Pentium 3 to Pentium 4 - degradation in performanc

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22 years 11 months

I have no experience benchmarking P3 to offer you, however, I thought you should be aware that there are many potential factors that could affect the performance of a program (any program):



1. CPU and system bus.

- Obviously, a faster bus is always beneficial.

- Sometimes a program is written with code optimized for a specific processor. Differences exist between different versions of Intels Pentium Chips as well as AMDs chips.



2. Physical Memory.

- The more the better. Windows employs a memory manager to swap programs and data out of physical memory to the hard drive (virtual memory) as needs dictate. The more physical memory you have, the less swapping that may need to take place.

Note that the amount of available memory is dependent upon the OS version you are using and how many concurrent programs (processes) are running in the background. Windows XP has a [b]much[/b] larger footprint than Windows 9x versions (Windows Me is a 9x platform). I think 512K RAM is the minimum you should have with XP.



3. Hard drive access speed.

- When using the virtual memory manager to swap memory out to disk, the faster the disk, the faster the program response.



4. Program architecture.

- Windows 9x handles 16 bit code more efficiently than Windows NT/2000/XP. If the program employs any 16 bit code, I would expect that code to perform better on the 9x systems.



Hope that helps!



Bernard Ertl

InterPlan Systems Inc.