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Well, after being without a PC (and net access!) for about a month, I finally got around to getting my new mobo: an MSI 865PE Neo2 with a P4C 2.4GHz. Very impressed with the mobo, much less so with the CPU. Can't really tell the differance between it and my old P4 1.7GHz (which only had 266MHz DDR!). Runs cool, though

Hypertheading doesn't seem to help one damn bit for my multitasking. Maybe it's because I'm using Win2K, though...it's not quite as "optimized" for HT as WinXP. Anyone got any experance with it on these two OS's? Haven't installed Linux yet; it's my next major project (SuSE 9 Pro DVD Edition, for those who care). At least I should get some good performace form IT...

Down with Windows!

What's the matter with you, you only have ONE pc??

BurninMan921, Personally I think it's difficult to feel the performance advantage once you go past 1.5 / 2.0 Ghz.

Btw. what about IO performance in your PC? Maybe the bottleneck (if you have any) is somewhere other than the processor?

Cheers.

Current bottleneck: Memory (dual-channel 266MHz, not 400Mhz). Next week, I'll fix that. The big thing is the HT doesn't seem to help multitasking at all. Copy a large amount of data around the HDD still slows the whole system to a crawl; Unreal takes just as long to load (Toms had a vid up that showed HT really speeding up UT's loading).

Maybe XP is tweaked for HT alot better than 2K (since XP knows there really is only 1 CPU, not two, it should be a bit smarter about process allocation).

"Copy a large amount of data around the HDD still slows"

I'd look at a RAID 0 set up for improved reading/writing perfomance. I would have a third drive to use as a back up and use an image creator to image the RAID. Tom's Hardware just reviewd a new RAID card, http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031128/index.html looks promising.

You should notice a boost in performance in apps written with HT in mind. I.e. some video and auiso editing apps.

THat proc should overclock easily to 3.0 Ghz on air cooling.

What I meant by the copy-slowdown was that doing any intense HDD activity slows down the rest of the system; it's eating CPU cycles like popcorn...and I do run a RAID: 2 120GB/8MG Cache WD's-nice and fast

I can't OC just yet...gotta wait for the 433MHz DDR (or maybe 466MHz...). Then I'll just turn on the MSI's DOT (Dynamic Overclock Tech.-it monitors CPU usage, and when it spikes over 95% or so it OC's the CPU). And yeah, that little 2.4Ghz should do AT LEAST 3.0...maybe 3.2...

HT does have some nice benifits: ran a DivX compressor, and could fire up UT2K3 and run it w/o any slowdown. Ditto when using DVD Shrink...

"AT LEAST 3.0...maybe 3.2"

hell if you get one from a good batch you oculd even get 3.4.

Maybe the new file system in Microsofts next OS, Longhorn, will have improvements for HT besides general imporvements over NTFS.

How are you running RAID? From the ICH5 or a PCI based card. If it's a PCI based solutiuon you might be saturating the BUS. I'm not sure of the bandwidth allocated for the ICH5R south bridge but youl could also be filling that up if running the RAID from that.

Too bad there aren't more consumer level products that take advantage of PCI-X

I wish PCI-Express would get here hopefully it will replace all of PCI ;)

What is your stripe size on that RAID you're running. 16k is generally best in benchmarks but not in real world usage for the typical home user.

It's a PCI card (Promise), stripe size is whatever it's default is (64KB, I think). The overall speed is fine; I deal mostly with large movie/VOB files.

Any copying I do is always to drives on another channel (usually to the ones hooked to the mobo), so bandwidth shouldn't normally to be big of a deal. As I said, the drives are just 2 8MG cache 120GB's.

The slowdown is there no matter what; with/without RAID. It's a wonderful little problem with IDE: everything gets handled by the CPU.

I'm about to ditch all 5 hard drives in the system and replace the main one's with Serial ATA drives, and drop in one or two of those huge new 300GB Maxtors for the vids (my roommate wants all of his DVD's in DivX format so we can use the PC as a "jukebox") - so hopefully that'll help.