Celeron-to-P4 upgrade results

[Kris Tilford]

I have an eMachines T2692 with a Trigem Imperial GV motherboard that I
installed 10.5.8 onto. I max'd the RAM @ 2GB, and used a PCI nVidia
GeForce 6200 Ultra which enabled both QE & CI.

It was OEM with a stock Celeron 2.6MHz/128k L2/400MHz Bus (SL6VV)

With the stock CPU the Xbench score was about 24.

I bought a used Pentium 4 3.06GHz/512k L2/533MHz Bus w/hyper-threading
(SL6PG) for $9.99 shipped. The shipping was slow, but the price was
right.

The P4 CPU Xbench score was about 38.

With the Celeron this was hard to use for streaming video, the CPU was
pegged at 100% all the time, and even on idle with no apps running it
was pretty high, something like 8-14% at idle. Most of the time during
use the CPU was 100%.

Now with the P4 streaming video is dead smooth, and the CPU Menu Meter
shows two CPUs because of the hyper-threading, and they mostly stay at
a lower 60-80% level with streaming video now. Now the CPU stays
closer to 50% in normal use.

This was the best $9.99 ever spent, it saved an old computer to be
useful again. It was about a 60% speed increase in the range where it
really counted for something useful.

[pete...@cruzio.com]

> Now with the P4 streaming video is dead smooth, and the CPU Menu Meter
> shows two CPUs because of the hyper-threading, and they mostly stay at
> a lower 60-80% level with streaming video now. Now the CPU stays
> closer to 50% in normal use.
>
> This was the best $9.99 ever spent, it saved an old computer to be
> useful again. It was about a 60% speed increase in the range where it
> really counted for something useful.

I bought a "lot" of fast P4 procs (541s, with H-T and EM64T, and some
6xxs, too, also with H-T and EM64T) with the expectation that SOMEONE
would eventually come out with a "legacy" kernel for Lion, at least one
which had SSSE3 emulation. Apparently, someone did, but I have long since
put that idea on the back burner.

These fast P4 procs make some sense on 10.6, but 10.7 is already proving a
tougher nut to crack, especially after the 10.7.4 update, even with procs
which are true dual core.

These P4 procs are seen as a Core Solo, and that is most likely the (or at
least a) limiting factor with Lion.