# Atom 1.8Ghz Dual-core Vs. Old Pentium IV 2.8Ghz



## afw (Nov 29, 2011)

Hi all ,Just want to confirm ...  my uncle owns an old PIV (and a CRT) ... he used the PC for surfing, email, watching movies etc ... 

considering the the power it consumes i suggested to go with an atom system. something like this --> Foxconn SFF R50-D4 Intel Atom D525 (1.8GHz, Dual-c...

what do u'll think ... will there be performance improvements, or will it be just a side upgrade ??? If you'll have any better suggestion please do tell me ...


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## Completely Bonkers (Nov 29, 2011)

What P4? If Northwood and 2.4GHz or higher, then Atom is just a side upgrade for surfing, email, movies.  However, it consumes a fraction of the energy, is cool, and can run silent. It can also have 4GB RAM, whereas the P4 might be on 2GB depending on chipset. The extra RAM helps improve performance, disk trashing, and if you want, you can set up a RAMDISK that will speed up the browsing experience. So perhaps an "upgrade" worth doing. For a 12/7 machine, ie on all day, it will pay for itself within a year just on electricity costs. You get the benefit of silent.

The D525 is faster than the P4 for multithreaded benchmarks like Cinebench. You'll get the impression from benchmarks that it is 2-3x faster than P4 and so definitely worth the upgrade. BUT, in real world single threaded applications, you really won't notice much difference.

If you ARE going to go Atom, then wait a month and get the new D2700 series. The D2700 is even more efficient, about 20% faster, and a better GPU. Or go with AMD C-350.


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## afw (Nov 29, 2011)

Thank you CB ... that was really helpful ... atom it is then ...


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## de.das.dude (Nov 29, 2011)

An AMD E350 will be better than an Atom IMO. go for the MSi one.
better visuals with the e-350


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## cdawall (Nov 29, 2011)

E350 over the Atom any day, but Atom over the P4.


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## de.das.dude (Nov 29, 2011)

semprons are better than p4s


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## Solaris17 (Nov 29, 2011)

de.das.dude said:


> semprons are better than p4s



my duron used to smoke my buddies P4 and i only had 768mb of ram and a radeon 9250........imma buy those parts again someday, i just made myself sad.


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## zxzxzx (Nov 29, 2011)

I wouldn't give up on the P4 just yet. I'm still using mine and I find it highly capable for my everyday tasks and even for modern games..

EDIT: P4s aren't necessarily power consuming either, one of my old systems ran with a 145w PSU


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## de.das.dude (Nov 29, 2011)

zxzxzx said:


> I wouldn't give up on the P4 just yet. I'm still using mine and I find it highly capable for my everyday tasks and even for modern games..
> 
> EDIT: P4s aren't necessarily power consuming either, one of my old systems ran with a 145w PSU



you gotta be joking. what modern games are you talking about ?


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## zxzxzx (Nov 29, 2011)

.


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## zxzxzx (Nov 29, 2011)

de.das.dude said:


> you gotta be joking. what modern games are you talking about ?



I am currently playing Crysis & Crysis 2 perfectly on high settings, Black Ops, Bad Company 2and soon enough MW3.
I have some sort of gift for playing new games on old systems - I played NFS Carbon smoothly on a P3 Slot 1 @ 450Mhz with a nV FX5500 and 768mb of ram. I can run almost all modern games even though the CPU is usually Dual-core minimum.


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## cdawall (Nov 29, 2011)

zxzxzx said:


> I am currently playing Crysis & Crysis 2 perfectly on high settings, Black Ops, Bad Company 2and soon enough MW3.
> I have some sort of gift for playing new games on old systems - I played NFS Carbon smoothly on a P3 Slot 1 @ 450Mhz with a nV FX5500 and 768mb of ram. I can run almost all modern games even though the CPU is usually Dual-core minimum.



I played crysis on a single core 3400+ at stock with a 7800GS AGP played medium settings at 1024x768. I could see that...However it choked that video card to no end and a $20 sempron 140 would smoke it no questions asked. I don't see high settings on shit without a highend card and super low res. I was there so I can call bullshit on this one.


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## zxzxzx (Nov 29, 2011)

cdawall said:


> I played crysis on a single core 3400+ at stock with a 7800GS AGP played medium settings at 1024x768. I could see that...However it choked that video card to no end and a $20 sempron 140 would smoke it no questions asked. I don't see high settings on shit without a highend card and super low res. I was there so I can call bullshit on this one.



ok. well i just added my specs and as you may or may not see im using a HD 4850 and a 15" CRT monitor which has a max res of 1024x768


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## Mussels (Nov 29, 2011)

i have an atom netbook, and its about as fast as P4's.


its a sidegrade, but a sidegrade that lets you run DDR2, aero (even the crappy intel onboard almost always support aero for vista/7), and quite likely a lot of connectivity upgrades - SATA, DDR2, HD audio, etc.


that said, my 1.6GHz atom (HT, single core/dual thread) can play 720p files only with specific settings, and cant handle 1080p at all. so it depends what kinds of movies he wants to watch. if its SD or 720p content, atom will be just fine.


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## de.das.dude (Nov 29, 2011)

^1024*768. your video card wasnt even worth the buy. my 4650 can play anything at that resolution LOL. and even still i bet no more than 20fps in crysis.

i last played dirt 2 with my 3500+ & 4650 at 1024*768 before giving it away. my 3500+ rocked. never had issue, till i came to multi threaded games.

i had a friend of mine upgrade from a p4 to phenom quad some months back. he now boils eggs on the p4, LOL. i actually saw him do it. takes a long time though


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## cdawall (Nov 29, 2011)

zxzxzx said:


> ok. well i just added my specs and as you may or may not see im using a HD 4850 and a 15" CRT monitor which has a max res of 1024x768



That makes more sense. 1024x768 is doable on a netbook chip and ION graphics...Not really proving performance with that one. P4's are still crap chips that run hot, have a shit throughput and overall were behind the times on release. They also offered zero benefits over a P3.



Mussels said:


> i have an atom netbook, and its about as fast as P4's.
> 
> 
> its a sidegrade, but a sidegrade that lets you run DDR2, aero (even the crappy intel onboard almost always support aero for vista/7), and quite likely a lot of connectivity upgrades - SATA, DDR2, HD audio, etc.
> ...



Thats why I like my L310 based netbook. Handles some 1080P on a good day and plays all 720P without issues.


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## zxzxzx (Nov 29, 2011)

Well, a P4 can still do for the meantime, it's not too different from an Atom so you could probably save up a bit. but it does depend on which P4 it is: the early P4s were no different from the P3s but Northwood's^ were improvements.


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## lilhasselhoffer (Nov 29, 2011)

1) A Pentium 4 cannot play any newer game at high specifications on a screen with any real estate.  By decreasing resolution and eye candy dramatically even an Atom with a decent discrete GPU could play Crysis.

2) Pentium 4 is a power hungry chip, given the computational performance.  Every single Intel socket, in recent history, has had power saving and performance driven CPU variants.  Just because your power saving CPU doesn't pull down the wattage of a performance CPU doesn't mean it's an efficient chip.

A school bus may not get great gas mileage, but running a geo metro 10 times the distance isn't more fuel efficient than running the bus.

3) As has been said, wait for the newer Atom.  The integrated graphics are terrible on the current generation chips, but that will get better soon.

4) Side-grade, perhaps.  You won't get much better performance, but what you do get is faster/more RAM, an actual upgrade path (PATA HDDs are hard to come by these days), and a lower power bill (between cooling and actual performance per cycle being better).  Oh wait, all of that is an upgrade.  The only exception is the lower clock speed of the Atom, which will be offset by the second core....


The short of it, get the newer Atom when it comes out.  Even the current Atom would be an upgrade from the current set-up that has been described.


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## Solaris17 (Nov 29, 2011)

zxzxzx said:


> Well, a P4 can still do for the meantime, it's not too different from an Atom so you could probably save up a bit. but it does depend on which P4 it is: the early P4s were no different from the P3s but Northwood's^ were improvements.



Are kidding? Lol wut?
>p4 isn't too different from an atom
>early p4s weren't different from p3s
>north woods were improvements from p3s
>p4 = atom
>p4 = p3
>north wood improvements
>p4<atom<p3
>north woods


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## zxzxzx (Nov 29, 2011)

? confusing so i kinda don't get this line:
>p4<atom<p3
P3 is faster than Atom?


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## Mussels (Nov 29, 2011)

zxzxzx said:


> ? confusing so i kinda don't get this line:
> >p4<atom<p3
> P3 is faster than Atom?



i cant make sense of what he said, but as a historical side note, P3's were faster than the first P4's.


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## Solaris17 (Nov 29, 2011)

zxzxzx said:


> ? confusing so i kinda don't get this line:
> >p4<atom<p3
> P3 is faster than Atom?



.....yes you should grab one get a copper mine 1.3ghz shit will tool crysis.


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## Widjaja (Nov 29, 2011)

I can say my old P4 3.0E prescott, 2GB DDR400 and X1950pro 512 AGP encodes much faster than my HP Mini which has a 1.66Ghz N280 atom 2GB DDR2667.


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## Completely Bonkers (Nov 29, 2011)

Hey, zxzxzx, Welcome to TPU!

Don't let the old dogs scare you. Their bark is louder than their bite.

And yes, P4 is OK, Atom is a sidegrade. You might do it for various reasons, but *NOT *FOR OUTRIGHT PERFORMANCE.


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## cdawall (Nov 30, 2011)

zxzxzx said:


> Well, a P4 can still do for the meantime, it's not too different from an Atom so you could probably save up a bit. but it does depend on which P4 it is: the early P4s were no different from the P3s but Northwood's^ were improvements.



Ok lets clear some shit up in this one. Yes a Pentium 4 will continue to work, so would a Pentium 2 or a Pentium 3. It is very different from an Atom design wise, Pentium 4 is Netburst based, Atom is Conroe based. Atom consumes <20 watts for every thing on that motherboard, Pentium 4 consumes >65 watts for the CPU alone, not to mention every other component on the board consumes more power. 

Now for a bit of a history legend and comparison to the P3...A P3 is based off of Intel's old P6 micro architecture IE Pentium Pro. Netburst was Intel's first "upgrade" since Pentium Pro. Netburst chips had 2 iterations per clock while P3/AMD had 3. This is why it required a 3ghz P4 to compete with a 2ghz Athlon 64. The FSB long pipelines and other lacklusterism's of the P4 are other reason it is to this day considered a pile of shit. Socket 423 was the original P4 socket and it was WAY different from P3 it "featured" RDRAM, a 400mhz FSB and up to a 2ghz CPU that could barely outperform the top P3's of the day and was destroyed by older AMD Athlon XP's. Intel's own Pentium M based chips destroyed all of the P4's released in a lower power envelope still using their old P6 micro architecture. Conroe's were later based off of this Pentium M and Netburst was abandoned as a huge flop. 

There is not a single thing that a Netburst processor truly won at other than heating rooms. They were a terrible design, terrible production and over all a pile that deserves to end up in dumpsters across the world.


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## xenocide (Nov 30, 2011)

cdawall said:


> Ok lets clear some shit up in this one. Yes a Pentium 4 will continue to work, so would a There is not a single thing that a Netburst processor truly won at other than heating rooms. They were a terrible design, terrible production and over all a pile that deserves to end up in dumpsters across the world.



I see people saying the same thing about BD in 8-10 years.


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## cdawall (Nov 30, 2011)

xenocide said:


> I see people saying the same thing about BD in 8-10 years.



I could see the same thing assuming the next revision of BD offers no improvements. Hopefully windows 8 shows the rumored performance boost to them. 25% more kick would bring those chips a little more comfortably out of the crapper.


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## xenocide (Nov 30, 2011)

cdawall said:


> I could see the same thing assuming the next revision of BD offers no improvements. Hopefully windows 8 shows the rumored performance boost to them. 25% more kick would bring those chips a little more comfortably out of the crapper.



Any Windows 8 benchmarks (or even Linux with corrected schedulers) only showed sometimes a ~5% boost.  That really was the kicker with P4, no matter how many revisions they did it still sucked.


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## cdawall (Nov 30, 2011)

xenocide said:


> Any Windows 8 benchmarks (or even Linux with corrected schedulers) only showed sometimes a ~5% boost.  That really was the kicker with P4, no matter how many revisions they did it still sucked.



Ahh but Conroe was awesome so even if BD tanks we can always hope whatever replaces BD will be awesome


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## HalfAHertz (Nov 30, 2011)

The P4s were marginally better for rendering at the time but the price they asked for the xeons was horrific and the small performance increase was just not worth it...


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## OneMoar (Nov 30, 2011)

a atom would kick the shit out of a netburst chip


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## NdMk2o1o (Nov 30, 2011)

OneMoar said:


> a atom would kick the shit out of a netburst chip



o rly? if by "kick the shit out of" you mean would beat it 10-30% in some multithreaded apps and get beaten by 20-200% in most single threaded apps then yea it really does nutburst netburst doesnt it?? , however the main points to make are that whilst delivering better threaded and sometime comparably single threaded performance it is doing it whilst using about 1/5th the power draw and heat and much lower clock speeds, which isn't bad at all.


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## puma99dk| (Nov 30, 2011)

if u go with the Intel Atom get it on the Nvidia IOn chipset så du kan use Nvidia Cuda to decode h264/x264/ccv1 codec for HD/Bluray or else u need more power.


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## Solaris17 (Nov 30, 2011)

puma99dk| said:


> if u go with the Intel Atom get it on the Nvidia IOn chipset så du kan use Nvidia Cuda to decode h264/x264/ccv1 codec for HD/Bluray or else u need more power.



WAT? you just cant slip into japanese mid sentence bro.


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## OneMoar (Nov 30, 2011)

Solaris17 said:


> WAT? you just cant slip into japanese mid sentence bro.



he just did  Aniki


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## Steevo (Nov 30, 2011)

Total cost of ownership a AMD Fm1 platform is cheap, or if you want real cheap you can score on a AM3 dual core with a good 4xxx series GPU off die and it will be supremely energy efficient.


I have four quads with 4GB of RAM and they idle at 17W from the plug and a whole 30 something normal use.


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## puma99dk| (Dec 1, 2011)

Solaris17 said:


> WAT? you just cant slip into japanese mid sentence bro.



lul, my native language appeared WTF 

sry for that man, and sry it's not japanese, but it's was a nice through, but it's danish, i can english, danish and a little of japanese and russian even a bit of german even it's for private use only, but thx to point it out ^^;


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