Diff. between 1.6 and 2.8G processor?

[Insp. Clue!So?]

Should the speeds matter much for a multi-tabler? Am I being paranoid in thinking that within a year or two the poker clients might evolve hoggishly enough so that it may eventually matter?

Insp.

[Bytestream]

1.8Ghz is really on the low end for a new desktop... Are you talking about notebooks? If so a Pentium 1.8M is on par with a 3.0Ghz desktop

[MicroBob]

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Diff. between 1.6 and 2.8G processor?

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1.2

[Alobar]

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Diff. between 1.6 and 2.8G processor?

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1.2

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damn, I was all prepared to give my little witty answer, and some bastard beat me to it! /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[tripdad]

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Diff. between 1.6 and 2.8G processor?

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1.2

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me too. MicroBob needs to learn how to sleep in.

cheers!


damn, I was all prepared to give my little witty answer, and some bastard beat me to it! /images/graemlins/wink.gif

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[Blarg]

I have a 1.7 and things can slow down a good bit when I'm importing hands on Pokertracker. As to simply running poker sites themselves, a 1.6 should be fine. I have not the slightest slowdowns on Party or Pokerroom or Pokerstars with my 1.7.

Sounds like you're buying a used system? Or a Pentium M 1.6 laptop. The Pentium M's are very good chips. They have a lot of cache on the CPU, and a Pentium M 1.7 is equivalent to a regular Pentium 3.0. You would be quite happy with the speed of a PM 1.6, if you get it in a notebook that holds up in other ways -- often you get stiffed with really raunchy components on notebooks, like very low memory and miserable video cards. Or very low resolutions. But either way, a 1.6 cpu will not be a bottleneck.

[Insp. Clue!So?]

Yeah, it's slow, I'm having a friend hang some parts together for me and call it a pc. I can have the 1.8 chip for $200 cheaper than a modern p4 so I'm wondering what the performance issues might be now and near term.

Insp.

[tripdad]

looks like i really screwed this post up good.

cheers!

[gusly]

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Yeah, it's slow, I'm having a friend hang some parts together for me and call it a pc. I can have the 1.8 chip for $200 cheaper than a modern p4 so I'm wondering what the performance issues might be now and near term.


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If your friend is ordering new parts rather than scavenging from other PCs, just have him/her order a motherboard that can accept CPUs that run at 1.6 to 2.8 Ghz or more. By the time performance issues come up, the 2.8 Ghz CPU should cost less than your 1.6 Ghz.

Assuming you don't have any bus or memory bottlenecks, you can just pop in a new processor and get a cheap instant upgrade when the time comes.

[CT11]

A 1.6 is fine. The things people posted about needing more is silly. PT runs slow when you have a big database not because you dont have enough CPU cycles but because you don't have enough memory and memory bandwidth. When you making a ton of database queries its not CPU intensive, you are just moving data from ram and back. The speed of your HDD can be important too, only if your database isn't cached in RAM.

Bottom line a 10k RPM SATA drive and _dual_ _channel_ memory that has been _properly_ installed and configured will help you a LOT more than a faster processor. RAM is most important here.

If you get a lap top (which it doesn't look like you are) the pentium M will do a lot of good too due to the added cache.

~CT11

[Insp. Clue!So?]

Yeah, I thought Ram was more of an issue than anything else. I'm guessing 512mb is sufficient.

This is in fact a desktop machine.

Thanks (to you and others) for responding.

[Nemesis]

My friend just put together a dual xeon processor board for under 900 bucks (no monitor). He spent 60 bucks on the 1.6 xeons and has overclocked them to 2.8 right now and they are cool as a cucumber. I think this could be a very good way to get a FAST computer w/o shelling out a lot of dough.

[MicroBob]

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MicroBob needs to learn how to sleep in.


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I am NOT a morning person AT ALL....but getting to "work" whenever I feel like it has really screwed up my sleeping habits.
Sometimes I crash out at 7p and wake-up at 2a. Other times I fall asleep at 5a and get up at 1p. Sometimes I feel like taking an hour nap and don't wake-up for another 8 hours. etc etc.

[jmark]

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I'm having a friend hang some parts together for me and call it a pc. I can have the 1.8 chip for $200 cheaper than a modern p4 so I'm wondering what the performance issues might be now and near term.

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Is your friend buying the parts himself? The 2.8 GHz chips are all around $170-$180, so I don't understand how anything could be $200 cheaper (Unless it's free I guess).

You could buy a Pentium 2.2 GHz or an AMD Athlon "2.5GHz" for about $100.

[CT11]

Again clock cycles are meaning less if you cant get the data to the CPU fast enough. Your average fetch from memory may take 1000 clock cycles on an old xeon. The HDD can take on the order or 100 MILLION clock cycles to read.

Also unless you really just don't care about your hardware/data/time you shouldn't over clock.

If you play video games and a system crash will only loose you a game and not money its not a problem.

Really though anything is fine for playing poker. Were not doing anything that takes a lot of CPU time and with the exception of importing hands into a large database were not doing much of anything at all.

~CT11

[Blarg]

With a gig of PC 3200 RAM, a 7200 rpm HD, and a P4 1.7, I still get very noticeable slowdowns where I almost time out(and sometimes do) when Pokertracker imports. From what I gather, there's nothing unique about that. So it's not quite as clean and easy as you say. Most anything will run poker sites and Pokertracker, but there are times when, yes, a slow system will make things crawl.

Some people have posted that with better cpu's than I have, they don't notice any slowdowns.

[jmark]

Our computer is a Dell with a P4 2.8GHz and 512MB (XP Pro). We don't get any slowdowns with pokertracker and I play 3, sometimes 4 tables at Party with a 56k modem.

[NoTalent]

The biggest problem I consistently see on peoples computers these days is spyware. It also does't help that they have 4000 programs installed and they are all running in the system tray.

Get Adaware, and when you install something--make sure it isn't a little icon in the bottom right of your screen (if you are running windows). That all takes up system resources. A 1.6 is fine. An AMD 2000+ would be better /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[CT11]

I never said it would solve the problem I just said it would help. Also do you have properly configured dual channel memory? This will increase your memory bandwidth. Also it goes with out saying that the size of your database matters a lot. A Pentium 1 will run a database if it can fit the whole thing in cache.

If the 1.6Ghz is free try that. If you don't think its good enough then buy the faster one.

I've been known to be wrong. The author of PT is more qualified to tell you how it uses memory.

[Blarg]

If by configured you mean plugged into their slots, then yes. The machine's been running games and things pretty well for years now. My databases are pretty small -- none with more than 50,000 hands.

I am indeed looking to upgrade. I'd like to play more than 4 tables at once, and if I almost time out with 4, I'm sure I'll time out a lot on 6 or 8.

[Insp. Clue!So?]

Hmmm, I wonder if sending the pokertrack data to a different logical drive would help. Don't real database operations maintain discrete data and code disks to speed performance?

So instead of 1 80G hd I get two 40s and use one for data, mpgs etc. and one for poker clients and all other apps.

Insp.

[CT11]

I meant plugged into the correct slots with more than one module. Depending on your motherboard there may or may not be BIOS settings as well.

Tell us how the upgrade goes. I'm as interested as every one to see what helps.

~CT11

[CT11]

A second HDD for the database could help though I'm not sure how much. I design hardware not databases so maybe some one who knows more about databases can tell us more. Of course if you have enough RAM the whole database may be cached in ram so it wont help so much. But thats something a database person would know more about.

~CT11

[Blarg]

I bought a new external Western Digital USB/Firewire 160 gig hard drive last week. I'm going to install Pokertracker on it when I get a new system(hopefully sometime soon) and see if I can just keep all my pokertracker data there, and the pokertracker program itself.

For Party, I'll still be reading off both a system main drive for hand histories and off this external one, but I'm figuring splitting the tasks between hard drives may help a bit. And also, it will be nice to not have my databases split up all over or ever worry about transferring them properly. This 160 gig HD should hold enough pokertracker data for many years to come.

[Ben]

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see if I can just keep all my pokertracker data there, and the pokertracker program itself.

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You most certainly can do this.


-Ben

[jmark]

I'm not sure how fast external drives are nowadays, but I would guess that they are slower than an internal drive and it might actually slow your system down. I'm not sure, though.

[Blarg]

It's a 7200 rpm, so that's standard speed. That would leave only concerns about transfer rate, and it's USB 2.0/Firewire enabled. I haven't looked up and compared transfer speeds compared to just having an internal disk cabled up to your motherboard, but I'm hoping that at least not having to read my hand histories and operate Pokertracker at the same time on the same disk will help a lot.

Anyway, keeping the data in one place is my main goal in buying the external HD. That way no matter how many computers I go through and how finicky they are, I'll probably not have much hassle keeping my data intact and in one place.