T43 owners: Can you see if these HD clips are playable?

[catback]

Hi,

I'm considering getting a used Thinkpad T43 to take with me on trips primarily to download and view clips off my camcorder. The camcorder I have records in 1080p HD AVCHD format. Below are links to three sample clips recorded from my camcorder. Can anyone with a T43 series Thinkpad please let me know if the clips are playable or if they're too choppy? Please mention your laptop's CPU/GPU configuration and the media player and codecs you're using.

Thanks for the help.


http://db.tt/qnO07yzR

http://db.tt/b8H79UJC

http://db.tt/cYkPTx5n

[Adda]

On my T43p with PM770 and FGL V3200 using VLC Media Player, I get about a second of smooth playback before the image freezes, the sound continues to play.

So unless other media players behave very differently from VLC, then you shouldn't expect any T4x series machine to play these videos, even 720p videos is a bit of a challenge for these machines, it plays fine, but not super smooth.
Overclocking the GPU to 500/300MHz makes no difference.

[ajkula66]

Hi,

I'm considering getting a used Thinkpad T43 to take with me on trips primarily to download and view clips off my camcorder. The camcorder I have records in 1080p HD AVCHD format.

As much as I love T43/p (see my signature), you're looking at an almost eight-year-old platform.

Not good for HD, and even worse for carrying around.

Get something newer - anything with Intel 4500 or above will do just fine...

[Raceboy]

When catback offered some clips to test on X6x forum, the VLC player sucked big time and WMP outperformed it by a huge margin (read: clips were unplayable on VLC but satisfactory on WMP).

I can test them after work on the FSB modded T42p (running Pentium M 760 at full 2.0 GHz speed like T43).

[Adda]

Well I don't have WMP on my system, and it seems you have to sell your soul to get a player that plays AVHCD, I'm not prepared to do that.

[Raceboy]

Downloaded latest Media Player Classic from here: http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/ and tested the first clip, worked just fine with the Pentium M 745 1.7 GHz @ 2.26 GHz (= Pentium M 780), even at full screen. Did not go out of sync or similar, played to the end without problems.

[Adda]

Doh, of cause Media Player Classic, I totally forgot about that one, but since you can play the videos, the T43's (or at least the T43p) should as well.

I think that is quite impressive actually, T4x's just fight on and on!

[Adda]

I tried the last video, in the forest, on my T43p using Media Player Classic, I get stuttering video and sound, the CPU is totally bogged down and heats up very very quickly.

If I change the renderer to 'Old Video Renderer' or 'Enhanced Video Renderer' things improve, it starts out by stuttering but it sort of clears up after a few secs and it's acceptable, the CPU is really working very hard though.

Edit: the sound is quite flaky no matter what I do, it seems that 2.13Ghz is not quite enough, maybe the last 133Mhz makes the difference.
Bottom line is, I would not recommend T4x machines for this kind of video playback, it pushes the system to the limit.

[systemBuilder]

As much as I love T43/p (see my signature), you're looking at an almost eight-year-old platform.

Not good for HD, and even worse for carrying around.

Get something newer - anything with Intel 4500 or above will do just fine...

VLC is a junk, and it's no surprise when a video doesn't play in VLC ... that just means that VLC is still junk! It doesn't play on my T42 in VLC, at 20% CPU load, VLC is simply giving up!

I have a T42 @ 1.8 Ghz (ATI 9600) and downloaded and installed MPC-HC (lightweight media player), and the videos play with small stutters on my 1400x1050 display.

I think there is some confusion about what's been happening with CPU architecture for the past 8 years. Basically, almost nothing! Moore's law says that CPUs are supposed to get 2x faster every 18 months. So in 8 years, our new Pentiums should be 32x faster, right, right, right??? WRONG! CPUs are only 2.5x faster (per clock cycle) since about 2004. I base my assertions on the SPEC2006 benchmarks here:

http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html

You can see that a 1.80 Ghz T43 with a Dothan 750 runs at 9.3, whereas an IBM System x3100 M4 (Intel Core i3-3240T, 2.90 GHz) turns in a performance of 38 @ 2.9 Ghz. So for an extra 156% in clock speed, the desktop processor benchmarks at 408% of the speed. Hence, CPU throughput per clock has increased only (408/156) = 2.61x in the past 8 years!

The Pentium M had some of the best instructions-per-clock ratios of any Pentiums, ever. That made the T4x machines a smashing success, they were more efficient than the desktops of that era because they were based upon the world-beating Pentium-3's. Later pentiums have struggled to improve on the Pentium M's.

CPUs haven't been getting much faster, not the uniprocessors at least, but bus architecture has been getting wider and higher-performance, so uniprocessor performance has improved mildly in the past 8 years. Mostly, Intel has been taking cost OUT of the platform, which is why it hurts the pocketbook so much to buy DDR memory for a T40/T41/T42 CPU.

The BIGGEST improvement in eight years (and this has affected my T42's) is the onboard graphics adapters with hardware MPEG decoders. For example, I can play FoxSoccer at 97% CPU load on our 2 Ghz T42 (ATI 9600), but there are small stutters and skips. No amount of fiddling (reducing resolution, killing needless windows tasks, prioritizing the video decode task) will avoid the stutters and skips. On a T420 with a GMA 3000, the CPU load is 13% because all the MPEG decoding is done in hardware.

This imho will be the death of the T4x series - no hardware video decode-support was included in these laptops, and PCMCIA bus throughput is not high enough to help. Maybe if you co-located an MPEG decoder with the Ethernet (mini-PCI) Adapter you *might* be able to keep these machines competitive. A recent gaming benchmark showed that no video games utilize more than 2 CPU cores, and even today I can play almost all of the pre-2010 games (including Far Cry), at 1024x768 at least, on my ATI 9600 T42.

A mobile 2.0 Ghz Thinkpad T4x is roughly equivalent (< 2x) to a mobile 2.0 Ghz Pentium core-whatever single-core running today. The only advantage of the core product is ... the (mostly spare) cores!!!

[dr_st]

I think there is some confusion about what's been happening with CPU architecture for the past 8 years. Basically, almost nothing! Moore's law says that CPUs are supposed to get 2x faster every 18 months. So in 8 years, our new Pentiums should be 32x faster, right, right, right??? WRONG! CPUs are only 2.5x faster (per clock cycle) since about 2004. I base my assertions on the SPEC2006 benchmarks here:

That's a fairly simplistic and largely inaccurate observation. First of all - that's not quite what Moore's Law states. Moore was talking about doubling of the number of transistors on a chip every 2 years. The implications of doubling the performance every 1.5 years is just an interpretation by one Intel executive that everyone just repeats.

Second, no one ever claimed that Moore's law is expected to continue indefinitely, and in the past decade almost everyone agrees that objective technological limitations are already causing it to slow down. It's not surprising, and nobody is lying to you.

You can see that a 1.80 Ghz T43 with a Dothan 750 runs at 9.3, whereas an IBM System x3100 M4 (Intel Core i3-3240T, 2.90 GHz) turns in a performance of 38 @ 2.9 Ghz. So for an extra 156% in clock speed, the desktop processor benchmarks at 408% of the speed. Hence, CPU throughput per clock has increased only (408/156) = 2.61x in the past 8 years!

I wouldn't take a single benchmark as an indicator of performance and I would also not necessarily treat the numbers linearly. There have been tangible improvements in clock-per-clock, even single-threaded. Not 400%, but 50% is a lot too. The CPU architecture is evolving. Every generation is somewhat based on the previous and not written from scratch (thank God), but they are not the same.

The Pentium M had some of the best instructions-per-clock ratios of any Pentiums, ever. That made the T4x machines a smashing success, they were more efficient than the desktops of that era because they were based upon the world-beating Pentium-3's.

Compared to (let's say) Pentium 4's, they were much faster clock-per-clock and much faster per watt as well. So I definitely agree with you that the Pentium-III/M architecture is superior. Everyone, including Intel, admits it and NetBurst (P4) is considered largely a failure by Intel.

And yet, still with that in mind, when it comes to raw performance - a full-blown power-hungry Pentium 4 HT, running at 2.8-3.4GHz will beat a contemporary Pentium M, which would be running at 1.6-2.26GHz. I know, since I have both kinds of machines and compared them - both then and now. The P4 HT is still quite usable in a few places where the P-M struggles. For a user who just wants performance, and cares not for power and efficiency - which of the two would truly be a better choice?

Mostly, Intel has been taking cost OUT of the platform, which is why it hurts the pocketbook so much to buy DDR memory for a T40/T41/T42 CPU.

Well - the cost of RAM has absolutely nothing to do with Intel or its platform - only with the supply as determined by the memory manufacturers. Every time a new memory architecture enters the market - it starts more expensive, then gradually the prices drop as it phases out the old architecture, where in turn, prices start going up, because it's now rare. This has happened in the DDR-DDR2 transition, and again in DDR2-DDR3.

A recent gaming benchmark showed that no video games utilize more than 2 CPU cores

That's also completely not true. There are definitely games out there that utilize 4 cores (I've seen benchmarks), although I am not sure if any can utilize more than 4.

[irus]

You can see that a 1.80 Ghz T43 with a Dothan 750 runs at 9.3, whereas an IBM System x3100 M4 (Intel Core i3-3240T, 2.90 GHz) turns in a performance of 38 @ 2.9 Ghz. So for an extra 156% in clock speed, the desktop processor benchmarks at 408% of the speed. Hence, CPU throughput per clock has increased only (408/156) = 2.61x in the past 8 years!

The Pentium M had some of the best instructions-per-clock ratios of any Pentiums, ever. That made the T4x machines a smashing success, they were more efficient than the desktops of that era because they were based upon the world-beating Pentium-3's. Later pentiums have struggled to improve on the Pentium M's.

CPUs haven't been getting much faster, not the uniprocessors at least, but bus architecture has been getting wider and higher-performance, so uniprocessor performance has improved mildly in the past 8 years. Mostly, Intel has been taking cost OUT of the platform, which is why it hurts the pocketbook so much to buy DDR memory for a T40/T41/T42 CPU.

The BIGGEST improvement in eight years (and this has affected my T42's) is the onboard graphics adapters with hardware MPEG decoders. For example, I can play FoxSoccer at 97% CPU load on our 2 Ghz T42 (ATI 9600), but there are small stutters and skips. No amount of fiddling (reducing resolution, killing needless windows tasks, prioritizing the video decode task) will avoid the stutters and skips. On a T420 with a GMA 3000, the CPU load is 13% because all the MPEG decoding is done in hardware.

This imho will be the death of the T4x series - no hardware video decode-support was included in these laptops, and PCMCIA bus throughput is not high enough to help. Maybe if you co-located an MPEG decoder with the Ethernet (mini-PCI) Adapter you *might* be able to keep these machines competitive. A recent gaming benchmark showed that no video games utilize more than 2 CPU cores, and even today I can play almost all of the pre-2010 games (including Far Cry), at 1024x768 at least, on my ATI 9600 T42.

A mobile 2.0 Ghz Thinkpad T4x is roughly equivalent (< 2x) to a mobile 2.0 Ghz Pentium core-whatever single-core running today. The only advantage of the core product is ... the (mostly spare) cores!!!

this guy is a very intelligent fellow. thumbs up dude. you rock. i had been suspecting this but didnt get time to do the research. but there is some issues with xeon e3110 doing 24.7 yet available for $100 off ebay. any explanation?.

[systemBuilder]

Mostly, Intel has been taking cost OUT of the platform, which is why it hurts the pocketbook so much to buy DDR memory for a T40/T41/T42 CPU.

Well - the cost of RAM has absolutely nothing to do with Intel or its platform - only with the supply as determined by the memory manufacturers. Every time a new memory architecture enters the market - it starts more expensive, then gradually the prices drop as it phases out the old architecture, where in turn, prices start going up, because it's now rare. This has happened in the DDR-DDR2 transition, and again in DDR2-DDR3.

A recent gaming benchmark showed that no video games utilize more than 2 CPU cores

That's also completely not true. There are definitely games out there that utilize 4 cores (I've seen benchmarks), although I am not sure if any can utilize more than 4.[/quote]

To be more precise, A recent subjective gaming benchmark tested a 1-cpu, a 2-cpu and a 4-cpu processor using several different video games and the same high-end video card. Experienced players could correctly guess when they were on a 1-cpu process vs. a 2-cpu processor. But players guessed correctly less than HALF the TIME whether they were on a 2-cpu vs. a 4-cpu processor. So yes, there *are* games that use 4 cpu's but most games today use 2 or fewer, and the benefits of 4 cpu's are indiscernible to experienced gamers.

[irus]

any ideas on the anomaly xeon processor e3110... its cheap and old and still gets 24.7 per core kinda better than i5 processors even. so i should be buying an old cheapo xeon and that wil be better than current i5?