Here's the bottom line: I upgraded from a PIII 550 to an Athlon 2100+ and I'm getting frustrated. So far there are a few noticeably faster things. My bootup sequence, if I didn't have to go through the SCSI check, would be about 1 minute total. That beats about 5 minutes for my old PC. Aside from that, I don't see much difference, and I'm concerned that I threw a lot of money away.

Encoding video (avi, mpeg, etc) into wmv, a major reason for upgrading, is not all that much faster. The system is more steady during the process, but the actual operation hasn't sped up much.

Encoding MP3's hasn't gotten much faster. Perhaps it's because I'm using EAC now instead of Audiocatalyst, and it's simply atempting to be more accurate, but while I can understand that in the ripping process, the encoding process I imagine should not take that very long.

So is there a program I can get that will only do benchmarks to tell me what kind of performance I'm getting? I downloaded Prime95 for testing purposes, but I don't know how to get benchmarks out of it.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

I have recently upgraded from a PIII-500 to an XP2100+ and all i can say is WOW it is majorly faster.

But we are probably not comparing apples with apples here (no mac joke intended).

Can you give a complete list of all your PC parts as they are often the limiting factor, not just CPU.

If I feel the need to benchmark, I usually download 3DMark. If you choose to submit your benchmark scores, you can compare your score with people who have similar machines.

I usually use setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu as a benchmark. My machines have progressed from needing over 24 hours to complete a block to completing two blocks every 4 hours (dual R12k 300mhz SGI Octane), and it gives me an idea of how quick the current one is.

Another question to ask is did you do a fresh O/S install or just slap the old hard drive in there? That can make a big difference in speed.

HP 9200i internal SCSI CDRW
Adaptec 2930 SCSI card (for SCSI drive)
Toshiba DVD drive
Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM Special Edition drive for the OS/programs
Western Digital 100GB 7200RPM normal drive
floppy drive
breakout box with card reader and 2 USB ports that came with the mobo

That's everything! Not much at all. I don't even have a sound card because I'm using onboard audio. and my situation wasn't much improved when I didn't have the SCSI card or SCSI burner installed.

if I didn't have to go through the SCSI check

On my scsi controller (LSI Logic Inc.), I can hit Ctrl+C during the bootup and select which devices to check and which to skip. That should reduce the time for that step significantly.

Tom

Well this is Adaptec's own SCSI BIOS utility. I tried going into setup for it, looking for just that, but I couldn't find anything. The bootup is one thing I'm actually quite happy with. That is fast, as is the loading of programs.

MMmmmmm - Octane. I am sooooo jealous. I keep looking for one at a sensible price to help my SGI collection along, but they're all way out of my league.

My setiathome and distributed.net crunching is all done on an old R10k 250MHz O2 and some Indigos. Just trying to remember how long it takes to do a work unit on seti. I think it's around 9 hours on the O2.

Encoding video (avi, mpeg, etc) into wmv, a major reason for upgrading, is not all that much faster. The system is more steady during the process, but the actual operation hasn't sped up much.

It is possible with this one that the bottleneck is hard disk throughput rather than CPU time. If that is the case then unless your new disks are dramatically faster you won't see much improvement.

How much RAM do you have ?

It is possible with this one that the bottleneck is hard disk

Yes I was wondering if the WD Special Edition drive he lists is the one with an 8MB buffer instead of 2MB. I use the WD 120Gb with the 8MB buffer to capture video to instead of the 2MB buffer drive that holds all other data, it's a wee bit faster but not much.

It is the one with the 8MB buffer. This should have been significantly faster than when I was doing the same operations on my 20GB 5400RPM IBM drive that came with the Dell. That's what had my OS and apps before...

You've discovered the semiconductor industry's secret. You better watch your back now.

Calvin

I don't remember if it was you that had encountered the problem with DMA, but if it's not enabled on your hard drives, they will be significantly slower than if it were turned on.

So make sure DMA is enabled and, if not, enable it and try again.

DMA is only disabled on the controller for the CD drives. Actually, I'm think that since it wasn't the problem in the first place, I should go turn it back on. Anyway, I don't think that was the problem, but who knows?