Hi, I have a 1.2 GHz Athlon T-bird ECS K7S5A mobo 512 MB 2100 DDR Ram 20 gig samsung hd (5400 rpm) ATI AIW Radeon 7500 I primarily do a lot of divx encoding and was wondering if I should either upgrade from the T-bird to a XP 1600+ to get faster performance. On the other hand, I read somewhere that memory throughput is the deciding factor and not processor speed. With amd I could go to 333MHz memory (I have to get a new mobo though) or I could go with Intel ::devil: (heaven forbid) with the new PC1066 RDRAM. Obviously the Intel solution is going to be much more expensive considering that XP1600+ chips sell for 70$. I would appreciate greatly if anybody could point me in the right direction. Thanks Karrad

It's not really the memory bandwidth thats important, what is important is memory latency. Using CL 2 266mhz DDR ram would probably be faster than using CL 3 333mhz DDR ram. Try going into the bios and set the CAS latency to 2 (if it isn't already). With some low quality RAM blocks this might cause you system to become unstable.

Thanks 

Hi, I tried setting the CAS Latency to 2. It was at SPD before. After I changed it to 2 there was ~ 5% increase in speed. I would like to find if a higher speed processor does have a big effect. Thanks karrad

I build a few computers a month, and constantly upgrade my encoding machine. I originally had a 1.4 thunderbird with PC2100, then upgraded to a xp 1800+, and got PC2700 two weeks ago. I would say that from 1.4 to 1800+ had about a 10% increase. The upgrade to PC2700 yealded almost no increase in speed. But having said that I think it would be a good upgrade from T-bird to XP for all round things. I find that my SVCD encoding is noticibly faster on the XP..... One of the most significant upgrades was setting up raid. When doing all those spliting and multiplexing operations, Raid 0 really really helps.... Hope this helps you make a decision.

u might get 10% quicker with a xp 1600 on a good day with the wind behind u. it made very little difference to me when i did the same upgrade! I also tried ddr memory........no speed increase at all.

I think an XP also improves the memory throughput a bit (at least that's what it looks like in some benchmarks). In your case, I'd try to overclock the FSB. If your memory runs at CAS2 with no problems, it will also o/c a bit, I think. Getting your system to run at 150FSB would make it a T-Bird 1350 with 300MHz DDR RAM. An upgrade for free! (if you already have a good cpu cooler and decent case cooling, otherwise you might have to invest a few bucks into this).