Is it worth the upgrade? (from a CC unit)

[asimov-solensan]

And I know that there's no simple answer. So i'm going to explain my user case.


From the gaming side I use mainly emulators, psx, snes, fba and neo-geo would be my prefered ones. Also there is many things that I want to test with qemu/win95 (have got a working image but no time to try games), and better performance in mame (panmame) would be very welcome.


I may use other systems from time to time but they are not a priority, even n64 is a console that I'm not very interested in.


Web browsing is one of th functions I'm more concerned with, I use the pandora very often for this matter (with firefox) along with claws opended at the same time and it's not rare that I also need to have a couple pdf's opened or the music player running (deadbeef).


Aside from that I don't use other desktop software.


I would like to hear about the improvement in video playing performance, It's annoying in my case to recode video files, I really don't have time for do it, besides I have got all my media files (and almost everything) in a server running samba, I would like to simply read video files from there like I do in my other computers. This also requires a good wifi performance, I don't know if there has been any improvement on this but any comment will be welcome.


Android is not a concern for me.


Now I'm using a 2010 CC unit, with enough swap space I can do almost what I mentioned. In fact my intention was to wait until the pandora 2 to replace it but after follow the pandora 2 spam forum I have lost the faith of a P2 that will fit my taste.


After reading this the question is will I notice any difference in my daily usage between my unit and the Ghz unit.

 

[dgame]

Yes, you will notice a difference between the CC and 1GHz unit.


The things you have to enable swap for on the CC work better on the 1GHz.


FireFox experience improves a lot on the 1GHz.


Programs, including media players, generally open faster and run smoother on the 1GHz.


As for streaming video I think an external USB WiFi adapter helps on both units.


I stream audio all the time using the built-in WiFi, but I find streaming video is more reliable with USB WiFi.


USB WiFi can also take advantage of Wireless N.


For Web browsing and multitask desktop use I recommend the 1GHz unit.

 

[_wb_]

The extra RAM will certainly help for desktop usage like browsing - you could also "only" upgrade to a Rebirth edition unit for that.


The extra CPU/GPU power is not needed for those emulators (they should already run full-speed), with the exception of qemu: for qemu, more power always means you can effectively emulate more stuff.


For video playback and browsing, extra CPU/GPU power will make things a bit more "snappy", but don't expect a huge difference.

 

[Grench]

I have a CC Pandora and a 1Ghz Pandora. My CC Pandora holds 1Ghz at OPP5 just fine. I generally keep my 1Ghz Pandora clocked at it's stock 1100Mhz.


Both are very capable from a game emulator perspective.


The prime difference you'll find from your use case described above is more attributable to the RAM than the faster CPU. So the 600Mhz 512MB German edition might do just fine for you if you wanted to save a bit on it.


Something that isn't mentioned much when talking about the 1Ghz units is that the NAND and the RAM are also faster. The 1Ghz unit boots from NAND a bit faster than the CC machine and tasks feel 'snappier'.


Is the 1Ghz upgrade worth it? From a practical standpoint when compared to the 600Mhz512MB version - maybe not - that depends on whether you want that last degree of performance bump. I do more multi-tasking on my Pandora than I probably should - every last bit of performance I can get out of it is welcome.


All three iterations are VERY nice machines.

 

[asimov-solensan]

Thanks a lot, your comments are very useful to me. Is there any video comparing web browsing with the two models or rebirth vs 1Ghz? It would help.

 

[MaxNormal]

I tried playing a video directly from a samba share on my NAS on my 1 GHZ unit with an external wireless N adaptor and performance was extremely poor. Copying the whole video file to my pandoras SD card across the same link was very fast so I just did that and watched the file from my SD card after it had copied. I expect that there is something I could tweak to get better playback on remote samba shares but I would not know where to start.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Use NFS instead of samba/cifs.