In article ,
Steve Wolfe wrote:
It looks like the machine I have (an HP Kayak XAS, you may have seen me
mention it already) can be upgraded from a PII 400MHz to dual PIII
600MHz.
But the PIII's are substantially more expensive than the PII's, around
$70
each compared to $10 each.

I guess I'm not that excited about a 50% increase in clock rate, by
itself. But is there a great advantage just in going from a PII to a
PIII
with a comparable clock speed? Would I get substantially more computing
for the money?

There *can* be an advantage, but whether it's important to you is
debatable. Early P3's had the same cache architecture as the P2's -
namely, external cache running at half of the CPU's clock speed. Starting
around the 600 MHz mark, you were able to get P3's with on-die cache
running at full CPU speed.

So, if cache latency is a deal-breaker for your application, the extra
money would be worth it. If not, then it's a lot more of a
personal-preference type of thing.

As a side note, I'm surprised that a P3/600 would be $70, seeing that
you can buy something like an Athlon 2400+ for less than that. I looked
over on ebay, and found the P3's running $20 to $30 each.

There's a wide range of prices, so I tried to generalize, and I was
looking specifically at PIII 600MHz 512 cache. I was thinking especially
of a matched pair I saw for something over $100, although they had 256K
cache.

I suppose I should make sure I can get the system up and running in the
first place, before I start worrying about upgrading it. I'm still
waiting for some cables and adapters to arrive so I can plug it into my
monitor, so I still can't see what I'm doing and it's just sitting there
with a clean hard drive right now.
--
"Is that plutonium on your gums?"
"Shut up and kiss me!"
-- Marge and Homer Simpson