It's amazing what a PIII upgrade will do...

[Dude]

I didn't think that I would make much of a difference upgrading from a OC'ed Celeron 458 (84*5.5) to a PIII 500, but this $250 upgrade is rocking my machine's world!!!

I'm easily hitting 5000 benchmarks with 3dmark max and pushing the 6000 level when I start overclocking. Which, by the way, I haven't yet pushed the computer to its limits, so I hoping for 6000 and beyond.

So, if anybody's considering this kind of upgrade from a celeron to a PIII.... DO IT!!! I would say it's worth the $$$.

My system: Abit BX6R2 motherboard, 128 Meg RAM, PIII 500, G400 DH, who cares bout the rest....

[Rags]

Going from a 300a@504 to a P3 450@560 has improved my seti@home time from 10hr30min to @8hr30min, and doing compiling in C++ is a pretty good leap faster as well. I think it is worth it.

Rags



------------------
P3 450@560, BH6, 128MB PC100, Delta CD ROM, Mill.G200/G400, 8.4G WD, 8.4G seagate, SB16 (temp.), Yamaha Burner, Zip, Sportster 56K int., Storm Scanner.

[Zypher]

Better yet, take the 450 or 500 and bump the frontside to 112 or so

I love the way cpu prices are falling so fast and so consistiently the past few years.

450s nearly around $150, 500s rapidly approaching $200. If you can get a motherboard that divides right (no real good ones yet :/ but some new abits coming real soon might, and maybe 820/810es later) certain 450s like to go to 600 easy. Grab PC133.

I wish memory would do the same :/ $108 for my 128mb sticks a while back. Now the same 'spec sticks closer to $180!

[Maniac]

Yo dude, do you realize what you're saying? You just spent $250 bucks so you could get a score of 5000 in a benchmark? Well no shit 3Dmark is heavily SSE optimized. Too bad almost nothing else out there is. I also have a celeron(at 464mhz), and it's staying put until I get at least a 50-70% performance boost across the board!!

[Marmita]

u want to get %70 performance increase for $200 ??? I didn't get such a boost even when I upgraded my pentium to a PIII... It will happen only when ur computer will be totally absent...

[Plmr]

Going from G200 and cel 300a at 450 to p3 450 at 560 and g400 vanilla 32 DH more than doubled my ZD 3DBench score I dont think they use SSE either.. Ima happy sombich YouBecha.
Matt

[Rags]

I am very happy with my P3, not a tremendous improvement from a P2, but it does overclock well.

Rags



------------------
P3 450@560, BH6, 128MB PC100, Delta CD ROM, Mill.G200/G400, 8.4G WD, 8.4G seagate, SB16 (temp.), Yamaha Burner, Zip, Sportster 56K int., Storm Scanner.

[Marmita]

It really doesn't matter... no SSE enabled program will give you the %50-%70 boost maniac's expecting from his next cpu...to get the increase he will need to buy a i820 board with a nice 700Mhz coppermine inside and 133Mhz PC133 ram all that for about $1000 and until then he will stay with medium performance... (btw I would do the same thing) the question is - Do u want to spend $150-$200 for a %10-%30 boost or wait for the next gen... SSE never ment to give u a %70 boost even if you'll put a 1Ghz cpu u won't get %70 because it will have the Memory, motherboard and Graphic board as bottlenecks... and btw every directX program indirectly supports SSE and 3D Now! coz directX is optimized for these instruction sets.

[Maniac]

Well maybe I was a bit spoiled. I upgraded from P-233mmx with a mystique 170+voodoo1 to a celeron 300A(464) and a G200 last september. Needless to say it was quite nice. Now I'm looking at the next generation and the .18 celerons with SSE(Q199) look to be my best bet. They should start at 500mhz and then go up to around 750mhz. All for under $200.

[Dude]

Yo Maniac...

It's not only 3Dmark speed, it's the over all G400 graphics speed. It has been posted that the G400's performance is very dependant upon the processor power.

In addition, the motherboard I have was not being used to its full potential running a celeron. The mother board, and memory I have can run beyond 100 MHZ. The only thing holding it back was the celeron.

Now I can push my puter to full throttle!!!

[Maniac]

Well I just don't see the price performance curve right now being worth it. Especially when you had a celery 458 to begin with! But after all it's your $....

[Dude]

It was a overclocked Celeron 366. I was able to max it out at 457 mhz by setting the FSB from 66 to 84 mhz.

One thing to consider though. I'm not just going from a 457 mhz to 500 mhz, the FSB is now at 100 MHZ instead of 84. I didn't think it would make much of a difference but the speed change was very noticable.

In addition, I am able to overclock the machine at 620mhz 124 FSB (scary though). That, in conjunction with running my G400 DH at Max speeds, make one smoking machine (and I hope not literally).

Hum.. if I were to pay for a MAX and a 600 MHZ PIII, there alone I saved about 500 bones.

[LAMFDTK]

If you stop smoking POT you will find that you you do have money for upgrades...

[DirtFarmer]

... and the lucky ones have money for both.
--Al out

[Himself]

What's amusing is that once T&L cards come along all the SIMD stuff will be wasted since the drivers will be using the video card instead of cpu code for the heavy lifting.