Windows Server 2003 - Pentium 4 vs Celeron D

[Willith]

Hi

 

The school i am working in at the moment has an old desktop computer running as server with an old Pentium 4 1.6ghz chip inside. A year or so ago i upgraded the ram from 256mb to 1.25gb and added a secondary IDE hard disk for more storage (160gb on top of original 20gb).

 

When accessing this server for administrative work it is rather slow and from examining the task manager, the processor often maxes out every few seconds. The server is host to 20 XP machines and it runs WSUS and Sophos enterprise along with roaming profiles, Group policy and shared folders with software placed as shortcuts on student desktops.

 

I have just obtained a newer machine which comes with 1GB of ram, 2x 160GB hd's (SATA) and a 3.0 ghz processor. Unfortunately this processor is a Celeron D and i dont have a lot of time to be able to do benchmarks, which is why i ask; Will this 3ghz Celeron D straight up beat the crap out of this older 1.6ghz Pentium 4? Or is there more to this than i have made out?

 

Thanks

 

 

Will

[SYNACK]

Like an elephant stepping on an ant.

 

That celleron D is several processor revisions ahead of the P4 and so will be much faster even barring the clock speed. It will be much more than double the speed.

[Willith]

Thanks for your quick response. Good to know it'll be worth my time whilst i figure out the next step of transferring all the data and domain settings over.

 

Cheers.

[3s-gtech]

Yeah, the 1.6GHz P4 was the Willamette core - it was basically a Celeron - 256kB L2 cache, 400MHz FSB etc etc. The Celeron D has 256kB of L2, 533MHz FSB, and a much faster clock speed. It'll trounce it.

[cookie_monster]

Gah I hate to say it but yes in this case the smelleron should out perform the pentium. If the clock speed were a bit closer I would say otherwise. We have some 2.2 GHz smellerons running XP and they're dog slow compared to similar speed pentium chips they're usually short on cache which kills their performance.

[Willith]

Thats good info. Just needed some reassurance before i switch to a processor named after celery

 

=]

[Theblacksheep]

The celeron Ds are so slow a 7" asus standard minibook (running XP) with the CPU clock set back to its native 900mhz beats P4s on superpi by some distance. Edited July 1, 2010 by Theblacksheep

[srochford]

I suspect you'd see a bigger difference if you could afford to go to 2Gb of RAM. Very little of what you describe the server being used for is CPU bound but it will use lots of disc access so extra RAM helps with caching. Faster discs would also probably help but they cost big money (and I'm guessing you've not got lots of money to spend given the hardware you've described)

 

Performance monitor is always your friend here - you need to see what's being used and where the bottlenecks are. Check in particular the disc queues; if processes are waiting for the disc then everything slows down.

 

There's some good stuff here Performance Monitoring about perf monitoring. It's written for Windows 2000 but I think it's all still relevant for 2003.

[klop]

Just a thought, but are you going to use both?

Use one for AD, GPOs, roaming etc and the other for Sophos, WSUS etc

Perhaps spread the software between the two?

[Willith]

I suspect you'd see a bigger difference if you could afford to go to 2Gb of RAM. Very little of what you describe the server being used for is CPU bound but it will use lots of disc access so extra RAM helps with caching. Faster discs would also probably help but they cost big money (and I'm guessing you've not got lots of money to spend given the hardware you've described)

 

Performance monitor is always your friend here - you need to see what's being used and where the bottlenecks are. Check in particular the disc queues; if processes are waiting for the disc then everything slows down.

 

There's some good stuff here Performance Monitoring about perf monitoring. It's written for Windows 2000 but I think it's all still relevant for 2003.

 

Is your ram upgrade suggestion aimed at the pentium 4 or the celeron D?

 

I think regardless of which machine either could do with more ram, and with ram not being very expensive i could recommend it to the school. However you've guessed it right, they dont have a lot of money and i think other component upgrades are out of the question. (Hence the current hardware).

 

I will give performance monitoring a go for a better insight

 

Thanks

[Willith]

Just a thought, but are you going to use both?

Use one for AD, GPOs, roaming etc and the other for Sophos, WSUS etc

Perhaps spread the software between the two?

 

I too thought of a similar solution. Only problem is, they only have one retail license of Windows Server 2003