The new upgrades give him about 100% more processing power. He scores well there too with a steamy 3801 on the 3DMark '03, up from 2882 (Compare your scores on the ORB at http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=2474924). But we're not just talking the benches here. In my favorite test of total system power, the "Stand at the lower Jeuno AH and spin with the display res at 1600x1200 backed by a 1000x1000 3D buffer" test, he scored a clean 20 FPS (Or so, slightly noticeable frame lag, but damn close to smooth,) after standing there and letting the place fill up with character models. This makes me one very happy person.
The funny part though is the number of people who don't understand why a .5 Ghz processor clock increase (1.73GHz for the 2100+ and 2.2GHz) such a big change in power. And the first hint I'll give these people is: The CPU clock upgrade wasn't why I did it. Turns out that one of the biggest shortcomings of computer architectures is that the CPU needs to access the ram on a VERY regular interval. But unfortunately, the channel that carries the info to and from the CPU is MUCH slower than the CPU. So the reason I purchased the 3200+ XP CPU was the fact that the 3200+ XP (Barton) is designed for the 400MHz Front Side Bus (Well, actually 200MHz, but on both the rise and the fall...) Since the Front Side Bus (Or FSB) is the part of the computer that connects the CPU to the memory, it would follow then that I've effectively doubled the speed at which my computer can communicate with the RAM modules. Because of this, even a slower processor can get faster speeds because it spends less time waiting for memory transfers to occur. Now don't get me wrong, the increase in the CPU DOES matter (Especially since I moved from the thoroughbred core to the Barton core,) but memory is going to be the grand daddy pappa of the process. However... There is ONE tiny thing I overlooked in my upgrade...
column Access Select Latency (or CAS Latency). See I purchased CAS 3, when I really should have purchased CAS 2. The cost differential and the speed differential are about the same, Single digit improvements, but the eligibility for overclocking is much better. But then again, it's really not an issue because I'm not overclocking my system (Nor do I have plans to.) But it does matter. Now that I think about it, I'm using CAS 2.5 timing... Probably why I can't get my chipset to run in turbo mode, probably sends the memory requests a bit too fast for the ram. I'll have to tinker with that later.
Vroommm!!!
Mood: ecstatic