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Pentium M too slow yet?

post #1 of 9
7/31/06 at 6:39pm
Thread Starter 
I have a 9300 with a 2gig pentium M, 6800NU, 1 gig RAM.
I am begining to think about upgrading to 7800GTX and 2 gig RAM, to try and boost frames on games like Oblivion,Prey, and the recent Call of Juarez demo(kick ass if you havn't played it yet).
What I am curious about is whether anyone has run into a bottleneck due to the slower processor yet. Before I spend $400 on a videcard/poweradapter/RAM, I want to make sure people aren't already seeing slower speeds due to the slower CPU. Might as well save the money towards a new machine if the CPU is going to slow me down in the next 12 months anyway.
Anyone with a decked out 9300 confirm they don't see CPU bottlenecking yet? I run everything at 1280X720 on my widescreen TV.
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post #2 of 9
7/31/06 at 6:50pm
I'd say no. My previous system was an XPS Gen.2 with 2.0Ghz P-M, 2GB DDR2, 7800 GTX, and this new system (see sig) is a marginal improvement, mainly due to the 7900 GTX speed. I doubt I'd have noticed if you'd swapped my 2.0 Pentium-M to a dual core 2.0Ghz without my knowing.

There's all this talk about "oh I can now run antivirus and do other stuff," but I barely notice the difference. I sure as heck can't run any hard drive intensive applications while running other hard drive intensive apps. So, you're not going to be burning DVDs and doing other hard drive-related stuff, that's for sure, DESPITE what the advertisements for Core Duo say. I'm actually a bit fed up of all the processing power/video card/RAM speed increases. The hard drive is so outdated now it's a joke, and stops the whole system from being truly great. I'd take a hard drive speed improvement over ANY other upgrade now.
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post #3 of 9
7/31/06 at 7:24pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by WilliamG
I doubt I'd have noticed if you'd swapped my 2.0 Pentium-M to a dual core 2.0Ghz without my knowing.

Thanks, that tells me what I had hoped. I realize with a duo I could perform multiple actions at once, like play a game and watch TV(though i don't know why I would do this). I am guessing the real slow down will start occuring with Vista and dual-core enabled games. But I still see that as far enough in the future to wait.
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post #4 of 9
7/31/06 at 9:13pm
See my sig for specs, and my system still handles ANYTHING I throw at it!
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post #5 of 9
7/31/06 at 9:17pm
Ive seen that people doing Pin mods enjoy quite the speed boost and better benefits over the users with Duo cpu's. My friends 2.4ghz pinmodded system is definetly speedier than my cost effective Core Duo 1.66ghz system. even if i have a videocard thats 2 generation ahead.
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post #6 of 9
7/31/06 at 11:40pm
I had the same question as a non gamer. But I do a lot of multi tasking since I have an external 2405 hooked up (lots of screen real estate to do more stuff with). But as AliG.. I mean WilliamG said, I noticed that when my computer gets bogged down, it's due to HD activity. For example, when I copy files to an external drive... holy cow... computer is practically frozen although CPU utilization is below 10%. The other lag I see is with Adobe reader. Flipping pages can sometimes be in slow mo mode, or at least, it's not snap snap (but again, CPU utilization never gets to 100%)

So guys, what can I do with my 9300 to make it faster? I have some ideas:

1) replace my 5400rpm 80gb drive with a >100gb 7200rpm drive.
2) install a second HD in the optical bay for my always on bit torrent and data files.
3) Increase my 1GB RAM? I don't notice my page file usage going over 1gb, usually it's between 500 and 1GB.
4) To transfer files to an external drive, instead of using a USB connection, use the firewire or get a PC Card SATA interface (assume external drive is SATA).
5) Get a pin mod chip to replace my 1.6 Dothan.
6) Put the CPU on Max multiplier mode.

Are those worthwhile efforts guys?
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post #7 of 9
8/1/06 at 12:09am
It depends on what you do. I use my laptop for a lot of web devlopment, sufring, blah whatever. I use VMWare to run a dev server and I will say I *REALLY* noticed the diff going from a i9300 with a 2ghz PM to the E1705 with a 2.0 ghz core duo (both systems have 2gb of ram -- infact its the same chips). If your primary use is for gaming the spend money on a faster video card it will give you a much more noticeable improvement in your actual use.

BTW Going from a <7200 RPM drive to a 7200 rpm drive is pretty pricey, yes but they really are a gem and make the whole system feel a lot smoother, I had a 100gb 7200 drive in both systems and love it. (I initially ran a 4200RPM 80GB in the i9300 though)
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post #8 of 9
8/1/06 at 1:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by DELL-Machina
Ive seen that people doing Pin mods enjoy quite the speed boost and better benefits over the users with Duo cpu's. My friends 2.4ghz pinmodded system is definetly speedier than my cost effective Core Duo 1.66ghz system. even if i have a videocard thats 2 generation ahead.

Once programs start coming in the multi-threaded flavor, the Core Duo will look a lot faster. The problem is- who knows when programs you care about will utilize multiple cpus?

I'm still interested in the Core 2 processors. At the same clock speed, they are significantly faster than my Pentium M, which means a performance boost now, and then another performance boost for applications that can use more than 1 cpu.
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post #9 of 9
8/1/06 at 1:36pm
The core duo does have an overall snappier feel to it, and if you are not a super busy person (Wow + thottbot or alas + AIM + Email) etc all running at one time you will not really be loosing out not having one.

The way I think about it having a i9300 before my E1705 was that the E1705 feels more like my desktop P4 3.0 with HT now than it did with the i9300 and the single core 1.6 Pentium M.
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