processor

ashby

Can anyone tell me how to compare different processors, for speed etc. I'm looking at renewing my PC soon, but am confused as to how to know which PC has a better processor. The same brand of PC often seem to use differing makes of processor and as far as I can tell there is no standard indication or ratings. Pentium 4 519 is presumably faster than P4 516? but how do I then compare those to some Athlon / Celron number ?
Many thanks.

Mr_Skint_2

http://www.reviewcentre.com/products97.html

http://www23.tomshardware.com/

http://www.upenn.edu/computing/arch/standards/supportingdocs/04-05/processor-04-05.html

John_Gray

The other thing to bear in mind is that unless you have "enough" memory, you may be using a proportion of the CPU power in performing "paging".

For XP, "enough memory" is often 512 MB, unless you're running many heavily-memory-intensive programs, when 1 GB or more may be a good number. The 256 MB which comes with many cheapo PCs is adequate in most circumstances, but for another £30-odd you can get another 256 MB of memory, which ought to "release the full potential" of the CPU...

John

gizmoleeds

Mr_Skint wrote:

http://www.reviewcentre.com/products97.html

http://www23.tomshardware.com/

http://www.upenn.edu/computing/arch/standards/supportingdocs/04-05/processor-04-05.html

Nice links Mr Skint.

There are things like FSBs and caches which will also have some sort of effect on the overall speed. However, this kind of thing got too techie even for me (I used to believe that the higher the clock speed the faster the processor - oh, how wrong I was!).