Athlon XP 1600 no faster than Tbird 1000

[sarahjh69]

Just got an Athlon xp 1600 in an elite k7s5a mobo
guess what, my athlon 1000@1333 encodes divx at the same speed
Same settings on both encoding side by side
same FPS (using sdram in both)

[chemmajik]

Yeah most of the performance comes from using DDR memory also, have you tried using the oc bios, your 133 may reach 150 to give you that close to ddr feeling, hehe. If you where using the same motherboard before, thats probably why you wont notice the increase. Increase that 1600 to a 1800 you'll notice it, esp with ddr... Wouldnt hurt to have a fast 7200 ata100 since that ecs does support it. Hmm I think I need to burn my bridges to make my 1ghz to a 1333....

[ppera2]

It must work faster. If not, your system is not set up well.
Something limits speed - it may be software, bad (set) drivers etc.

Slow BIOS setup ....

[sibe]

the real clockspeed of your athlon xp 1600+ is 1.4Ghz, so it's not much faster than your old overclocked cpu and probably that's why you don't see a change in encoding speed.

Sibe

[diji1]

real clockspeed of your athlon xp 1600+ is 1.4Ghz

Hi,

True, but i would have thought the "Quanti-speed architecture" as the marketing types deemed to call it would still make the XP pull away a bit from old Tbird.

One of the components of this is hardware data prefetch. Doesn't encoding generally take advantage of this feature to give fairly solid increases in speed ??

Mind you though, i have been seeing hardware tests that point to the idea that ddr ram shifts the system bottleneck
out of the RAM and onto the CPU - so i guess this could be the problem.

btw - "quanti-speed architecture" - jeez, marketing ppl really are the grease that keeps commerce alive. Emphasis on grease.

[sarahjh69]

chemmagic
you are correct
I changed the memory speed in the bios from
standard to ultra and my encoding speed
went from 24 fps to 30 fps
a 20% increase for a small change in the sdram timings

I also downloaded softfsb and clocked the cpu and mem speed
from 1400 (133 fsb) to 1494 (142 fsb)
giving me an xp 1700 for the price of an xp 1600

I think i will need to buy some DDR memory to get full advantage
from the athlon XP

[chemmajik]

Sarah you are running plenty good wait till ddr has dropped in prices, at the price it cost's now you really wouldnt benefit as much.
You have plenty speed, you might gain some speed if you use sse, 3dnow, mmx aware software. When you run wcpuid it does show SSE available correct?

[sarahjh69]

found a HD bottleneck in my xp 1600
on 2 pass encoding
pass 1 == 27-36 fps
pass 2 == 18-21 fps (something wrong here!)
seemed like the HD was having problems reading and writing at speed
so added another HD to the second ide controller and wrote to that.
pass 1 == 27-36 fps
pass 2 == 27-36 fps

and just for fun I decided to see how many DIVX movies I could play
off HD simultaniously.....
Athlon 1000@1333 could play 2 movies 1/4 screen at 83% cpu load
Athlon XP1600@1494 could play 4 movies 1/4 screen at 80% cpu load

quite a big difference in performance! (finally)