Resolved CPU Speed and ratings

I am looking to upgrade my cpu "Intel D840" I am using a "P5N-D" Asus m/b. I am looking for a list of procesors in increasing speed & power. I have found a site that will tell me what CPU's are compatable with the m/b, now I need to understand which would be that fastest. In the old days it was just the processsor speed and when I purchased the D840 it was 3.2 mhz which was very fast in the past. I see the new Dual and Quad at a much lower mhz and I don't understand how this relates to my currend processor's speed.

 

The best article on this subject, ie the most likely to be under stood by non-geeks is an extract from a Wicki article attached. Basically it means that most performance increases for CPUs are now made by increasing caches etc, and not by raising clock speeds, so that the MHz ratings are not good indicators of CPU speeds any more.

Roger

 

Multiple cores do multiple tasks. In this age of multi-tasking, different processors can handle different tasks, you can set up say, a media conversion in one window and go about doing other tasks in others...theoretically. No more waiting around while one task is completed.

Games are somewhat different, you use one window (you can't run high-level games and run other tasks at the same time).

Your choice is to select many cores for multi-tasking (in many windows) or if you have CPU intensive programs, choose fewer cores.

Matt
[In a nutshell ]

 

I have to disagree with you Matt, multi-cores are the best speed boost one can buy.

If you are using a cpu intensive programme, and I do in Photoshop, a multi-core cpu is a great speed booster. I recently upgraded from an Athlon 64x2 to a Phenom 64x4, and the processing times for some of the steps when I am working on a large image file, eg a panorama of 12 images, are greatly reduced.

For example: blending these files used to take anything up to 20 secs, and now takes 10 to 12 secs. It greatly speeds up some other jobs too, such as smart sharpen, the patch tool, etc. Watching the progress in Task Manager one can see all four cores running and 80% using 4 cores is obviously a higher processing speed than 100% on a single core.

Roger

 

Steve, I have had this processor (Intel D840) for many years 2006, and I was just looking for something faster.

 

Here are the possible upgrades for my motherboard.

Looking for the fastest processor for my Asus P5N-D.

Here is the url to the list of upgrades, could someone let me know what is a fastest processor upgrade than my D840?

http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-ASUS/P5N-D.html

 

You should look up the price of some socket 775 processors in the price-range you want to spend, then cross-reference with that table. I expect some of the top-end processors would be worth more than the rest of your computer (maybe several times over).

It is not just speed, you need to consider the size of the L2 cache (L2 cache is important and it is expensive, it's the main difference between a Celeron and a Pentium), also the fsb (front side bus), your motherboard is 1333MHz which you should match with the fsb of the CPU.

Is you RAM 1333Mhz? If it is lower it may be a bottle-neck.

After that, you need to decide on the cores. You can tell us what programs you are interested in running. I would not expect you are running high-end games or very CPU intensive programs, so a Quad core would probably be suitable.

[Roger, I'll point out that late versions of Photoshop are one of the few programs around that can run on numerous processors at once.]

You can let us know what your price range is, if you are stuck. See how you go at doing some research yourself

Matt

 

+1. If the software is written to only utilise one core, you can have as many cores possible and it will make no difference.
Single core, MHz is king.