On Sun, 2006-10-22 at 09:16 -0500, John Pierce wrote:
Hello list!
I just installed opensuse 10.1 X86_64 on my new Athlon 64 base system, 160GB sata II 3GB drive and I am not seeing what I perceive as a speed demon.
On my Athlon XP 1800 with 10.1 and all updates applied when (for example) I click on the terminal icon in kde it takes roughly ~3 sec. to open and have a terminal I can type in. On this new system it takes about the same amount of time, this is one of those places that I thought I would see a noticeable time difference as in I would click the icon and would have seemingly instaneous opening of the terminal.
A few things come to mind: 1. You probably had a disc of the same speed (7200rpm?) on the AthlonXP? Unless you increase the drive speed (and the difference between PATA, SATA and SATA-II are largely academic), startup performance won't be much different. Even a 1GHz Pentium-3 can start most desktop aplications much faster than any 72000rpm disc will allow it. Until fairly recently my workstation at the office was a P3-1GHz with two 7200rpm SCSI discs (one for / and swap, the other for /home) and 1GB of PC133 memory. It's still at least as fast and responsive at desktop stuff than any new PC with 7200rpm discs. 2. AthlonXP is a much more powerful CPU than many people give it credit for. 3. You don't say which Athlon64 you have. Even if it is the 1.8GHz (i.e. directly comparable to your AthlonXP), the Athlon64 will be much faster with many CPU intensive things. To give you an example. I have an AthlonXP 2400+ (2GHz, 128+256k cache), 1GB DDR400 mem, and a 7200rpm SATA disc. I used it mainly for video encoding - making AVIs from my DVDs. My notebook is a Turion64 ML34 (1.8GHz, 1MB cache). Guess which one is faster at encoding? With all the quality switches for xvid in mencoder, the AthlonXP encodes at between 3 and 7 FPS, the Turion64 runs at between 10 and 30 FPS. BUT As a desktop, the AthlonXP feels much more responsive, because it has a faster disc. I've remedied this somewhat, by upgrading the notebook's memory to the max - 2GB, but it's still not as snappy as the AthlonXP.
Still 4 to 5 seconds to open the gimp, 7 to 8 seconds to open openoffice writer. Take a nice big image, say this one: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/Images/palmis_ast_200626...
I have loaded all of the optimized defaults in the bios and 512Mb of pc3200 ram. That's not enough. With that little memory you will never feel a huge
Download it, open in Gimp, right click on the image, go "Image" --> "Scale Image" and take it to 640x791. How long does it take on either machine? I'm guessing the Athlon64 is much quicker. It takes my AthlonXP a good two seconds longer than the Turion64. performance boost, now matter what CPU you put in. Get at least 1GB, more if you can afford it. Hans