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Subject: Re: . . . M O R E . . . S P E E D . . .

Author: William Penn

Date: 12:27:15 08/17/03

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On August 15, 2003 at 18:10:17, Aaron Gordon wrote:

>On August 15, 2003 at 16:27:54, William Penn wrote:
>
>>I have had a 500MHz Celeron/256MB system for quite a few years. I just bought a
>>new 2.6GHz Celeron/512MB computer and was expecting my chess software to run
>>about 5X faster. It doesn't!? After considerable comparisons and benchmarking,
>>it's clear that it runs about 2.2X faster. My tests & benchmarks are based on
>>kN/s in infinite analysis mode using various practical chess positions and the
>>Shredder 7.04 UCI engine in the CB GUI.
>>
>>What is the most important single other factor (besides processor speed) that
>>would increase the speed of this engine in terms of kN/s? I'm sure that more RAM
>>wouldn't do very much. Is it "BUS speed", or "memory speed", or "processor cache
>>size", or "processor type", or what? I'm not interested in minor factors, just
>>the most important one.
>>WP
>
>This is what Intel counts on, people only looking at the MHz. Unfortunately you
>got stiffed by Intel. Lots of benchmarks show the Celeron 2.2 overclocked to
>well over 3GHz losing to a Duron 1.2GHz in most things, which should scale to
>about what you have been seeing.
>
>The Pentium 4 is the same way (just not as bad). The best bet would be to get a
>2800+ Athlon XP chip (if you don't want to overclock) as its the fastest MHz
>wise (2250MHz) of any of the Athlons for chess, and faster than any of the P4s
>out today for chess as well. If you'd prefer lots of speed and some
>overclocking, try one of my 2.4-2.5GHz Athlon XP pretested chips.. They'll put
>you up near P4-4GHz speed chess-wise and blow a P4-3.2 out of the water at
>everything else.
>
>I've already done the tests vs a P4-2.53 @ 3.32GHz in multiple applications
>(divx, mp3 encoding, compiling, encryption/decryption, sciencemark, chess, etc),
>the P4-3.32 lost by a significant ammount in most of the tests. Plus, at $79 for
>the 2.4GHz Athlon XP (3200-3400+ IMO) isn't bad at all..
>
>Here are some chess benchmarks:
>http://www.newageoc.com/crafty/bench.html
>
>Note: I don't have any freon-cooled Athlon systems tested yet (at 3.4GHz), so
>that would beat the P4-4GHz w/ HT by quite a bit. The top Athlon on there is the
>2.5GHz and that is AIR cooled. The top P4 is FREON (-50 celsius) cooled.
>
>You can see from here the 2.2GHz Athlon (Athlon XP 2800+ is 50MHz faster) beats
>a P4-3.25GHz. Celeron 1GHz (p3 core) is faster than a Pentium 4 1.5GHz, and an
>Athlon XP 1.86GHz (about like a 2200+) is almost equal to a P4-3GHz. Even the
>Pentium 3 1.12GHz beats a P4-1.6GHz. Good job Intel. :)
>
>Intel has it pretty sweet, though. Only company I know that can produce a
>product sigificantly worse than the last one and charge people 4-5 times more
>and have people actually buy it.
>
>My recommendation is take it back and build an Nforce2 based Athlon XP 2800+
>system. If you'd like to save a little money and get some extra speed, head over
>to www.newageoc.com. If you don't know how to overclock I can manually 'lock'
>the chip at 2.4GHz that way you don't need to do anything but drop in the chip
>and put on the heatsink. :)

Thanks for the advice & info. Very interesting. This 2.6G Celeron box + monitor
only cost me $650 bottom line on sale at Staples (Compaq Presario S4200NX). I
still have a few days to take it back. Hard to decide. I may keep it. The
computer hardware minus monitor/software cost was only about $400. I've been
looking at alternatives if I want to spend $1000+ but not sure if I do. I kept
your link. If I do then I may be in touch later.
WP



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