Oh Yeah, Speed Baby!

This AMD powered box is a speed demon ...
 I just installed a full Microsoft Office 2003 installation, from start to finish, under 2 minutes!
 Launch Word for the first time ever, just over 1 second.
 Launch Excel for the first time ever, under 1 second.
 I wish there was a way to easily determine what is the biggest factor in the performance gain for a particular operation, CPU speed, memory, disk speed, caching ... oh well, whatever the reason, I'm having fun! :-)

9 Comments

Tony December 12, 2004

Nevermind, just saw the previous post.

Tony December 12, 2004

What kind of box is it? Sounds like I might need one too! Tony

Mario December 12, 2004

Hi, nice to see you having so much fun. :) I don't know the biggest factor, but it's pretty obvious (for me and my work) that it's not the CPU. Except for some special fields like rendering and stuff. I guess the hard disk is the bad boy. regards, Mario

tfitch December 13, 2004

Based on some older machines I built with PII XEON chips with 2MB L2 caches, the big old cache on the chip is the key to performance. I built a couple dual PII 400 Xeon machines with the 2MB L2 cache, and compared to dual PIII 800 chips with the 512KB L2 cache, the 400s would hold up or exceed the 800s in all productivity tasks. Gaming is one spot where the 800s were faster, but that was probably more video card dependent.

Hardy Johnson December 13, 2004

Nothing like some screaming SCSI disks to feed those multi-GHz procs. The only people who say IDE disks are fast are those that haven't seen SCSI in action.

Tomas December 13, 2004

Running Dreamweaver and Flash MX plus Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time on my DELL 8600 with 2GB of memory... overkill.... well not if you are on a tight deadline ;)

Finn December 13, 2004

Sounds cool...... But what about the ultimate test... starting up DreamWeaver MX and than also start FlashMX because you're editing a flash file. Finn

meena December 13, 2004

Hey Ben that's really great you're having so much fun with your new PC. I'm so glad to hear you haven't succumbed to the mindless mac brigade's marketing. Avoid the Borg, just learn to use a machine the way it was intended! Lose the Fear!! Meena

Kyle MacDonald December 19, 2004

Ben, Its awesome to see you putting the box through its paces. It would rock to see performance of CF on it ;-)

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