AMD versus Pentium4

Will Robinson · Post by **Will Robinson** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 2:47 pm

I was going to build a new box with a P4 3.4 Ghz 550 Prescott processor. I know 'Why a Presscott? Well because I want to use the Asus P5AD2 Premium mobo that's why. I had hoped to overclock it to somewhere near 4Ghz...

Anyway the vendor pissed me off and said they shipped the order but only the video card showed up and *now* they say the mobo, cpu and memory is back ordered. Bastages! So I figured I'd try to come up with an alternative while I wait and decide if I should cancel the order or not.

The problem is I want to keep the vid card Saphire X800XT PCI-Express so I need to use a mobo that has PCI-E slot in place of a VGA slot.
The Nvidia nForce4 comes to mind but I don't even know which AMD CPU would be comprable to a P4 in the 4Ghz range.

So, what's the AMD alternative to a 4Ghz P4?
Of course all suggestions and flames welcomed....even Mobius

Mr. Perfect · Post by **Mr. Perfect** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 4:14 pm

Well considering how soundly the top Athlon 64s smack the 3.6GHz around when gaming, I'd say get a 4000+(heh, duh) or a similar top-end Athlon 64/FX.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 5:16 pm

Get a Nforce4 socket 939 mobo, and a high end 939 pin Athlon 64 it will beat the P4 in pretty much everything at stock speed. And if you get one of the new .90 Athlon 64 chips they are reasonable overclockers and should give you quite a performance boost.

Avder · Post by **Avder** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 5:39 pm

two words: Dual opterons

Capm · Post by **Capm** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 7:04 pm

Why stop there avder, go quad opteron - cost ya 6500 for just the motherboard, cpu's, ram and hs/fans for the cpus

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 7:56 pm

Why stop there Capm? I hear AMD is demoing 8 way opterons soon. Why not go for that? Just for the CPUs, mobo and RAM you are easly talking $20k.

Lothar · Post by **Lothar** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 8:24 pm

why stop there, Krom? For more money than you have, you can get a 96-processor opteron system. Or maybe you could move up a notch from there...

Avder · Post by **Avder** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 8:52 pm

*spoojes*

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 10:01 pm

Capm · Post by **Capm** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 11:55 pm

now now - we don't want the game to become self-aware

Mr. Perfect · Post by **Mr. Perfect** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 11:20 am

Besides, it's hard to find a AGP or PCI-E slot mobo for 4+ CPU setups. Having a 96 Opeteron setup with a PCI Voodoo 3 would be really sad.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 11:27 am

If you had 96 opterons running, you could emulate any video card you want in software.

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 2:48 pm

Krom wrote:If you had 96 opterons running, you could emulate any video card you want in software.

Not to mention heat your house during the winter without having to run the furnace.

Just run a fan, and connect a hose from a duct to the fan and then from the fan to the back of the computer and you're set.

You'll be cooling your computer Sickone style.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 3:04 pm

Yeh - I was gonna go Intel this time around, but I delayed so long, that AMD is surely the way to go. I'm gonna go nForce 3 250GB and socket 754 though - the other stuff here is just too pricey.

Capm · Post by **Capm** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 12:04 am

754 is a dead-end socket tho, do yourself a favor and get a 939 board and chip.

Mr.Rsm · Post by **Mr.Rsm** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 12:23 pm

www.cyberpowersystem.com it's actually cheaper than buildin ur own rig. check it out

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 12:29 pm

Mr.Rsm wrote:www.cyberpowersystem.com it's actually cheaper than buildin ur own rig. check it out

Not if you select quaility parts.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 12:52 pm

Except Capm - I never update a system, I always replace motherboard, CPU and RAM at the same time - so socket 754 will be just fine, and considering the overclock these budget CPUs are capable of...

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 12:59 pm

fliptw wrote:
Mr.Rsm wrote:www.cyberpowersystem.com it's actually cheaper than buildin ur own rig. check it out
Not if you select quaility parts.

Aggreed, I glanced through that site and I was not impressed.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 10:15 pm

The shocking truth about the P4-560 is revealed at THG:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041114/index.html

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 12:24 pm

Haha the shocking truth: dont use a cheap thermal compound! They said the intel refrence thermal pad worked fine.

MD-2389 · Post by **MD-2389** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 5:26 pm

Capm wrote:754 is a dead-end socket tho, do yourself a favor and get a 939 board and chip.

I thought they were going to let that run for a while longer for the "budget" 64 chips?

Mr. Perfect · Post by **Mr. Perfect** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 9:24 am

The Semprons will use 754 from now on, and they won't have 64bit. From what I've read they'll be 32bit versions of the Athlon 64.

Top Wop · Post by **Top Wop** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 2:16 pm

Mr. Perfect wrote:The Semprons will use 754 from now on, and they won't have 64bit. From what I've read they'll be 32bit versions of the Athlon 64.

Is'nt that kinda stupid? To have the platform of a 754 yet offer a 32 bit version of a chip as opposed to a 64 bit one?

Mr. Perfect · Post by **Mr. Perfect** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 2:34 am

Not really. if the Semprons where 64 bit they'd eat into the Athlon 64 market.

Anand article wrote:Unfortunately, in addition to the reduced amount of cache, all of the Semprons lack 64-bit support. That isn't a major concern yet, but it could be in another six months when we see the launch of Windows XP-64 and 64-bit applications. For those that are interested in 64-bit computing, you will want to spend the extra money for the Athlon 64.

STRESSTEST · Post by **STRESSTEST** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 2:36 am

That and they will stop using socket A soon anyway. So they need a budget processor on some platform, right?

754 to the rescue.

Aggressor Prime · Post by **Aggressor Prime** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 5:53 am

AMD = Nice Mobo

woodchip · Post by **woodchip** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 8:25 am

So just what will be gained from going to a 64 bit system over a top end 32 bit system? Will the extra cost be justified at this time?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Nov 19, 2004 12:21 pm

The Athlon 64 just *happens* to offer some of the best 32bit performance on the market right now and I hear windows XP 64bit Edition is starting to shape up, they are expecting something like 17% performance boost by running a 64bit OS.

SkyNet · Post by **SkyNet** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 9:23 pm

Woodchip, I'm an undergraduate at school right now studying to be a computer programmer, and from what I've been told the reason for 64 bit is for larger memory address allocation. Not really for integer values because 2^32 is quite a large number, but mainly for pointer opperations.

See pointers are addresses to addresses. So it's an address that points to another address. I know it's very confusing, but when you program you'll have to learn this. The issue with a 32-bit system is that you can only have so many unique addresses before you're out of memory.

There is a reason why systems only allow for 4GB max. This is one of them. So it's 4GB per CPU as each CPU get's it's on 32-bit instruction set. Well for 64-bit we effectively double the amount of unique addresses so if I were to guess at this, we'll probably start seeing single CPU chips with a max of 8GB memory possible assuming that it will double in RAM but I'm making an assumption that it's 1:1.

Anyway off of all this crap, moving to a 64-bit chip isn't going to help you if you continue to run 32-bit programs, and this will probably be the case for a few years yet, but eventually if you don't have a 64-bit system you'll find that programs wont be able to run on your 32-bit system because you don't have enough addressing space or in other words they were compiled for 64-bit machines. You've got some time yet before that happens.

One last note though. A 64-bit machine isn't more expensive then a 32-bit Intel machine so not updating to one seems kinda prohibitive to me.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 9:41 pm

SkyNet wrote:Well for 64-bit we effectively double the amount of unique addresses so if I were to guess at this, we'll probably start seeing single CPU chips with a max of 8GB memory possible assuming that it will double in RAM but I'm making an assumption that it's 1:1.

You need to do some more study I'm afraid:

"The AMD64 platform can address 4 petabytes of physical memory, and a 64-bit CPU can potentially address up to 18 exabytes."

4 petabytes = 4,096 terabytes = 4,194,304 gigabytes

18 exabytes = 18,432 petabytes.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 9:45 pm

4,194,304 GB != 8 GB

You're only out by a factor of half a million.

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 9:51 pm

Mobius wrote:4,194,304 GB != 8 GB

You're only out by a factor of half a million.

How on earth do you figure he implied that?

The main advantage to going to 64-bit: an execuse for more CPU registers.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 6:29 am

fliptw - he stated that 64-bit memory addresses result in a doubling of maximum memory capacity compared to 32-bit processors. However, the difference is actually two to the power of 32 - several billion - not just two.

64-bit chips, by themselves, do provide no performance increase over 32-bit models; you have to write software for it. And it's mainly a precision/mem capacity increase anyway.

woodchip · Post by **woodchip** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 6:38 pm

So the short of it is, one shouldn't run out and spend extra jingle just to have a 64 bit system. Thanks for the input.