ur not going to beleave this but the 8300 has slower memory 333mhz. the 8250 has 1066mhz dual channel rdram the best mem u can get. they went cheap on the 8300 not even a 3rd 5.25 bay

And right now, the processor is the old 3.06 GHz Hyperthreaded P4. You can tell that it's not the new P4 proc cause the new one is actually only 3.00 Ghz, but supports the 800 Mhz FSB of the new Canterwood board.

Intel just said that the bug in the 3.00 was fixed today, but it'll be a few more days at least to get OEMs to patch their BIOSes.

What performance of the 8250 you are not satisfied with?  Is the system slow?  How much system memory do you have?  System speed is greatly affected by the system memory.  Also, what software or programs have you added that might cause your system to run slow?  Any comments surely help?!!

Link is the chipset Dell originally announced and introd on the 8300 at first, before the chip was pulled for some 'minor' issues. No date for re release has been given. It looks like the 8300 now offered  may have a version of the this chip, with the slower memory, and front bus. Original announcement and spec had the 3.0GHz processor, 800MHz front bus,HT, and 8x AGP, using Dual Channel 400MHz DDR SDRAM.  Hopefully once things are ironed out this one will come back. I'm waiting.

 http://intel.com/design/chipsets/875P/index.htm?iid=ipp_browse+chpsts_feature_875p&

In response to the question about my system speed, the 3.06 Ghz 8250 just isn't noticeably faster than my 1.8Ghz 4300. Previously, it was even worse but BillLeeLee informed me about an XP system patch that slowed things down.

I have 512MBs of system ram. I don't run more than 5 or so applications simultanously so I think the amount of memory is more than sufficient. I also have monitored memory usage and I don't think I get even close to needing more.

I guess this is a result that most tasks I do require fetching a lot of data off the hard drive and that's the weakest link in the system. BillLeeLee also has given me some tips about partitioning the drive which I'll try next.

//Ray

you could also try running a scan at www.pcpitstop.com

It helped with performance. Do you check for spyware if not that might be the problem, some of those things can even crash ur sys. you can find the best spyware scanner at http://security.kolla.de/

Raymo,

Your not going to see a HUGE IMPROVEMENT by getting a P4 3.06GHz system after owning a 1.8GHz P4 system.  if you're just running everyday applications. The amount and speed of the memory you use can greatly impact performance. If you're a gamer (like me) a new video card will offer a lot more performance than a CPU upgrade.

As for the new 8300 system, it will NOT be much faster than an 8250 with the same specs. The 800MHz bus will offer better performance, but the difference will not be that huge. Everyday apps like spreadsheets and other business apps will be just as fast on a 4550 as an 8300.

You may want to look at the new Prescott CPU which will be available by the end of the year. That will offer a lot more performance than just the 800MHz bus. 

Thanks for all the tips and suggestions. Looks like I'll stick with the 8250!

//Ray

glad to be of help :)

Try running your system with a "small" 20Gb 7200rpm disk and make the big disk a slave-disk.

The large disks and partitions give the OS a lot of overhead.

The cache on de diskdrive itself is most of the time the same, big or small harddisk.

For a big disk (120Gb or 200Gb) a disk-cache of 2Mb-8Mb is not much!

I use a small disk for Windows XP (a lot of small files) and a 100Gb disk for video-editing (a few big files).

My system boot and runs fast, no problem. (I have a 8200 2,66GHz, 512Mb Memory)