boxst

Hello.

I'm just upgrading my computer (a PIII 600) and I can't decide between a P4 or an AMD 1.4 with 512mb of DDR ram.

Lots of computer stores say AMD, but I've always had an Intel.

Any suggestions / experiences?

Thanks!

Steve.

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

PT/Mr Lawson etc, care to share your views????

IWatkins

Once the hand optimised compilers are available, the Intel processer is always the faster.

Just a pity that they take so long to get the good compilers out. Recently been about 6 - 9 months after the chip ships.

Latest hand optimised Fortran compiler for the P4 1.4 produces code that blows the equivelent AMD processer away by about 15-20%.

Intl everytime, especially if someone else is paying (e.g. work). However, for value for money, the AMD is very hard to ignore.

Cheers

Ian

IWatkins

Double Post

[This message has been edited by IWatkins (edited 06 September 2001).]

ChrisB

If you want bang per buck, then the 1.4Ghz AMD Athlon is now around £100.

Pair it up with 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM on a decent motherboard (Abit, Asus etc), a GeForce, Kryo or ATi Radeon based video card and you will have one kick *** sytem.

For everyday use, the 1.4Ghz Athlon will compete with the 1.7 or 2Ghz Pentium 4. Can you really notice the difference between 180 and 160 frames per second in Quake 3?

Until the new i845 based motherboards come out later this month, you are forced to use RAMBUS memory with the P4 which is more expensive than DDR RAM. Intel are also changing the size of the P4 from using a 423 pin socket to a 478 pin version. Buying a motherboard with a 423 socket now would be A Bad Thing (tm). All the 2Ghz+ P4s will use the new 478 size.

KF

What do you plan to use the PC for?
KF.

Steve Lawson

Hi boxst,

I can't offer any technical reasons for going for a AMD/Intel chip as anyone who knows my current track record with pc's will tell you.
But I currently have a 950mhz AMD TBird and it rocks ,very subjective I know.My only comments are the AMD's seem a little temperemental unless you know what you are doing(All hail Mr Footlong).
Personally I would buy another AMD...actually I am going to only because I have SNet to fall back on when I **** things up.
Hopefully PTHolt will see this thead and respond.

Regards

Steve

Blow Dog

I bought a 1.4DDR Athlon, it was proved faster in tests over the Intel 1.7

I am VERY happy with mine.

Cem

14,500rpm

i recently bought a 1gig AMD thunderbird, immediatly turnrd the wick up to 1.45gig (10x145) without any problems, turned it down to 1.33 now, stable as anything i've ever owned.

TBH i don't really notice much of a leap in performance over my previous AMD duron (600 running at 900 ) which in turn did n't seem a great leap forward from my p2 450 (overclocked 400). i'm sure there is a difference tho, but i think more memory is always more useful, when i added another 64meg to my old p2 to bring it up to 128meg the difference was very apparent. i now run 256meg, but need more so i can learn oracle.

in conclusion, i would n't get carried away with multi gig CPU's that you probably don't need, money is better spent on memory and faster hard drives (scsi) and if you play games, a good graphics card. AMD's can be more difficult to set up, as several people have mentioned, but its not rocket science, but they do need a decent heat sink, lots of reviews of them (and other stuff) on the excellent

robski

Until recently I was a great advocate of Athlons, but the P4 is going to come storming up, the problem with it is that its designed for very fast processors, this ISNT the current 1.4-1.8 type offerings, but the faster 2/2.5+ offerings. What its actually got is a very long pipeline by previous processor standards, and this is the key, once thats running fast, its going to be very effective, at slow speeds, its far from ideal.

RAMBUS is interesting technology, very fast yes, but its got a high latency to start, so that means that its VERY good for larger data transfers, but not for smaller transfers as the latency is the key. Again this influences the "speed" of the machine, so depending what tests are performed, changes the results!

Now that youve had your basic lesson what woud I do?
It depends on what you are after. Thats not a particularly poor machine your upgrading, but my advice is:
1) start with everything apart from the processor when specing a fast system. Disk drives are very important as when your processor needs something from disk it needs to wait for a millisecond device to deliver the goods (dont forget the processor works in nanoseconds so its just a tad faster!).
RAM, this has to be balanced. You hear people saying you can never have enough RAM, in most circumstances this is bollix. If Microsost do some more work yes, but the number of times we have put more memory in a machine and actually noticed that over time it will run slower is sad You optimally want more memory than you will need to prevent disk caching, and not a lot more than that, i.e. read that you need to think about what you want the system to do!
Graphics card, nowdays with most games 3D (or using 3D engines) the speed of the card makes a massive difference. Fast processor and slow card = slow game, fast card and slow processor = slow game.
Sound cards and most other components make a difference as well, do some research and look for componets that use low CPU, its scary how much difference there can be between 2 similar spec'd devices.

If money was no object I would go Intel, if money is an object you will build a better machine using AMD, purely down the the price difference.

Intel are on the back foot at the mo, they have a history of not being, and are unlikely to stay there unless AMD have something very good ready to challenge the P4 at higher speeds.

mail me if you want some decent links to testing sites etc...

robski

ptholt

don't worry steve i'm here, i saw this when it first came on, but didnt want to be mr negative and moan a lot at the start

Mr footlong has just reminded me of this post this morning so will go for it now

I've worked with pc's and in IT for about 13 years and had always had Intel stuff, I have made many pc's from just buying the parts and bolting it all together and never had a problem in that time.
About 6 months ago i decided to try athlons (I spend a lot of time playing games nad the athlons really do perform well at that task for a lot cheaper than an equivalent intel product.)

I bought all the kit from scan as someone mentioned above (ok firm flogging stuff at not ad prices but you try and get support or a faulty product returned!!) would recommend ebuyer above them every time. Sorry i digress.

I bought the following :-
512 ram (sing;le chip)
abit kt7a raid mobo
athlon 1.2
case (came as a bundle, standard scan thing)
geforce 2 gts ultra
125 gig hs (split between 2 drives of 75 gig and 50 i think).

As I hadnt built one before I took it to a friend who runs a local co building and supporting pcs.
He bolted it all together (rather badly - as it turned out!) but we couldnt get it running above 900mhz at 133 fsb and it wouldnt run at all at 266 fsb.
We tried masses of different bios upgrades, memory, video cards in the case, out the case - nowt.
It then went to another friend in the it industry for him to try (who posts on here as well) he managed to get it to 1000mhz i think it was, but still only at 133mhz.

I was then introduced to mr footlong via mr lawson (who had also had a few probs getting his athlon working) he ripped the whole thing apart and re-built it.

Turned out the guy who works for my friend who had bolted it together had left the clear plastic packaging on top of the cpu when he bolted it together which had then melted all over it.
Nick to his credit (after he'd stopped laughing at the above) managed to get it working at 266 fsb at 1200mhz but it was running too hot and would lock up.

I then spent a bit more money on a load of case fans, a much more expensive (and better pbviously) heatsink and case to try and reduce temperature.

I didnt realise athlons were so temperature dependant, they get to hot and just lock up.

The parts arrived and Nick set about rebuilding and got the thing running fine (apart from a slight glitch on the cpu when it boots where it sits at 100% useage for no reason for a little while - we suspect the above damaged it).

I've also been disapointed in the 3d performance of my new machine, as it runs unreal tournament VERY jerkily (worse than my old p3 900), but this could also be because of the above.

So my lessons in athlonville have so far led me to the following conclusions.

athlons have proved much 'fiddlier' to install and set up (when compared to the 20-30 intel's ive built.

They are also much more sensitive to temperature.

My problems did make me think i would quite happily return to the intel fold as i've never had any problems with them, and it would be worth the extra cost to not have the above hassle (the above also took about 2 months btw).
But seeing as it appears my cpu and board may be damaged i'm going to replace those first and give the athlons one more go.

The chips has arrived which the ever helpful Nick is going to help me with soon - cheers mate.

So we'll have a definate conclusion at that stage.
But certainly at the mo, my personal jury is still out on athlons.

XRS

I'm only a hobby builder of PCs, but I always used to swear by Intel. I tried a few AMD but was not impressed.

However, I have recently upgraded to the system described by ChrisB and am VERY pleased with it. Temperatures are not a problem (currently 24 degrees)so long as you have the right heatsink, and I've recently added a case fan as well.

Oh, and I remembered to remove that little piece of plastic on the heatsink (thank goodness - I did wonder though!)

Go AMD - it's so cheap at the moment.

Lee

ptholt i would disagree with 2 of your comments.

fiddlier to build ? not likely. In all the systems I've built its the accessories which can be fiddly. Christ a motherboard/cpu/ram is the easy part - wiring up an SB Live for the first time is fun :-)

temperature sensitivity ?
my fileserver (athlon700) started playing up recently - found that of the 2 fans on the chip (old slotA) one was not spinning at all, the other spinning so slow you could read the writing as it went round. Burnt my hand on the damned heatsink didn't I !!
replaced fans and sorted.

Conversely, had the same with an intel chip where the fan stopped. Chip fried and was useless.

I always use athlon for desktops / dev servers, and only intel in production servers.

Markus

AMD no question. all the machines I've built in the last year, including my own, have been AMD chips, the guy I work for only uses intel if the customer asks for it, otherwise it's AMD all the way.

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Lee, I am not going to dispute that building a basic PC is easy-peasy, but you are being far too generalised in your comments. Any muppet can slap some components together and see what happens, but there is far more to it than that as I imagine you well know.
In my job I frequently come across systems made by other 'computer engineers' that are sub standard AMD setups and normally end up under a desk sorting them out.
Virtually all of the AMD motherboards are based on VIA chipsets, due to their outright performance, (relative stability) price, availability etc, but as you should well know, require a bit of nurturing to ensure top performance, compatability and stabaliity.

The VIA chipsets are great in my opinion, but for the average user are not quite simple enough. You normally get all sorts of funky options such as latency settings for the RAM, what form of interleaving and block size you want to run and how aggresively it should track and feed data through the RAM.
The VIA boards are very particular on how you set up the track and feed settings. For instance:

The Crucial RAM that I use runs at the following settings,

133MHZ
CAS 2
Turbo speed
4-way interleave
4K block mode

Take the usual 512MB stick that you get with Scan deals and it is a little different,

133MHZ
CAS 3
8-10ns,normal speed max usually
4-way interleave
4K block mode

You try running the feed rate any higher than that and they freak out.

The crucial stuff at these settings goes 30-odd% faster than the second stick.

IRQ/slot/sharing assignment. Again, if you know what you are doing with this, performance and stability problems virtually disappear.

Then there's the (frequent, but not so much any more) BIOS updates to aid the stability/compatability/performance issues and the good old 4-in-1 drivers.

Then you have all of the CPU and AGP side of it. Not the voltage and frequency side of it but all of the rest. Getting bored of details now....

If you put one of these together in basic form then it will be pretty stable, but chances are that it will be 20-odd% slower than it can be due to BIOS compromisations which the user has to alter.

Athlons in Thunderbird form (non-MP, don't know everything about these, yet)are reletively temperature sensitive, due to the fact that they crank out heat like you wouldnt believe. In there various forms and depending on use they crank out between 50-80 watts of heat energy alone. The phenomenal performance comes at a cost. This is the one main area where the PIII series win hands down. The Athlons are generally 100% spot on running up to 50c but usually when busy running above that, problems occur.

XRS, what speed CPU and Heatsink are you running? The pre-1000 cpus that I have come across can easily run below 30c on idle, but virtually all go above this when being stressed.

Both Ptholt and I run the Thermalright SK6 with delta fans and silver compound. these are widely acknowledged as amongst the elite of heatsinks, but even with these and more than adequate case cooling (in overclocked form)idle at high 30's to low 40's and sit at mid-high 40's when crunching UD or gaming.

Anyway, blabbering now, could have gone on about all sorts of cr@p, but quite frankly can't be @rsed! Got to do something resembling work today!

I am not biased towards either, but both have their strengths and weaknesses.
The latest Intels have yet to mature, but still have a lot going for them, but price and RAMBUS are not amongst them.
The AMD's kick ***, but there are the slightest of issues and there is an art to making them really sing. The good far outweighs the bad IMO.

Were it not for the P4's still stupid pricing, I would shortly be buying one, but
I am not about to go and get some lowly 1.4 P4 on the cheap when my current Athlon whips it!


Cheers,


Nick

P.S too long to proof-read, so apologies for typos, random gibberish etc!

jjones

check your power supply - i beleive you really want 300watts with ghz processors.

but then i may be talking out of my rectum

ptholt

Lee, you missed the other part of my sentence off which was more inline with my statement - 'athlons have proved much 'fiddlier' to install and set up '
The actual set up and trying to get all the devices running properly and at the right speed (as nick went to great lengths to explain) was a right pain.

I downloaded about 8-10 different bios versions from a very poor abit website, spent ages troughing in newsgroups to find out soudblaster live platinums didnt like my abit board. In total the time wasted trying to find answers to issues that I have never had to face on an intel were enormous, and if i applied my hourly contracting rate to the time wasted trying to get it all running correctly, it would have been much cheaper just to purchase a brand new branded intel like dell or compaw etc. (though i never would).

when it was first assembled the abit would just bleep with no screen feed etc.
there was nothing in the manuals explaing these bleeps (or there so called support site), so ages were spent in the newsgroups trying to find the problems, constantly booting, unplugging, re-seating, different memory sticks, check agp slot etc.

That was all VERY fiddly to say the least.

Whereas installing a soundblaster live platinum + live drive into my intel pc was a total walk in the park in comparison.

edited to say that whilst going through the above farce, we tried three psu's.
1 x 250w (which scansupplied in there case - which was awful) and two other 300w ones.


[This message has been edited by ptholt (edited 07 September 2001).]

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Did we?
I remember the luuuuuuuuuurvly scan case and PSU and a Macron 300w supply, but not another, or does that one have absolutely nothing to do with me?

CharlieWhiskey

AMD every time, some much more bangs per buck.

If you want a cheap upgrade keep your eye on the today only page at

ptholt

The psu fun and games was before it arrived at you nick, hence why when we bought the case i didnt really want to buy another.

I've never had to faff around with psu's before ever (never even had one break on me!) in two months athlon useage i'm on my third!

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

ScoobyDoo555

I too have recently built a system up, using an AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz/ABIT KT7a Raid, with 512 meg PC133 Ram.

The only hassle I had, had NOTHING to do with the actual processor/mboard. The RAM was faulty!!! Took me AGES to sort it out (1st time I'd ever experienced this problem)

However, after the inital grief, I'm SOOOOO happy with it

I've also got a Hercules GTS2 card - the top one.... WELL impressed.

On the heat aspect, I just made sure that I had plenty of air movement inside the tower -bought an PCI slot extractor. This helped greatly.

I've had Intel-based systems, and earlier AMD stuff. To be perfectly honest, neither brands caused major grief.

The main difference I've found is that for professional audio/video applications, the Intel chipsets are better, due to the instructions used. AMD are brilliant for home use.

I think it's just luck of the draw - PCs in general are NOTORIOUS for problems. Having said that, that's part of the fun, innit?

If we want stress-free computing, we'd all have MACS (flamesuit ON!!!!)
Yes, yes - not as much software etc.... still, I find it ironic that Microsoft software runs better/more stable on a Mac than a PC.


Dan (both MAC & PC owner/user )