The time flows and I have some news in my department. As I planned I updated CPU on Asus M2A-VM HDMI motherboard with Phenom II X2 555 BE and added additional 2GB RAM (4GB in total now). However, I downgraded video from GeForce 9600GT to Radeon 4650. CPU was recognized without problems (I updated BIOS version to 5001 earlier). It works under 3.2 GHz, however, hypertransport drops to 2000 MT/s as Socket AM2 can't do more :). The performance difference from Athlon X2 4200 was very visible. Starcraft II and its scenarios load time reduced significantly (from minutes to probably a minute or two) and game felt much lighter (it can be that additional RAM played its part here too) even with inferior video card. I could to switch between Starcraft and other applications without hassle (earlier it took a lot of time to do this with long black screens in between). It closes almost instantly too (it took several minutes to do that earlier). Windows XP 64-bit load time decreased too. Folding@home SMP project can be done in time by using computer 6-8h per day. In general, I was surprised by the difference as I hadn't expected such performance improvement. However, there is one caveat. Cool'n'Quiet doesn't work in Windows XP 64-bit for me. Phenom always works under full 3.2GHz. The question remains about other power saving features. What is more, it may be a different story in Windows Vista, 7 and Linux. I'll try to investigate this later.The other bad thing is that default cpu cooler is very loud on max speed. I'll change it to Scythe Ninja 2 Rev B.
In meantime I've received new CPUs for my collection. They were bought quite a long time ago mainly but they had been kept in USA. I got these ones currently:
Qualcomm MSM6500 (ARM926EJ-S core)
Fujitsu SPARC64 GP 810 MHz SFC881177FP (should be 0.15µm). CPU card with VRM modules. This one definitely will become one of my favourites.
Agilent PA-RISC 1QK9-0009 REV 5.1 (PA-8200, 240MHz(?)).
Motorola MC68000RC8
AMD AU1550-333 (MIPS core)
Motorola PPC755ARX400LB (embedded PowerPC 750)
Freescale PPC7448Hx 1.167GHz (should be e600 (MPC7448) PowerPC core, maybe engineering sample)
IBM Power4 MCM terminator (second terminator in my collection).
Quite a big bunch :) but photos will be much later. I am waiting for some more (some MIPS CPUs, NEC V70, Itanium Montecito ES, AMD 29000). Probably thats it for this year (though, who knows I said the same thing several times).
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| AMD Phenom II X2 555 box |
In meantime I've received new CPUs for my collection. They were bought quite a long time ago mainly but they had been kept in USA. I got these ones currently:
Qualcomm MSM6500 (ARM926EJ-S core)
Fujitsu SPARC64 GP 810 MHz SFC881177FP (should be 0.15µm). CPU card with VRM modules. This one definitely will become one of my favourites.
Agilent PA-RISC 1QK9-0009 REV 5.1 (PA-8200, 240MHz(?)).
Motorola MC68000RC8
AMD AU1550-333 (MIPS core)
Motorola PPC755ARX400LB (embedded PowerPC 750)
Freescale PPC7448Hx 1.167GHz (should be e600 (MPC7448) PowerPC core, maybe engineering sample)
IBM Power4 MCM terminator (second terminator in my collection).
Quite a big bunch :) but photos will be much later. I am waiting for some more (some MIPS CPUs, NEC V70, Itanium Montecito ES, AMD 29000). Probably thats it for this year (though, who knows I said the same thing several times).
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| Fujitsu SPARC64-GP 810 MHz |
