I was gonna go with the AMD, but after all da things that I read here...
I went with the 1.6 Northwood P4, Asus mobo i845 DDR mobo. 512Mb of RAM, Plextor 24/10/40 (wanted the 40X but I guess I won't really that extra few sec/CD)
Two 40Gb harddrive, not sure if I should RAID them, but they work fine for now nontheless...
I am not totally done with the software installation yet. I am still formating the second harddrive as I am typing this)
Anyways, I am so excited, now... and I got a few questions.
Should I RAID it or not? If yes, should get another spare hard-drive as my boot drive?
How safe it is to over clock my 1.6Ghz Northwood with stock fan? How fast can I go?
Got my new system!!!
too late now because you already have your system, but I went the AMD route after many years of Intel, I got Asus A7M266 with
AMD 2000xp 512 ddr pc2100 and it is totaly awesome, I would say I gained at least %50 power over my p3 1gig.
I used to be able to run maybe 16-20 platinum verbs with I get 35-37
whatever you read was either a bad setup or the wrong chipset, I would not hesitate to recomend AMD to anyone.
AMD 2000xp 512 ddr pc2100 and it is totaly awesome, I would say I gained at least %50 power over my p3 1gig.
I used to be able to run maybe 16-20 platinum verbs with I get 35-37
whatever you read was either a bad setup or the wrong chipset, I would not hesitate to recomend AMD to anyone.
On 2002-02-15 03:23, SL1200MK4 wrote:
I was gonna go with the AMD, but after all da things that I read here...
I went with the 1.6 Northwood P4, Asus mobo i845 DDR mobo. 512Mb of RAM, Plextor 24/10/40 (wanted the 40X but I guess I won't really that extra few sec/CD)
Two 40Gb harddrive, not sure if I should RAID them, but they work fine for now nontheless...
I am not totally done with the software installation yet. I am still formating the second harddrive as I am typing this)
Anyways, I am so excited, now... and I got a few questions.
Should I RAID it or not? If yes, should get another spare hard-drive as my boot drive?
How safe it is to over clock my 1.6Ghz Northwood with stock fan? How fast can I go?
I would definitely overclock the Northwood. 
The main thing to keep in mind is you MUST keep your PCI bus at 33mhz for utmost stability, so a FSB of 133mhz is the only setting I would be comfortable with. The stock heatsync fan is fine for this, and 2133mhz from the 1.6A P4 (16x100=1600; 16x133=2133) is almost 100% sure. The chips run extremely cool and the Intel chipsets work the best with Creamware, at least if you plan on using lots of delays/reverbs and don't want to think about PCI problems. At this point for a serious DAW a Northwood makes a lot more sense, at least until AMD moves to the .13micron process this summer (which will reduce heat, noise).
<font size=-1>edit: So I don't get flamed here, AMD is fine, if you like it, buy it. This is my opinion and I have used every new platform out there (save Sis/Ali solutions), so I think I can say my opinion.</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: subhuman on 2002-02-15 09:31 ]</font>
The main thing to keep in mind is you MUST keep your PCI bus at 33mhz for utmost stability, so a FSB of 133mhz is the only setting I would be comfortable with. The stock heatsync fan is fine for this, and 2133mhz from the 1.6A P4 (16x100=1600; 16x133=2133) is almost 100% sure. The chips run extremely cool and the Intel chipsets work the best with Creamware, at least if you plan on using lots of delays/reverbs and don't want to think about PCI problems. At this point for a serious DAW a Northwood makes a lot more sense, at least until AMD moves to the .13micron process this summer (which will reduce heat, noise).<font size=-1>edit: So I don't get flamed here, AMD is fine, if you like it, buy it. This is my opinion and I have used every new platform out there (save Sis/Ali solutions), so I think I can say my opinion.</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: subhuman on 2002-02-15 09:31 ]</font>
If you bought crucial or other good quality RAM you may want to clock it at 132 mhz. that way you can have the memory running at 164 x 2 DDR (328) you will get a lot better memory bandwith. at the expense of a wee bit of mhz. p4s love memory bandwith!
otherwise when you change it to 133 mhz the p4b266 reverts to 1:1 memory clock ratio instead of 3:4.
people have got these things up to 2.4 ghz with stock cooling. Intel has made good cooler this time. I expect they do not want to have to change it again too soon. also P4 chips are almost impossible to burn up. they will throttle down mhz if they get too hot.
supposedly if you use the "turbo1" setting on the board it locks the PCI bus slightly off spec to 35 mhz, no matter what FSB you use. i have no real proof of this though, just some vague mentions on another forum.
(i dont get mine till monday..thats tomorrow
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: defex on 2002-02-17 20:28 ]</font>
otherwise when you change it to 133 mhz the p4b266 reverts to 1:1 memory clock ratio instead of 3:4.
people have got these things up to 2.4 ghz with stock cooling. Intel has made good cooler this time. I expect they do not want to have to change it again too soon. also P4 chips are almost impossible to burn up. they will throttle down mhz if they get too hot.
supposedly if you use the "turbo1" setting on the board it locks the PCI bus slightly off spec to 35 mhz, no matter what FSB you use. i have no real proof of this though, just some vague mentions on another forum.
(i dont get mine till monday..thats tomorrow
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: defex on 2002-02-17 20:28 ]</font>
YES!!!!! I overclocked it to 2133MHz, and guess what the CPU temp is the same as when I ran it at 1600mhz... 40C.
Havn't run the system for long at 2.133 Ghz but hopefully it will work out fine...
won't dare to try the Turbo1/Turbo2 for, now...
for those who have tried it, can you please let me know if it's okay to do so?
Havn't run the system for long at 2.133 Ghz but hopefully it will work out fine...
won't dare to try the Turbo1/Turbo2 for, now...
for those who have tried it, can you please let me know if it's okay to do so?
woop! i just finished setting mine up just like that. it works beautifully!
gotta love the DDR beating Rambus pc 800!
i made some sandra benchmarks
at http://www.neutron7.com/images/bench/dx_bench1.jpg
gotta love the DDR beating Rambus pc 800!
i made some sandra benchmarks
at http://www.neutron7.com/images/bench/dx_bench1.jpg
well the PCI bus would actually be a little slower at 132 if everything was exactly as you might think. however the reading on my PC geiger actually says it is a bit higher. not enough to worry about though.
the p4b266-c is the same thing but without all the additional crap on it like audio and usb2 (which i disabled anyways) i just could not get one here quickly enough.(those 2 things i mentioned actually share IRQ with slots 5 and 1 so if you have multiple creamware cards you will probably have to disable them anyways)
the p4b266-c is the same thing but without all the additional crap on it like audio and usb2 (which i disabled anyways) i just could not get one here quickly enough.(those 2 things i mentioned actually share IRQ with slots 5 and 1 so if you have multiple creamware cards you will probably have to disable them anyways)
thats really interesting .it means asynchronous PCI (and Agp ?)bus clock frequency !Finally someone did that .But can you write more about PCI speed with "turbo1" and "turbo2" settings .Also its interesting how many masterverbs you can load with and without those settings .It can affect PCI troughtput in strange ways .