Athalon 64 X2 or Intel Core 2 Duo?

[Puck]

Which is the better game platform, all other things being more or less equal.

[Krusty]

Fraction of the price, hell of a lot more overclockability, much lower temperatures, lower voltages, can OC to 3GHz on stock air cooling!

Conroe, for now, but Conroe by a mile.

[Kev367th]

4-5 months back would recommend a Conroe without reservation.

However

With AMD K-10 Barcelona just around the corner you might want to just stick it out a little longer.

[Skuzzy]

Unfortunately, Intel's Penryn is already looking like another AMD killer, and it may be out before Barcelona.  The Penryn benchmarks look pretty impressive against Conroe, so far.

[Kev367th]

Last I heard Penryn wasn't due until Q4 this year.

Barcelona 'may' appear end of June at earliest, but not much later.

Lack of independent benchmarks for either leaves it up in the air.

Plus we have no idea of cost.

All that is known for sure-

For current AM2 owners K10 is a drop in replacement.

Penryn requires yet another new motherbaord.

[Skuzzy]

Intel's test boards are using socket 775 with a load resistor added.  ASUS has sample motherbaords already to support Penryn.  Same socket, just another voltage step for the BIOS's and regulators to deal with.  And the chipset supports DDR3 memory.

Penryn has already sampled.  Intel is ahead of schedule on it.  It appears they want to hold off shipping it until later in the year.  Prices are set to be announced as well.  Intel already reduced Conroe pricing to make some room.

From all appearances, Intel is just sitting back waiting for AMD to make a new product release then Intel will drop a bomb on them.  Intel has no real incentive to release Penryn any quicker than they need to.

I am watching this one with interest.  With DDR3 RAM, we get the advantages of DDR1 (low latencies) with the clock rates of DDR2.  Best of all worlds.  DDR3 also has lower power requirements.

[Puck]

It sounds like the prices for a Conroe are about to dive, which is good for me.  I don't bother buying bleeding edge (other than my $500 GA), cutting edge is good enough.

I'll wait for Penryn, then spend 1/4th as much for a Conroe with an nVidia SLI MB.

Is it just me or did nVidia change Scan Line Interleaving to sound more modern and hi tech?  Interleaved (dual channel) memory?  When do we get the little iron ferrite cores back?  

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

[Kev367th]

Originally posted by Puck
It sounds like the prices for a Conroe are about to dive, which is good for me.  I don't bother buying bleeding edge (other than my $500 GA), cutting edge is good enough.

I'll wait for Penryn, then spend 1/4th as much for a Conroe with an nVidia SLI MB.

Is it just me or did nVidia change Scan Line Interleaving to sound more modern and hi tech?  Interleaved (dual channel) memory?  When do we get the little iron ferrite cores back?  

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Ah the good old days, Voodoos with true SLI (Scan line Interleaving).
i.e. the two cards prcoessed alternating lines on the screen, one doing the even lines, the other the odd lines.

SLI now does either -
Top half / bottom half of screen
Or alternate frames.

I don't think its possible any longer with modern cards to render alternate lines.

[airhog99]

Originally posted by Puck
Which is the better game platform, all other things being more or less equal.

Everyone says Intel currently leads the performance race. In addition AH has some problems with AMD Dual Core unless forced to run on a single core. (Which it does easily -about 40%-50% usage on a single core on my mid range Dual Core.)

However, I love AMD for having taken on Intel and brought us all much more affordable PCs, with a broad choice of mother boards etc, and a never ending performance race.

So I went with AMD out of loyalty and anticipation of more great things to come.

[Skuzzy]

AH runs fine with a dual core AMD CPU if the AMD patches are used.  It is an AMD issue, not an AH issue.

Any application which uses high resolution timers in conjunction with being multi-threaded would have problems with a dual-core AMD CPU unless the patches are used.

AMD makes fine product.  AMD and Intel have been trading the performance crown for a while.  Right now Intel has the upper hand in both performance and lower power consumption.

[airhog99]

Originally posted by Skuzzy
AH runs fine with a dual core AMD CPU if the AMD patches are used.  It is an AMD issue, not an AH issue.

Any application which uses high resolution timers in conjunction with being multi-threaded would have problems with a dual-core AMD CPU unless the patches are used.

AMD makes fine product.  AMD and Intel have been trading the performance crown for a while.  Right now Intel has the upper hand in both performance and lower power consumption.

I have the AMD patches installed, but the only thing that would give me the abillity to Alt-Tab out of AH and go back in again reliably was to run AH in Win89/ME compatibility mode.

[Skuzzy]

Originally posted by airhog99
I have the AMD patches installed, but the only thing that would give me the abillity to Alt-Tab out of AH and go back in again reliably was to run AH in Win89/ME compatibility mode.

Normally that is video and/or sound card related as both those drivers are also multi-threaded and putting the game into compatibility mode kills the threading for those drivers as well.  But it could also be the applications installed.  Quite frankly, it could be a lot things.

But this is not something we can fix.  If it was a game issue, then the manifestation of the problem would exist for all computers, regardless of the hardware.

[airhog99]

Originally posted by Skuzzy
Normally that is video and/or sound card related as both those drivers are also multi-threaded and putting the game into compatibility mode kills the threading for those drivers as well.  But it could also be the applications installed.  Quite frankly, it could be a lot things.

But this is not something we can fix.  If it was a game issue, then the manifestation of the problem would exist for all computers, regardless of the hardware.

I'll try experimenting with drivers again.. I don't trust Realtek (for the on-board audio). I'll try using my old Soundblaster card. However, does not the fact that I can kill AH and restart it without rebooting point to this not being a driver issue? (I notice that this is getting OT)

[coinbird]

i hope amd can come back to fight. otherwise us the consumers lose.

[airhog99]

Originally posted by coinbird
i hope amd can come back to fight. otherwise us the consumers lose.

I think the differences are somewhat exagerated, as it is price/performance that matters to most people. I never buy the "ultimate" as the premium is not worth it, IMO. (I pick it up 12 months later for a fraction of the initial price.)