P4's, HT, enlighten me?

[Gurm]

So I haven't yet put together a P4 machine, so I need to be enlightened.

It seems from looking at pricewatch that only the 800mhz FSB chips have HT? Is this true? Someone want to explain to me which chips have HT and which don't, and which chipsets support it and which don't?

For that matter, which chipsets are good? Intel and SiS both seem to have like 5 or 6 chipsets each for the P4.

I ask because I may have an opportunity to slide sideways into a P4 rig from my current Athlon rig, and I'm contemplating doing so.

- Gurm

[High_Jumbllama]

The 533mhz fsb 3.0ghz chip and all the 800mhz fsb chips have it. Of note is that overall system performance can increase 10 to 50% depending on the app but an individual process's/program's performance may actually decrease. Say a single process needs 80% of your processor's resources (X). You activate hyperthreading which increase your overall processing ability to for example 1.5X. Each processing thread/channel is now .75X which is less than some programs need or at least makes them slower. If you multitask it is great, but if you have an app or a couple apps that benefit from a more powerful single processor and do not have SMP support it will actually make the app run slower.

Someone else know about chipsets?

[Admiral]

Well, for Intel you have the i875P, i865PE, i865P and i848P, if you want HT, 800fsb CPU and DDR400 support.

The main difference between the i875 and i865 was supposed to be the Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) for memory which brings you an extra 5-10% performance. Problem is that with the i865PE motherboard manufacturers discovered they could enable PAT and sell the boards with this feature. In the end there was no major difference between a basic i875P and a 50$ cheaper i865PE board so Intel got pissed and brought the i865P out, on which PAT can't be enabled.
Not that PAT is something to die for, in many systems it brings instability (depending on ram) and if you're overclocking and/or running asynchrounous CPU and memory fsb you'd better turn it off.

The i848P is just a stripped down single channel version of the i865P

There's not much I can tell you about SIS, just get a 655FX (or higher) with 964 southbridge to have all the features the i865PE and i875P have. Also, SIS boards are not as good overclockers as Intel ones.

[isochar]

Don't forget that Prescott's have Hyperthreading 2... which shouldn't have any performance loss. (Seen here: http://www.accelenation.com/?ac.id.215.1)

List of all Intel chipsets:

http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/chipsets/index.htm?iid=ipp_nav+desk_chip&

IMHO, Intel chipsets should always be paired with Intel processors if budget permits. Pretty much the consensus is that i875 or i865G or i865PE are the way to go...

[Gurm]

Yeah except that a bunch of independent tests show that the SiS 655tx walks all over any of them.

- Gurm

[Byock]

For Intel, I always use intel chipsets from Asus. Guess I just can't get the bad taste out of my mouth for Sis, since the P1 days, when I had nothing but problems with them.

[Gurm]

Oh yeah, I am the first to admit that SiS used to suck nuts. But hey, if nVidia suddenly starts releasing GOOD chipsets with GOOD drivers, I'd switch. Not that it'll ever happen...

- Gurm

[isochar]

Originally posted by Gurm
Yeah except that a bunch of independent tests show that the SiS 655tx walks all over any of them.

- Gurm

Walk all over? All the reviews I've seen of the boards based on that chipset show it up to 10% faster than i875, while most of the time it hovers around 5%. I guess this comes down to preference whether you'd be willing to sacrifice the SIS's slight performance advantage for an Intel chipset.

[TransformX]

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/asus_p4s800d-e_deluxe/

[Admiral]

Umm, what would be the CPU usage with a SATA hdd for the SIS 964 chip ?
And how easy it is to configure SATA on it ?

I mean, Intel does a nice IDE emulation (or whatever) and the OS just detects the SATA controller as another Ultra ATA one, without the need to press F6 and feed it a floppy with drivers when you installl the OS. Mandrake 9.2 also detects it nicely.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

I built a budget machine last year for my friend (from a Celeron 400MHz), with an Asus P4S800 (SIS 648FX with FSB800, and Prescott support), a Celeron 2.4GHz (which he may eventually upgrade to maybe a prescott when its cheap, thanks to large expandibility), and Asus GeForce FX 5200.

According to him, its a very stable. So I guess that was a success.

And I think the P4S800 at that time was a nice and cheap purchase...