Upgrade Your Computer Now? Think Twice

Are you planning to upgrade your computer? Still lost which processor to go for?

If you are using the Pentium 4 Socket 478 Processor, running at 2.4G and above, my personal advice is not to upgrade the computer at this moment.

The performance of the current processor upgrading is not obvious, as you may notice for the past 2 years, the processor clock speed is selling at 2.4G to 3.4G in the market. Nothing has been obviously changed in the past 2 years, despite increasing of the L2 cahce speed from 512K to 1M and 2M and etc.

I have done some benchmarking based on my processor bought in March 2004, which is 1.5 years ago from now. I have made some comparison based on the Sandra Sisoft benchmarking and found that there is totally no obvious changed in the performance. Perhaps I shall say that the performance may be increased, but it will not be observed by your eyes or sense...

See how my computer run almost same speed as Pentium 4 3.6Ghz at 1M L2 Cache? The real advantage of 1M Cahce remain a question.

The good upgrade alternative is dual core. Only dual core processor can let you "see" the performance changes. However, the price of the Dual Core isnt cheap at this moment.

I shall expect that the next generation after Dual Core shall be our long waiting Pentium 5.. :) or AMD K9 ?