On Thursday 04 March 2004 04:38 pm, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
I'm trying to decide if buying a new mother board is worth the hassle. I learned earlier today that the Intel motherboard that my Intel CPU came on is one rev off from supporting hyperthreading. All I need is support for 2 512MB dimms, IDE, AGP, USB, PCI, and, of course, hyperthreading. I don't want on-board sound or ethernet. It just gets in the way.
How much difference with HT make? Anybody have any benchmark info? I know, I just said yesterday on the programming list that I don't trust benchmarks. But they might at least give a hint. I do sometimes use stuff like Mathematica, Java3D, POVRay, etc., which are likely to be affected by hyperthreading. I also suspect my compiles will go faster. I'm just wondering how much. Everytime I pull the chip of the motherboard, or do anything else with the hardware, I run the risk of destroying it. I've been working with electronics since 1974. I know what I'm doing, but that doesn't mean I can't break something.
Does anybody know if, and how outer CPU bus speed is reported by hwinfo? What's it called, if it is in the hwinfo? I don't see it there. Is there another method of probing the chip to get different info?
STH
Steven, If you are wanting better performance, actually doing two things at once, then go for a dual cpu motherboard. If you are just wanting speedups, then go for the Opteron/Athlon64 cpu. Hyperthreading was just another gimmick Intel tried to use for an already bad cpu, the Pentium IV. Lee -- --- KMail v1.6 --- SuSE Linux Pro v9.0 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...