any good p4 board here? I'm confused ...

[cuba]

and question number 3:

what about the giga-byte GA-8IRXP board? how's the 845 chipset compare to the 850?

[Rock_Artist]

ASUS P4T 533Mhz considered a good choice for Pentium based Audio solutions.

[QuikDraw]

Originally posted by Dreamware:
Contrary to what people say. Installing the latest intel chipset drivers and application accelerator of www.intel.com is essential. Benchmarks have cleary proven that the Intel Application Accelerator is optimized for the Pentiums 4's data prefetching feature, which essentially anticipates which bits of data the CPU is likely to request next, and then transfers the data into cache before the processor actually requests it.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Okay Alex, explain yourself. You say that the Intel chipset drivers AND Application Accelerator are essential. What makes you feel this way?

Once again (I've done this a few times now since I got this motherboard) I installed both the chipset drivers and Application Accelerator. The latest versions of both just downloaded tonight from Intel.com. I did some tests after the chipset driver install. No change in system performance or behavior. Then I loaded Application Accelerator. There was almost no difference, but my PTLE performance actually decreased according to the DaveC test. Using WinXP System Restore I put my system back the way it was before the installations and retested. My PTLE performance came back to normal.

What does Application Accelerator have to do with prefetching data for the P4 cache? It's a software IDE caching program according to Intel's Readme. What does IDE caching have to do with the CPU prefetching data? Other than possibly improving disk read performance from Intel IDE controllers (which I don't use with PTLE on this system, my HDDs are on Promise controllers) it can't improve P4 performance!

The chipset drivers are supposed to update USB, AGP, IDE and PCI drivers. All these are built into Windows and work just fine! As a matter of fact, the 845 chipset drivers built into WinXP are exactly the same ones that I just downloaded. Same file versions and dates. Why is this essential to install? It's already installed automatically with the OS!

Tell me Alex... Why do you feel that these installations are essential? Why? What problems does it solve? What applications show improved performance? Does it affect PTLE performance in a measurable way? Say, an improved DaveC test score?

I must know where you get the idea that these installations are helpful, or as you say essential.

Benchmarks are designed to sell hardware and software to people that are impressed by numbers on a graph. Rarely do benchmarks translate to real-world performance. I don't care if a benchmark shows my harddrive could be 10ns faster on multiple reads of the same sector! I care if it'll get me another track in PTLE or if I can run more plug-ins. That ain't happenin' man!

[img]images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

Mike

[Dreamware]

In our test we have found track counts to increase after installing the intel chipset drivers and application accelerator. However, they must be installed in a certain order after a clean install to work properly.