Hey everyone! I have been doing some minor upgrades to my system (P4 w/ HT 3Ghz, 1GB RAM, 160GB HD Radeon 9250, Soundblaster 24 bit, etc...). I am really unfamiliar with HT technology, but I know it has something to do with multi-tasking. I am really interested in these dual core processors and I figure while I am at it....might as well upgrade that. So my question(s): is it worth upgrading my current processor or is it fairly up to date? Is it even upgradable? The specs on the processor are: 80546, 3.0, 1M, PENTIUM 4 PRESCOTT DT, 800, E0. No clue what all of that means, well some of it, but I just don't know. Any input would be greatly appreciated. If I were to upgrade what does everyone recommend?
firstly it's an intel, so sell it on eBay, lol, HT refers to AMD CPU's (better performance, although intel CPU's are more overclockable)
Wrong: define: hyperthreading - Google Search And Intel CPU's are neccessarily more overclockable, that's a bad statement to make, the AMD Opteron 140 Series are known to be some of the best overclocking CPU's, people have had them up to 3GHz (from like 1.8Ghz) on Air cooling. Yes Intel CPU's can reach higher clock speeds, but that doesn't mean they're better overclockers.
[ot]Well you're both sort of right HT - Hyper Transport (AMD) HT - Hyper Threading (Intel) A second T is usually omitted > technology. [/ot]
HyperThreading involves using part of the Pentium 4's lengthy pipeline. It has 20+ stages, compared with the 12 or so of the AthlonXP, and in part why it continued to loose. Since there's so many stages in a P4's processing, some parts are left idle. What Intel did essentially was allow for some executions in the pipeline when not being used otherwise. It's pseudo-multi-processing if you want to think of it in another sense. Hyper Transport is frequently denoted as HTT for HyperThreading Technology, as previously noted. Upgrading is really going to depend on the CPU socket you have. If you have the older Socket 478, you can, but you're not going to gain much by doing so. If you have an LGA775, you've got more options to play with. As far as what to upgrade, that largely depends on what you want to do and what your system is like right now. If you're interested in gaming, your best option would be to upgrade your video card. It all depends on what you want to do. Believe me, a CPU upgrade won't do you any good if you're interested in gaming on your current box.
