Have you done any speed tests on your hard drives and made sure DMA is enabled.. Sometimes windows likes to somehow disable that..:)

Pat,

I've got the same Mobo with a 3.0 P4 and also find it to be very stable. You mentioned you bumped up the RAM from one to two gigs. Did you notice a considerable increase in performance or a marginal increase in performance?

Windows will slow drop your hard drive interface speed down (from DMA mode 4/5 to the craptacular PIO modes) when it sees your drives getting errors. Hard drives shouldn't be getting errors.

Optical drives will get errors when you insert a scratched CD.

There's a way to stop windows from doing that.

Patrick, the speed boost you get from a RAM upgrade will depend on the combination of programs you run at once. With heavy multitasking or programs that can potentially use lots of RAM (photoshop with large files, video editing programs) then you may need more RAM than other people. Some video editing programs also use more RAM than others (i.e. with Vegas you can set it to not use all that much RAM).


Having 4 sticks of the exact samel model 512MB sticks will increase memory bandwidth and give performance a few percent boost though, on that particular chipset.
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=37831

How did you manage to get a Pentium 4 socket 478 3.6 GHz? According to Intel they only went up to 3.4 GHz. And Asus says the P4C800-E Deluxe only supports up to 3.4 GHz.

Thank's all for all the info. Not sure which way I'm going probley a pentuim because it's been awhile since I owned one so I might give that system a try. Thanks again for all the info you all have given.

Chad

I will throw one more at you....

If youre going to get a new board, I would whole heartedly recommend the ASUS P5AD2-E Premium. Couple that with the P4 550 chip. The 550 is the fastest chip you can get ahold of without having to spend several hundred more $ for a marginal performance gain. It is THE sweet spot chip with regards to bang for buck. You can then pick up 2 GB of Patriot DDR-2 RAM for a little over $400, which gives about 5.6 GBS throughput. It is a rock solid, screaming setup. But youd also want to re-invest in storage, as that motherboard uses SATA drives, primarily, which also are faster. You can pick up some Western Digital 250GB SATA's for $130 bucks apiece at NewEgg. Go ahead and get 4 of them for a TB. You'll not be needing much more for a while to come. And, it allows for very easy and very stable overclocking using some simple BIOS preset profiles. You can take the 3.5 to 3.75 with no issues whatsoever, and if you get a decent CPU fan to keep it cool, you can go to 3.9...no troubles. I actually rendered at 3.9 just fine, but it was very close to max temp....didnt have a problem, just made me nervous.

I would not overclock unless you know what you're doing. If you do want to overclock:
A- Get a good heatsink. The Zalman 7000alcu (may be newer version out now) and Thermalright Xp-120 are considered among the best bang for your buck heatsinks.
B- Test your system for stability! Prime95 + CPUBurn (not CPU Burn-in) I found stresses your computer the most. Leave prime95 running overnight to test RAM fully too. You should probably test at a more overclocked state than the one you want to run at (so there's safety margin).
C- Figure out maximum overclocks for the chipset, CPU, and RAM. On Intel/Pentium platform, you may not be able to figure out the maximum for the chipset. You can drop the memory divider to underclock the RAM... this lets you test the CPU. Test RAM by using 1:1 divider and memtest86, usually it hits a limit before CPU does.
AMD64: http://www.seriousmagic.com/dvrmonitoring2.cfm#p0
D- Be aware that your system still may not be stable. My machine passes prime95 and memtest fine when overclocked but it will randomly freeze or reboot every other day or so when overclocked.


Overclocking does offer very tangible speed increases though! For video editing, CPU speed is the biggest component in your system's overall speed. To guestimate the performance increase for rendering, divide the clock speeds and knock off 10% of that increase.

Hard drive speed doesn't make any practical speed benefit in my opinion... My own tests can be seen at http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...id=18784<br /> "hard drive speed on rendering".
SATA is only faster than IDE because newer drives tend to be faster, and newer drives tend to be SATA. Sometimes the newer SATA version of a drive is slower though.

Normally, I would agree with that, but times are changing and it's getting to where you dont have to worry about all that detail, since the engineers at ASUS have done it for you by creating the easy overclocking BIOS profiles. One need not know the individual aspects of it, just choose 10% and the BIOS makes all the neccessary adjustments to the chip/FSB/RAM timing, and youre good to go. All you really have to worry about is how hot youre getting.

BTW, does Zalmon offer an LG775 compatible fan? I couldnt locate one after they were recommended to me before. You'd think theyd be cranking those out right now.

Thank's Daniel for the recomendation that sounds like a great system but I don't want to spend that much money.Plus I want to use my memory I have and my drives. I will upgrade to sata drives soon but right now I just want to invest in a faster Motherboard cpu combo. I'm still looking and going to buy soon once I make my mind up which to get.

Thank's for the help

This is getting for confusing lol. I want a cpu that is compatible with 64 bit. On the AMD no problem figuring which ones do that but the pentuim is a bit confusing. If I understand it right the only Pentuim cpu's that are 64 bit is the 6xx series and all of them are the 775 socket and you can only get the motherboard that has the DDR2 and PCI express slots am I right? I really don't want to invest in another Video card and memory if I don't have to. Thank's again all for the help.

Chad

Are you sure? I don't think those settings account for stability. I don't think it would underclock your RAM either (which would likely hit a limit before the CPU does).

The Zalman 7700alcu should be compatible with the LGA775 socket. It is big I believe... hardocp.com's review of the motherboard in question should tell you whether or not it'll fit.

It's me again and I'm about ready to buy but still not sure what to get. I really was wanting to get a pentuim because everything I read about rendering tells me to go with a pentuim. The only thing is I want a chip that is able to handle the 64 bit XP and the pentuim 600 series is the way to go but the problem is If I go that way I will need to buy just about everything new including hard drives and memory and a new video card so this is what is stopping me. I have been looking at the new San Diego 3700 chip and that chip is very close to what I need the only thing I have not heard much about it and how good it is is editing and rendering so this is where I am at now wondering if anyone heard anything good about this chip? Thank's again all for the help.

Chad

Not sure where you are reading, but you might try this:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2...2/index.x?pg=1

They compare Xeons, P4's of all types, A64's, X2's and Opterons. Intel most definitely does NOT lead the pack in performance or rendering.

You might also want to check out a similar thread:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=45178
What processor to get for Vegas.

I don't think you need to go for a 64bit CPU because we don't even know if it's useful, and it may take some time for the bugs to settle out and to wait for 64-bit drivers. By that time you could just upgrade?

As far as buying things new, you probably don't need to buy new hard drives. If the motherboard is low on IDE channels, you could pickup a IDE-SATA converter/adapter.
Memory may need to be new if the new mobo needs DDR2 or your RAM isn't fast enough. Video card is similar... pciE versus AGP.