New Computer - Need Opinion

[Bubba]

Hey All.. Seriously thinking about getting a new computer mainly for
gaming... This is what I have now PIII 700 MHZ, 256 Megs of ram and a
16MB Voodoo Video Card and running Win98 for O/S..

and the computer specs I'm looking at is AMD Athlon 1900+ , 784 Megs
of Ram, Geforce4 ti4200 128 MB Video Card and running Windows XP.

Now I sure it's a huge upgrade for gaming but the thing that worries
me is that the Athlon has 256k of cache and my currect PIII has 512k
of cache.. Sounds like no big deal but I had a Intel Celeron 300Mhz
with 128k of cache and I thought it was slower than a 486DX4 for
games. I found the celeron did all kinds of loading and loading with
the hard drive even when it wasn't doing anything.

I had the experience with games showing 5 secs of a really smooth
frame rate (over 30 FPS) then about a second or two of really choppy
video (like a slide show) while the hard drive was loading (This was
with the celeron 300/128k Cache)

Is the low cache the reason for this ?
BTW had a Pentium 150Mhz and a Pentium 90MHZ before that with I think
512k of cache absolutly no slow downs on loading times while playing
games.

Also, What do you think of the new specs of my system should it run
all the new games fairly well with good frame rates and high
resoltions ?

Thanks for any insight.

[Walter Clayton]

...and did you consider the size of the L1 cache or did you simply look at
the L2 cache? ;-)
I have a 2.4G P4 on one machine that only has 16K (you heard right) of L1
cache. The T'Bird in my test bed/main machine has 128K of L1 cache.
However, those numbers are pretty much meaningless in terms of straight
comparison between two different architectures.
One thing to understand is that Intel and AMD handle cache differently. They
also have different architectures that react different as cache scales up or
is ramped down, but that also depends what kind of work is being done in
conjunction with locality of reference.

I'm gaming fine with 1G T'Bird and 512M of real. And I test some extremely
heavy hitting games. One advantage I do have is a 128M Ti4400 primary video
card.

One thing I do have to ask is why not a faster processor and a GEFX card?
Actually if you're really worried about only L2 cache, then Barton is what
you want. That also puts you in the high 2.xG arena.

The other consideration is audio card. Be careful about that since that's
one area where you can bog the system as a whole. All I can say in that
regard is I do not use Creative products.

--
Walter Clayton - MS MVP(WinXP)
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
http://www.dts-l.org
http://support.microsoft.com/servicedesks/fileversion/default.asp


"Bubba" > wrote in message
om...
> Hey All.. Seriously thinking about getting a new computer mainly for
> gaming... This is what I have now PIII 700 MHZ, 256 Megs of ram and a
> 16MB Voodoo Video Card and running Win98 for O/S..
>
> and the computer specs I'm looking at is AMD Athlon 1900+ , 784 Megs
> of Ram, Geforce4 ti4200 128 MB Video Card and running Windows XP.
>
> Now I sure it's a huge upgrade for gaming but the thing that worries
> me is that the Athlon has 256k of cache and my currect PIII has 512k
> of cache.. Sounds like no big deal but I had a Intel Celeron 300Mhz
> with 128k of cache and I thought it was slower than a 486DX4 for
> games. I found the celeron did all kinds of loading and loading with
> the hard drive even when it wasn't doing anything.
>
> I had the experience with games showing 5 secs of a really smooth
> frame rate (over 30 FPS) then about a second or two of really choppy
> video (like a slide show) while the hard drive was loading (This was
> with the celeron 300/128k Cache)
>
> Is the low cache the reason for this ?
> BTW had a Pentium 150Mhz and a Pentium 90MHZ before that with I think
> 512k of cache absolutly no slow downs on loading times while playing
> games.
>
> Also, What do you think of the new specs of my system should it run
> all the new games fairly well with good frame rates and high
> resoltions ?
>
> Thanks for any insight.