Author Topic: pent 4 vs. athlon 64? (Read 662 times)

NUTTZ · « **on:** September 29, 2004, 09:39:49 PM »

I want to upgrade

Whats the pro's and con's between a pent 4 (fastest CPU) 533 fsb?

or the new generation athlon 64's ( with fastest CPU)?

NUTTZ

FBScud · « **Reply #1 on:** September 30, 2004, 05:21:27 AM »

After hours and hours of research, I found that more folks believe the Athlon 64 processor with the Socket 939 motherboard is the preferred choice for gaming. It is usually faster in benchmarks and with the native 64 bit capability, it will handle newer 64 bit applications when they start coming out.

Don't get fooled by the clock speeds. The P4 3.6 ghz intel chip or even the 3.4 ghz extreme chip would appear to be faster than an Athlon 64 3500+ or maybe even the FX-53. But I believe there are architectural designs in the chips that enable the Athlon chips to task at higher rates, despite the listed speeds.

So...with all of that, I went searching for a good Athlon 64 based system. I found that I could get a comparable P4 3.6 ghz system for around a $1000 less. Since AH2 is the only game I run, I went with the less espensive P4 3.6 ghz system and hope it will run AH2 for several years. I made sure the motherboard is the newer 925 intel chipset so here's hoping I can upgrade processors when that becomes an issue.

Schutt · « **Reply #2 on:** September 30, 2004, 05:33:08 AM »

Athlon runs at slower clock speed but better parallel execution which makes it faster/compareable to Intels.

I had the intention athlon64 system would come off cheaper overall than P4 system since you can run cheaper memory... what did you compare?

Forget about upgrading future processor and keeping the rest.
Mostly the future processor is either not significantly faster or wont fit to the current MB.
I know, everyone says newest chipset for upgrade possib., but upgrading to a slightly better processor wont give you a noteable performance boost, since ram, grafik, harddisk still run the same. And a much faster processor will need diffrent power, faster ram and faster interface to the grafik system.

ciao schutt

Kev367th · « **Reply #3 on:** September 30, 2004, 01:25:45 PM »

Athlons 64 execute more instructions per clock cycle, hence a seemingly 'slower' clock speed Athlon 64 outperforms a top of the range P4.

Another major difference is the memory controller. All Pentiums have it on the motherboard, Athlon 64 have it as part of the CPU. Result, ridiculously low latencies and insane memory transfer speeds that a P4 can't get near.

All those thinking of PCI-Express, not even the latest Vid cards come close to saturating the current AGP/Hypertransport bus on an Athlon 64.

NUTTZ · « **Reply #4 on:** September 30, 2004, 04:07:44 PM »

Thanks, this new rig will be for doing Art, AH2 Terrains, and gaming.

I plan on building this new, so the Ram, graphix card, HD, ect. will be bought FOR the new MB, and CPU.

NUTTZ

MOSQ · « **Reply #5 on:** September 30, 2004, 04:31:59 PM »

IMHO the best bang for the $ are socket 754 Athlon 64 cpus and socket 754 mobos. The socket 939s may be slightly faster but lose out on the price/performance comparison.
And the socket 754s are much better $/performance than Intel.

Kev367th · « **Reply #6 on:** September 30, 2004, 04:34:05 PM »

True MOSQ but 754 is a dead end regarding future releases. E.g. 'Dual core" CPUs will only be available for s939 and s940.
The recent release of Athlon 64 (s939) 3000 is a good entry level cpu.

Skuzzy · « **Reply #7 on:** September 30, 2004, 04:52:01 PM »

It depends on what you are doing. If you are into many of Adobe products, you will find the Pentium 4's w/HT smoke anything AMD has right now as Adobe apps make use of HT/multi CPU hardware.

Adobe Encore will burn a DVD almost twice as fast using an HT enabled P4 versus the AMD 64's.

Just FYI.

schizer · « **Reply #8 on:** September 30, 2004, 04:55:46 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Skuzzy
It depends on what you are doing. If you are into many of Adobe products, you will find the Pentium 4's w/HT smoke anything AMD has right now as Adobe apps make use of HT/multi CPU hardware.

Adobe Encore will burn a DVD almost twice as fast using an HT enabled P4 versus the AMD 64's.

Just FYI.

How the heck can any software program burn a DVD 2x's as fast? Dvd Burning is limited to the media speed as well as the drive speed, software/processor cant speed up burning. Yeah maybe reauthoring, or encoding one, but simple burning (nope),

Skuzzy · « **Reply #9 on:** September 30, 2004, 04:57:33 PM »

Ok,..I was too simple on the explanation. The encoding process allows the DVD to be burned in almost half the time. Better?

More details. I went through all this on both processors recently. Also encoding the sound to Dolby Digital 5.1 was done as well as the MPEG2 conversion from AVI source.

schizer · « **Reply #10 on:** September 30, 2004, 05:04:41 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Skuzzy
Ok,..I was too simple on the explanation. The encoding process allows the DVD to be burned in almost half the time. Better?

More details. I went through all this on both processors recently. Also encoding the sound to Dolby Digital 5.1 was done as well as the MPEG2 conversion from AVI source.

Thought thats what you meant, but I wanted to clarify. Thanks. Yeah a P4 will smoke any AMD processor when it comes to encoding,reauthoring, etc of video material.

Skuzzy · « **Reply #11 on:** September 30, 2004, 05:14:21 PM »

It's ok schizer. I was a bit too terse.

However, I think it is too general to say a P4 will always be faster in this area. I think it would be more dependent on the tools you use. Not all tools are written to take advantage of a multi-CPU environment.

NUTTZ · « **Reply #12 on:** September 30, 2004, 05:18:28 PM »

I'm using Corel products. I'll probably upgrade to graphics suite 12 ( using Corel 9 at the moment) I'm not sure what you mean by "HT". I'm a die hard fan of Pentium, the 800 FSB. The AMD's 939,940 (53) series have 1600 FSB, but I see the cache is 1mb L2, the Pent4 is 512? My head is spinning. Sure I would like more BANG for the buck, but the reliability of the pent4 has more time under it's belt than the athlon 64's. I wouldn't be over clocking either so that wouldn't be a deciding factor. Still I wouldn't want it to be outdated anytime soon. I see the Pent4 3.6 Mhz, and the AMD 53 series chips are where I will be looking at. the Raedon x800 XT or pro. a few 1gig sticks of ram ( I see they have 2gig sticks also), Will any MoBo's handle 2-2gig sticks of ram?. Now I normally use 7200 RPM HD's i see they have 15k and 10k RPM drives also. Should I stick with 2-7200rpm HD's raided? or go with the faster rpm ( less Physical HD space)? And yes i will probably be mading some short animated films.

NUTTZ,
Thanks for the input.

Quote

Originally posted by Skuzzy
It depends on what you are doing. If you are into many of Adobe products, you will find the Pentium 4's w/HT smoke anything AMD has right now as Adobe apps make use of HT/multi CPU hardware.

Adobe Encore will burn a DVD almost twice as fast using an HT enabled P4 versus the AMD 64's.

Just FYI.

Skuzzy · « **Reply #13 on:** September 30, 2004, 05:27:08 PM »

HT = Hyper Threaded. Basically, there are almost 2 CPU's in the HT CPU's. 'Almost' being the key word. They share a lot of stuff, and probably yeild about a 40 to 50% gain over a single CPU in performance (when using software that actually is written for multi-CPU environments).

It was the last innovative thing Intel did. Personally, I would not touch a 'Prescott' based Intel CPU with a ten foot pole (the 'E' designator or CPU's above 3.2Ghz). The Northwood cores were about the best Intel ever made of the P4 line ('C' designator available in 3.2Ghz or less).
The Prescott runs slower than the Northwood at the same clock rates, and to compound it, they also run much hotter than Northwood.

For what you are doing, an ATIX800Pro should be fine, but for long life the X800XT might be better.

I don't do RAID, so someone else can step in on that.

NUTTZ · « **Reply #14 on:** September 30, 2004, 06:04:13 PM »

Lets see if we're on the same page, what you are saying is...? Get a dual CPU MoBo? A dual CPU MoBo using 2 Pent4 3.2 Northwood chips?

NUTTZ

Quote

Originally posted by Skuzzy
HT = Hyper Threaded. Basically, there are almost 2 CPU's in the HT CPU's. 'Almost' being the key word. They share a lot of stuff, and probably yeild about a 40 to 50% gain over a single CPU in performance (when using software that actually is written for multi-CPU environments).

It was the last innovative thing Intel did. Personally, I would not touch a 'Prescott' based Intel CPU with a ten foot pole (the 'E' designator or CPU's above 3.2Ghz). The Northwood cores were about the best Intel ever made of the P4 line ('C' designator available in 3.2Ghz or less).
The Prescott runs slower than the Northwood at the same clock rates, and to compound it, they also run much hotter than Northwood.

For what you are doing, an ATIX800Pro should be fine, but for long life the X800XT might be better.

I don't do RAID, so someone else can step in on that.