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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (3130)	10/20/1998 8:20:00 PM
From: Clarence Dodge	Respond to of 14778

All From the Tweak3D site posted 10/14/98 Begin quoted material: The Tale of the SL2W8 etc. As told by Dan "Tweak Monkey" Kennedy I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but I'm pretty sure you probably have. Supposedly, Intel manufactured a bunch of extra P2 450s. They didn't want to flood the market and force themselves to drop their own CPU prices, especially since the less than P2 333s are selling well. So.. they set these P2 450s to run at 66 MHz bus instead of 100, which made them well, P2 300s. There are a few specific step #s that indicate that the P2 300 has the .25 micron and 4.5 ns cache. They are SL2W6, SL2W7, SL2W8, SL2YK, SL2VY, and SL35V. The most common of which, and most likely to reach 450+ is the SL2W8... keep in mind, Intel is trying hard to get rid of these fast so people don't remark them and sell for a huge profit. Well, this store called Accubyte sells the P2 300 for $202 (their page says $250, needs to be updated). When I called to order, they specifically said "It's the SL2W8". Okay.. so I ordered one.. figured I could have a P2 450 for my Canopus Spectra 2500 review (whoohoo!). It took 5 days to arrive. Blah.. too bad I released the review yesterday... some lame holiday that I didn't even get off for school delayed my FedEX. Anyway, I started up my PC. The BX6 set it to 66 x 4.5 (300 MHz), so I entered CPU soft menu, and set it to 100 x 4.5 and enabled turbo mode (just for kicks), didn't tweak the voltage, and didn't enable Speed Error Hold. It booted up. Everything seemed okay. I put it through an hour of nonstop Unreal, 5 Quake II crusher demos, 10 glquake timedemos without a single freeze. Try Unreal at 69 FPS 640x480 (STB Black Magic 12 meg SLI), 104 FPS Quake II 640x480 (demo 1), and 187 FPS GLQuake (demo2). And like I said, not a single crash, because you're not overclocking. I'm talking about a REAL P2 450 for $200. Just for some more fun, I added a Glacier 4500 on there and set it to 112 x 4.5 (504 MHz) and that worked flawlessly too. If I had better ram, I would put this big ass Peltier thing Computer Nerd sent me on there and set it to 133 x 4.5. But ya know.. 600 MHz seems a little impossible. =) To sum it up, buy a P2 300 from Accubyte. It will be a P2 300 SL2W8 (ask if you don't believe me =) ). It will run at 100 x 4.5 These are going fast.. so get one soon. Mine was purchased on the 9th FYI. Let me know if any of this information is incorrect or if the SL2W8s are sold out etc. End quoted material Clarence PS This Pii 300 stepping is $265 today.

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (3130)	10/20/1998 9:00:00 PM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

>>128 to 256 RAM: How much benefit in NT 4? In my experience (at a lower level of RAM), NT will use what it has based on the demand. NT is actually pretty good about this (compared to other MSFT products, anyhow). Whether your demand makes good use of 256 megs or not depends on your use of it. If your commit charge is not exceeding 128, then you will likely not see any performance boost (or at least rarely); in fact, unless your ACTIVE demand exceeds 128, you won't feel a thing, even if the commit charge exceeds 128, except when you switch from ap to ap. Depending on what you do, your active commit charge (or working set) may approach the commit charge reported or even the peak commit charge. It all depends on how you use it and on how often you use it that way. How's that for mealy mouth? But the truth is, it depends so much on how you use it that there isn't any good way to generalize. That's a bouquet for NT, incidentally; that's the way it should work. Experience. My commit charge runs around 120-150mb with peaks of 180 in a 64mb system. I rarely experience serious memory pressure (read that disk thrashing). I do mostly database work, and the upshot is that the db segment gets paged in (pretty fast) then everything runs in memory. Little profit from a memory upgrade there, unless my databases get bigger (they're for development testing, so I can more or less control them). Real memory gets divided about evenly between NT and application stuff, including disk cache in the NT half. On the other hand, occasionally I work on high-res scans of photo images which exceed memory, and everything goes to a crawl, to use a VERY polite term (not resembling the words I use when it happens <gg>). And of course I'm frequently switching to memory hog browsers, quote getters, charting programs, etc, more and more every day. Suffice it to say that for me the next machine has AT LEAST 256mb; preferably more. Have you ever noticed how aps expand to use available memory and then some? Expenses expand to use available money and then some? Waist expands to use available belt loops and ... clearly time to stop.<gg> Got to go get on the treadmill ... . Spots

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (3130)	10/21/1998 10:27:00 AM
From: Sean W. Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

128 to 256 RAM: How much benefit in NT 4? Experiences? I'm thinking about picking up another RAM stick, and will do so if I can expect I decent performance boost. I've never used NT north of 128 megs, but am finding lately that my "commit charge total" is often hitting 100 and greater, thanks to memory hog apps. The question I have is, can I expect a reasonable performance increase by setting aside 100 meg or more beyond the commit charge total? Is NT's justly famed disk cachability effective that far up? TIA guys (are their any gals among our loyal contributors, BTW?) It may be overkill. I use it but I run verilog sims with 500M process sizes all the time that need a lot of memory. Sean