 at the same clock speed. This is news to
>>me... can anybody please quantify this by giving in percent how much slower it
>>is. Either by references to web pages or the results of your own experiments.
>>
>>This could help me in my next computer purchase. My finances are limited, so one
>>of my options is to choose between a fast Pentium 3 and a slow Pentium 4.^
>
>A Pentium 4 achieves about 70% of the performance of a P3 or Athlon with same
>MHz. So the speed of a Pentium 4 with 3 GHz is equivalent to the speed of a P3
>or Athlon XP at 2.1 Ghz (Athlon 2600+). For chess Athlon is still the king of
>the hill and much cheaper. Since a year the heat problems have also gone. So buy
>an AMD or better wait a few months and by an Athlon 64 (which is according to
>some posts a real beast for chess).
>
>regards Joachim

Thanks, Joachim, and also thanks to everyone else who answered my post. The
consensus seems to be that a Pentium 3 is 15 and 35 percent faster than a
Pentium 4 clocked at the same speed.

I'm in an early state with my purchase decision, so I have room for changing my
mind. I'm still saving my pennies, at the same time watching the market for new
developments. Usually I buy a new PC once every three years, and I buy a
processor which is about 6 months old in order to get a good compromise between
price and performance.

I'm a bit nervous about getting an AMD processor because of all the heat-related
problems that I had the last time I bought an AMD processor in 1998. (Sorry, I
can't remember the specs). I exchanged the processor (and the whole motherboard)
after a few months because it crashed every time I ran a Fritz analysis
overnight. Have AMD really got their act together with the heat problems?



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