Hey guys... Just wanted to see if anyone here had a P4 and what they thought of it. I built my own, with an ASUS P4T motherboard and 512MB of pc800 RDRAM. 1.5GHz. Here are some pics. :)

http://mark1500p4.sytes.net/P4CompOutside.JPG

http://mark1500p4.sytes.net/P4CompInside.JPG

I've never used a P4, but I hate AMD. Killer machine man. Any problems with it yet? Since I got my Dual P3 machine, no problems. Athlon crap fried in under a year with a lot of blue screens. I hope the P4 continue's its beatings of AMD. I know that will piss some of you off, but oh well, its my opinion :)

I have a Dell P4 1.4GHZ that I got when they first came out. Yeah, I paid too much but I had very recently then opened my own business and required a PC. It is a tax write-off anyhow (100%) so I really don't care much. Wnated something to carry me 4 years.
It has 128MB pc600 ram (could use a bit more) a 20GB HD..I already had a spare 20GB HD..I installed that
The SB LIVE 1024 audio card. works well
12x dvd w/ hollywood card..no TV out cards were available by Dell back in Nov/00
19" monitor
pretty standard stuff. I use Monsoon speakers (GREAT!, no complaints except for 'system resources are dangerously low' messages and I really truly don't have much on the system.

We have a P2 350 HP with the fast burner, 17" monitor 40x cdrom and 96MB ram.

We also have a Compaq (yechhh) AMD K2 266 with burner, Voodoo PCI card and stuff for the oldest boy and a Pentium 166 (basic) for the youngest.
There are also a few p100/150 hanging around the house.

We have 2 HP P1000 photosmart printers (love the output..hate the ink prices) a lexmark printer, Canon 4000 and 6000 printers, HP flatbed scanner and a Relysis flatbed scanner, 2 HP laserjet printers (old).

I had the Dell and HP networked directly until I moved my office downstairs. May kick the oldest downstairs and set both computers and stuff in his room so I can get back directly on the net instead of using my wifes.

Thats it!! Tahts all!!!

Danny
Capitalcity RT

I'm still using my P3-450 that I built myself a couple of years back. I should be looking into a new computer next spring/summer. I plan on building my own again. I love building computers!!! :)

Kick ass system 00ChryslerIntrepid! Me jealous. :)

Same here. Fasted processor I have right now is a P3 650mhz, and it's plenty fast for what I do, so I'm in no hurry to upgrade (yet!) Maybe once I pay off some of these bills ;)

CapCity R/T - you definately need to hump-in som more RAM -- bring `er up to 256K and you shouldn`t be seeing any more of those system resources low msgs anymore. Also, make sure your virtual mem settings are adequate and there is enough room for the swap file to swell-up -- at least 2 gigs. These new systems are such hogs! :mad: Pretty soon you`ll need to grow exponentially to keep up!

my athlon 700 is overclocked to 750 (can't afford to risk burning it up) on a nice abit board. since i upgraded to windows 2000 it has crashed exactly one time. prior to this it crashed very infrequently. my old celeron crashed incessantly. i don't think it's fair to say that one brand crashes more than another. i know that pretty much all PC software now is written for the pentium family but running an AMD won't make your likelihood of crashes any greater unless you run it on a cheap chinese motherboard.

Starscream, no I haven't had any problems with it at all. I love it. I have two 30GB IBM DeskStar 75GXP 7200rpm ata/100 drives in there and a GeForce2-MX based AGP video card with 32MB. It's not the fastest video card, but it suits me and my gaming needs well.

Notice on the pics that there is no floppy disk drive. I haven't had a need to use one for a long time and I don't intend on it. :)

Coincidentally, the one drive I do have in there is a Toshiba 8x8x8x32 DVD-ROM / CD-RW drive (8x DVD-ROM, 8x CD-R, 8x CD-RW, 32x CD-ROM). It's sweet. I love it.

That's a sweet case! What brand is that and where did you get it?

:)

Warlord, it's a Lian Li all-aluminum mid-tower case. You can find them in a few places, but I'd try http://www.directron.com/lianli.html

That's where I bought mine. It's very nice because it's so light and it keeps things very cool. It comes with three case fans built in... two in front (with a little air filter) and one on the back). Very much worth the cost. :)

Thanks for the info. Three built in fans. Sweet! I will have to look into getting me one of those. :)

[ September 07, 2001: Message edited by: Warlord187 ]

Well, I'll back up my AMD Bashings this way. First off, most boards, including Abit (I had a KA7 with my shitty athlon 700) are chinese (yes, technically Taiwan is part of china). I don't know of any American made boards. Secondly, I had way more trouble with my Athlon than my Celeron (which is running a shitty ECS mobo) and my P3 machine running an Abit VP6 puts them both to shame. Third, when I worked for a pro-amd shop for a year and a half, we had frequent problems with the amd chips. Especially the K6 series. I will admit that AMD made a VAST VAST improvement over the K6 with the K7 series. When I was there, none of our intel machines (which was about 50 to my knowledge, not very much) came back. The athlons (especially in the beginning with that TERRIBLE 750/751/756 Chipset) came back, A LOT. We had to RMA shit out the ass. I run windows 2000 since January, and it has crashed on me exactly zero times. If I still had that Athlon, I would have had to re-format at least twice by now.

The RDDRAM is still expensive. Dell wants 210.00 for an additional 128mgs when you order a computer. I think I'll wait until it comes down some. PCs aren't selling much and the forecat for 2002 is dismal so maybe the price of the RDRAM will fall.

Is there anything I should do other than let the system automatically choose the excess memory from the HD?

Let me know. please.

I downloaded this shareware program called Cachemaster. Allows you to modify varios setting and determine how the memory should be configured or allocated optimally for the application. I didn't find it to do very much!!

I gladly accept all suggestions other than buying additional RAM, at this time.

Getting a cable/DSL router to network 3 of our 4 computers, tomorrow. Hope this expensive 'box' works. It has its own firewall and apparently configures the system for you. It is a D-Link 7401 or something.

I am now in my basement office back on the net, direct. Yahoooooooooooooooo!!!

Danny
Capitalcity RT

CapitalCity, check out www.pricewatch.com (http://www.pricewatch.com) for some better RDRAM prices. $210 for 128MB is a rip off.. I bought more ram for a quarter of that price off of there. :)

Thanks guy.

Don't forget that our Snowy money is worth
sh^t and with the exchange, there may not be a huge difference. Correct me if I'm wrong but I would presume that Dell would install 2-64MB RDRAMS, not 1-128. Right?

Danny
Capitalcity RT

I don't know what Dell would do. With P4 systems, you typically have to install the Rambus ram in pairs, so yeah... probably two 64MB sticks.

Best of luck finding some RAM from other sources for a lower price, though.

I haven't looked for it, but another site like Pricewatch is CNET Shopper (http://www.shopper.com) . It's worth a look. :)

all that shows is that intel and amd can both make shit.

The Dell P4 came with PC600 RDRAM. Can one mix and match with PC800? Does it all have to be PC600 OR PC800..and will PC800 fit into the 850chipset motherboard that came with the computer or are the bases (?) different for PC600 DRAM?

Danny
Capitalcity RT
00 BLK Dell Dimension P4 1.4 GHz
mods 19" monitor, 12x dvd-rom, 2nd 10GB HD, Monsoon speakers w/subwoofer, HP P1000 printer, Thrustmaster Joystick, Netgear 10/100 fast ethernet card (over and above the standard 3COM), monitor top video camera,
HP C500 Digi camera.
No Zaino, No K&N, No GR8wht air intake
3 year unlimited mileage warranty

Let me know where your at & I'll find you a place when you can buy 128MB of RDRAM for less then $210. That price is insane.

You can use PC800 ram in a system that came with PC600 but don't mix PC600 with PC800.

You actually want to use RDRAM in pairs, that's how you get up to 3.2GB a second of memory bandwidth depending on the chipset of course.

Adding more ram doesn't give you more system resources. In 95/98/ME system resources are shared. In NT, 2000, XP you get you own seperate allocated system resources for each application minus whatever is running in the background & drivers.

What could be the problem:
You could have a virus.
You have too many things running in the background & pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't show you everything is running. If your running 98 run MSCONFIG, Startup, & start tossing stuff. You could have leaky drivers, be sure your drivers are up to date.
Check the WIN.INI file in the \Windows directory & check the Run= section.
If you have anything loading in the CONFIG.SYS & the AUTOEXEC.BAT get rid of it if you can. You could have loaded outdated crap with Win3.x of course & W95 but it seems to cause bizarre problems under 98 & ME.

Abit had a ton of problems with their early AMD motherboards. Plus Abit tends to release several different revisions of their motherboards. BIOS updates don't fix everything. I've heard horror stories when 3 out of 50 boards were actually stable. I'm going to have to stick with Asus for now on, no troubles, stable, ok I loose the onboard IDE RAID, well it's a waste of money if your going for performance anyway. Mirroring yes, performance, no.
A single 15,000 RPM Cheeta will spank any IDE RAID setup. But the cost of that dam controller!

An Athlon MP 1.53GHZ with the upcoming Via KT133A chipset, a 2GHZ P4 won't stand a chance. Gee does Megahertz really mean anything anymore? HUMMMM

FYI, you can mix pc600 and pc800 RDRAM, though the memory as a whole will operate at the speed of the slowest RDRAM module. Having said that, however, there is no reason to mix pc600 and pc800 RDRAM since the price difference is trivial at best.

As for the upcoming Athlon competing with the 2GHz P4, I really couldn't care less. I used to pursue performance way back into the old Pentium days, and it really means sh!t. To hell with benchmarks and to hell with specifications. If you build a computer with all the right components, the processor means less than most of them.

From my own experience, I sat down and played with a new Compaq computer that had some Athlon in it and I thought it was slower than other computers I sat down at with a very similar hardware configuration.

I don't trust AMD. It took them too long to realize that they have to make the complete solution work first (chipset, motherboards, memory subsystem, etc.) before they release their latest and greatest chip.

On the other hand, I don't get really excited when I hear about 2GHz chips either. All it means is that the chips right under it fall in price, indicating where the real price-performance value is.

One last rant: I strongly dislike AMD fanatics. Just like I dislike Linux fanatics and Mac fanatics. They love to bash Microsoft and Intel yet refuse to acknowledge and respect the good things they have done for computing.

I don't like AMD. That doesn't mean I don't acknowledge the strides they have made, I just dislike their chips and do not see why I should switch from Intel.

I've never had good luck mixing RAM. On a Abit BE6-II mixing PC-133 128MB & PC-133 256MB SDRAM doesn't go well at all. Sure past POST & boot fine but here comes the fatal exception errors.

In my years of building computers I've learned the key component for overall performance is the hard drive. You mentioned that Compaq, well the same with HP they tend to use those JUNK 4500 RPM BigFoot drives, yes their reliable, run cool, quiet, but sweet boneless they run SLOW!
A P-233MMX is still a usuable, true it's only 233MHZ but as long as you throw enough ram in it & a fast ATA-66 controller & drive it's still a usable computer.

I actually have never built a Athlon system, I've used a few AMD K6 chips in the past but mostly i've used Intel based chips & only one failed on me after a month of use. I know you have to be very picky about the power supply (Athlon approved) & how well your cooling is in your case otherwise you will run into problems. This was never a major issue with Intel chips until the P4 came out.

I have seen no heat issues with p4 ,after running 1/2 day heat sync was almost room temperature.Try that with an athalon.

Check out this link... http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q3/010917/index.html

This will show you some pretty interesting stuff.

Within seconds of removing the fan it died, dam that bites. 500+ degrees, HAHAHA anyone want to cook a turkey?

That does bite that AMD screwed this one up, I didn't know they incorporated clock throttling into the P4's like they have in the notebooks.

HELP!!!

My P4 sometimes goes nuts on me, especially when I leave it on all night (monitor's off). When I come down in the morning, I have RTL problems (no idea?) with 20 RTL boxes on the task bar and the computer kinda stuck in snow. Then I get these pmldrv.exe errors or whatever (don't know pmldrv.exe, then a comcmt32.dll (?) error ...cannot open up. Then I have to virtually shut down every program to get some memory just to see the START menu! Once I reboot, everything is hunky-dory!
Any ideas? Randy, if you see this, when you come to Ottawa to show me your spoiler, you can fix this mess!!!

Danny
Capitalcity RT

If you want I can remote control it & square it away. btc909@yahoo.com

Originally posted by CapitalCity RT:
HELP!!!

My P4 sometimes goes nuts on me, especially when I leave it on all night (monitor's off). When I come down in the morning, I have RTL problems (no idea?) with 20 RTL boxes on the task bar and the computer kinda stuck in snow. Then I get these pmldrv.exe errors or whatever (don't know pmldrv.exe, then a comcmt32.dll (?) error ...cannot open up. Then I have to virtually shut down every program to get some memory just to see the START menu! Once I reboot, everything is hunky-dory!
Any ideas? Randy, if you see this, when you come to Ottawa to show me your spoiler, you can fix this mess!!!

Danny
Capitalcity RT

Is that some kind of amusing joke? :eek:
Must be Windows ME. Whadda ya think?
Danny
Capitalcity RT

Originally posted by CapitalCity RT:
Is that some kind of amusing joke? :eek:
Must be Windows ME. Whadda ya think?
Danny
Capitalcity RT


Are you saying the remote control utility is a joke? Nope, It's for real!

Pardon my ignorance...what is it, then?

Danny
Capitalcity RT

Cool but very simple I see your screen in a window on my screen. Remote control. You can't resolve every problem but alot of things you can & it's far easier then telling someone "ok click here, then their" "ok where are you now".

"Just give me the IP & fire up the server."

:)