[geeks] PPro Overdrive chips, anyone used them???

[Ken Hansen]

Jon,

The way Windows was coded, *nearly* everything passes through the video card, so a faster video card is typically the best place to start with a Win PC... (that means that nearly everything a Win program performs has somewhere in it a graphic call, and the program will wait for that graphic call to complete before proceeding through the code)

If an OS other than Windows is running, the above advice may not apply.

When 486's were king, the advice was:

 - Maximize your L1 cache (some system had zero cache)
 - Make sure you have 32 Meg RAM (if you do, then)
 - Get the fastest video card you can (if you do then)
 - Optomize the HD (defrag, upgrade to SCSI)
 
(the 32 meg recommendation was based on tests done by PC Magazine, they found that the expense of increased RAM over 32 megs were not justified by increased performance - those same dollars should have gone to the video/HD. Remember, RAM used to be very expensive).

To be honest, I still think those rules apply, of course the 32 Meg RAM size could easily be upped to 128 or 256 Meg, only because RAM is so cheap these days.

Personally, I install as much RAM as possible when I get a machine - when I got my wife her Motorola Mac clone, I bought all the RAM it would take before it even arrived...

But really, the rules are the same with PCs as they are for Workstations/servers...

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Katz [mailto:jon at jonworld.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2001 11:59 PM
To: geeks at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [geeks] PPro Overdrive chips, anyone used them???


Kris wrote:
> I fell for the MP bug about two years ago. I built a Dual Celeron
> 433. Comparing CPU power, the Celerons equal about a 800 - 833MHz
> Athlon. Pretty good for a machine a year old when 1GHz was the top.

My celeron 333 seems to be doing better than the k6III/400 I had.

Does that make sense? I'm so out of touch w/ the PC world these
days....