Not really a problem, just an observation . . .

Back about 4 years ago, I had a spare P4 3.0Eghz socket 478 processor laying around. I'd built my "Super" computer around an exact 478 a few years before that, and liked the way it performed . . . the hyperthreading emulated having two cores (the OS saw it as two) and blew other non hyperthreaded processors out of the water. I bought what I call a "cross-over" board (MSI 945GCM478) - one that would support the P4, but also had a PCI-E x16 slot, and used DDR2 RAM. I built a video cruncher PC with 2GB of RAM and an HD3850 video card . . . and set it to digitizing my old VHS home movies, etc. It did a really good job at that, and would serve also as light gamer when my sons would come over and we'd break out the old games we used to LAN.

Cut to last month, when the PC began to suffer blue screens at odd times, and at ever increasing rates. I did some trouble shooting and found upon a visual inspection there were exploded capacitors on the motherboard. I could buy the exact board now for around 50 bucks, but as it would have the same crappy caps on it I decided not to. Instead I took an old HP computer my son gave me that had an A8N-LA board. I found a used Athlon 64 X2 4800+ at a decent price, and with 2GB's of DDR PC-3200 RAM I had laying around built a "new" computer.

It seems to do as well as the old PC did at converting video, but here is what surprised me . . . even though the Athlon is a bonafide dual core processor, it did not score as well under CPU tests as the P4 single core hyperthreaded processor did. :confused

Granted, the Athlon only has a true clock of 2.4GHZ to the P4's 3ghz . . . but I thought there would be a bigger difference in performance from a true two core processor. The P4 didn't beat the Athlon by much . . . but still. Also, the A8N-LA uses DDR RAM instead of the DDR2 the MSI board used, and I don't know how much that might affect tests on the CPU itself.

I'm not really all that CPU savvy, so this is probably a very naive post on my part . . . but I was really taken aback by the CPU tests.