Forum Home
Press F1
Thread ID: 11341	2001-09-13 07:12:00	Progress Update on slow Celeron 700	Guest (0)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
18735	2001-09-13 07:12:00	Hi Guys I've been following up on all the advice I received a week or so ago (and Juha's comments thanks) and have made some progress but the problem is still there. I downloaded SiSoft Sandra as recommended and benchmarked my disks. The ATA66 disks maxed at 8200 and the ATA100 at 12500 whch were very poor results. I then found that UDMA support was not enabled in the bios of either computer and this improved ATA66 disk performance to 10500 and ATA100 to 18500 for the fast computer (PIII 733) but only 10200 & 12000 for the Celeron. This is still way below what SiSoft Sandra suggests but both are using 40 wire cables which I will replace on the weekend with 80 wire types but I still don't think that I can blame the overall slowness on just the Celeron cache size or CPU speed differential Nor does it seem likely to be the difference between the two C drives though the Celeron is ATA66 and the PIII ATA100. Just to confuse the issue further, checking device manager (resource by device)tells me that neither computer has DMA drivers installed. The message is 'DMA drivers are not installed or not required for this device'. My original informal benchmark was the time taken by NAV2001 to complete a scheduled scan on the two identical software setups and the difference was Celeron 31 minutes vs PIII 11 minutes. That is now down to 7 minutes & 4 minutes but for all that, the Celeron still acts slow. It feels to me like some kind of instruction processing bottleneck as with the Celeron there is a distinct delay between clicking on a button and any action happening while the PIII reacts virtually instantaneously. Benchmarking the two CPU's shows them to be virtually neck and neck so I'm baffled (which I might add doesn't take much as my computer knowledge is not that great). Could this be a video fault or bottleneck? Both computers use on board video and I assume that part of the 128MB of system RAM is used for video RAM. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Peter	Guest (0)
18736	2001-09-13 10:30:00	You've probably gone as far as you can with the celeron not meeting the speeds you expect of it. the Celeron CPU has a bus speed (External data)of 66Mhz, multiplied by 10.5 to get the core speed of 700Mhz. The PIII CPU has a higher bus speed, probably 100Mhz. Add to this, the Celeron has only half the cache of the PIII. I have benchmarked Celeron CPU's & most of them only reach a speed comparable to a CPU that is 65% of their size. Eg, your Celeron 700 probably reached the benchmark comparable to a PII 466 CPU. I'm no expert onthese matters, but the celeron was never made to be a performer, it was sold as a budget CPU. Motherboard design & chipset play a large part too & it's not uncommon to see the same chip produce very different benchmark results on different motherboards.	Guest (0)
18737	2001-09-13 12:50:00	a while ago we did some testing on a p2 350 and a celeron 466. used the same motherboard, just swapped the cpus. to get the cele up to the p2's framerates (quake3 timedemo 001) we had to overclock it to around 550. i would expect a p3 733 to completely out perform a cele 700. can't wait to get one to test;-)	Guest (0)
18738	2001-09-13 22:51:00	Thanks Mike, but I think you may have missed the point a little. I am not trying to do disk or processor intensive work here, or even moderate multitasking. There are no graphics intensive actvities or games & no heavy swap file demands. This is simply opening small Word files and carrying out basic Windows functions. The Celeron responds sluggishly to routine activities that I would not normally have to wait for. I find myself urging it on so that I can enter the next command, something I have never done before except on the world wide wait before I got ADSL. The Celeron is definitely slower to respond to a click than my old P166 which I still have running as a comparison. The old girl doesn't benchmark very well and takes time to process data but it sure answers the call faster. With the amount of RAM the Celeron has and the limited demands made, I would expect that a normal user would not notice any difference. In all the reviews I have read and the comparisons run in PCWorld, I have never seen a report of slower response to mouse or keyboard input for a Celeron. Do you have any comment on the lack of DMA drivers for either computer? At this stage I am assuming that Win2000 doesn't need to load drivers to run UDMA on the basis that I wouldn't have obtained the disk speed increase that I achieved by enabling the BIOS facility if that were only half of the equation. If anybody can point me to a good test to run in Sandra I would be grateful as I can't quite see how to isolate my problem. My experience of benchmarking is virtually nil. Regards Peter	Guest (0)
18739	2001-09-14 04:51:00	I added 128MB of SDram to my old 233 (from 64Mb) and it slowed down noticeably, but seems to have come right after I installed Cacheman.	Guest (0)
18740	2001-09-14 06:45:00	Back again(got to get some work done!). Check out this article on Bus Mastering you may need to make some ajustments? www.windows-help.net	Guest (0)
18741	2001-09-14 14:12:00	This may also be an explanation for the 233: www.pcforrest.freeserve.co.uk	Guest (0)
18742	2001-09-14 22:26:00	I checked out the bus mastering pages but unless I missed something, they seem to deal only with W98 and I am using W2K. I tried an extensive search on the MS W2K site but drew a blank on bus mastering, DMA or UDMA. A further net search turned up two other three sites including Tweak3D.net but that seemed to be suggesting that manual registry changes were needed. They all seemed to talk only about UDMA/66 but I have a mix of 66 & 100 disks. Does anybody know where I can find W2K-specific information on enabling DMA and whether or not W2K even needs DMA drivers. Standing by! Peter W	Guest (0)
1