Dual P3 550s or single Pentium 4 1.6?

[john1290]

I currently have a Pentium 4 1.6 gig system. From my work I "acquired" an old mini-server. It's an HP Kayak XU based on the Intel 443BX chipset. It has a AGP port and a few PCI ones and a scsi system in it. Currently, it has a slot 1 P3/550 CPU with room for another. As soon as I can find a PC to "borrow" another slot 1 p3/550 from (and I'll need to purchase a VRM from HP for the 2nd slot), I plan on throwing 512 megs of SDRAM into it and MAYBE put it to work as a video encoder. Question....should I just sell it as is or would adding the 2nd CPU come close to crunching AVIs to MPEG2 at near P4 1.6 speeds? (Of course I'll be using an SMP-aware MPEG2 prog.

[Dubber]

P4 1.6 should outperform Dual PIII-550 in video editing/converting.

[SaSi]

A dual P3/550 should never be a match for a P4/1.6. It should be faster than a single CPU 1GHz machine, but 1.6 is 60% faster anyway.

[JamesB69]

the p4 will be faster at everything.

give me the dual p3's, should be faster than my celeron 600 which is my video editor

[kitty]

Get the fastest P4 you can afford (or maybe an Athlon without a VIA chipset).

Multiple processors can help with some software but 2 very old processors is not better than one newer one.

A website for info: www.2cpu.com

[hustbaer]

2*550 will for 99.9% of all cases be slower than 1*1000.
even it the cpu-core and instruction timing etc. were identical.

now that P4 is far more optimized than P3, the difference will be even bigger.
i think 1 P4@1G will at least be 30-40% faster than 2*P3@0.55G...
so a 1.6G P4 should be twice as fast...

and all this speaking of applications that scale well with additional CPUs...
most applications don't - even those that use multiple worker threads.
(which is what i believe you mean by SMP aware...)

bye,
--hustbaer

[bartman]

At work I have a dual P3 1.4G with 1GH of ram.....for video encoding my P4 2G Desktop is faster.

The misconception is that 2 CPU's = twice as fast but the reality is that while 2 CPU's is better than 1 CPU, you only get around 60% increase in speed and thet is only when the software supports it.

A dual processor will 'feel' faster though because while one CPU is going full bore the other can handle running the OS. In your case I'd stick with the P4 for encoding and use the P3 for mundane stuff or just playing around. (dual processor machines are fun if you haven't used them before).

Do a benchmark and let us know the results though....