[zetakappa700]

Alright, it seems to me that CPU ghz have gone down and frontside bus has increased, how does this effect the overall speed of the system? I have a celeron 2.7 with a bus of 533 Mhz. How would this compair to say a AMD 2.0 Ghz with a 1600 or 2000 Mhz bus? The CPU speed has gone down but the bus speed has increased?

Also, I was thinking of buying a motherboard/CPU combo from tiger or newegg...can I plug and play or would I have to adjust the windows settings? Or is this entirely a bios thing that should be no problem, provided that motherboard bios supports the CPU? I was thinkig about moving to 939 interface or 754 interface, any suggestions on boards or CPUs?

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I think that I posted this thread in the wrong section. After exploring the site I believe it should have gone in building or upgrading your system.

[zetakappa700]

I think that I posted this thread in the wrong section. After exploring the site I believe it should have gone in building or upgrading your system.

[Samm]

Hi there

I'll try to explain the CPU clock speed & FSB speed for you...

Firstly, AMDs. A common misconception with AMD cpus is that an Athlon XP 3200+ (for example), runs at 3.2GHz. It does not. This particular cpu runs at about 2.2GHz. The 3200 rating is just the PR (performance rating) in MHz of the cpu. i.e An athlon xp 3200+ is supposed to be equivalent to an Intel Pentium 3.2GHz in terms of performance.

The FSB for this particular cpu is 200MHz with a multiplier value of 11. Hence, 200MHz x 11 = 2.2GHz.

If you had a computer with an Athlon XP 3200+ installed, the chances are that it would be using DDR400 (400MHz) ram. This is because DDR takes the CPU FSB & doubles it - i.e 200MHz x 2 = 400MHz.

Intel P4's & Celerons use a slightly different system again. For example, a Pentium 4 2.0GHz cpu (socket 478) will actually use a base FSB of only 100MHz with a multiplier of 20 (100MHz x 20 = 2GHz). This FSB is then quadrupled to give the system FSB of 400MHz.
In the case the celeron 2.7GHz (FSB 533), the actual base FSB is 133MHz. It is quadrupled to give the 533MHz value.

In terms of how the FSB speed affects overall speed, as a general rule of thumb, the FSB affects the overall system speed for the motherboard, so higher is generally better. The multiplier however only affects the CPU clock speed, not anything else.


In answer to the second part of your question, if you upgrade the cpu & motherboard but use an existing hard drive with Windows already installed on it, then you will find that on the first (and possibly a few subsequents boots) that Windows will detect an awful lot of new hardware. This will often be the system devices (chipset, IDE controllers, USB controllers etc) on the new motherboard, as they will be different to the ones on the old board. This can lead to a buggy install of windows & it is always preferable to perform a fresh installation of windows instead, if possible.

[Thebinaryman]

the amd would own. celerons only have 8kb L1 cache and 128kb L2 cache (at least the older ones, not the D).