Author Topic: Motherboard & CPU (Read 378 times)

TheFox · « **on:** May 09, 2002, 10:29:20 AM »

Hi everyone.

I'm looking to upgrade my system again (madness creeping in) and favour an Asus P4B motherboard Intel chipset and probably the P4 1.8a Northwood chip.

Has anyone used this combination ? Any comments/suggestions?

Best Regards

Fox
Krait Squadron

Skuzzy · « **Reply #1 on:** May 09, 2002, 11:07:55 AM »

Built 5 of that particular combination so far. Pretty sweet. I would not use the onboard sound chip though.

bloom25 · « **Reply #2 on:** May 09, 2002, 12:01:07 PM »

If you must go Intel, at least get the P4B version that uses DDR Sdram. (That goes without saying, I hope.) Putting PC133 SDRAM in there would result in a very large performance hit.

Skuzzy · « **Reply #3 on:** May 09, 2002, 12:02:34 PM »

That would be the P4B266.

TheFox · « **Reply #4 on:** May 11, 2002, 05:33:28 AM »

Thanks guys - much appreciated

Fox
Krait Squadron

funkedup · « **Reply #5 on:** May 11, 2002, 09:56:52 PM »

Friends don't let friends buy Intel!

ScreamingEgle · « **Reply #6 on:** May 11, 2002, 11:35:37 PM »

not if one has many shares in it

TheFox · « **Reply #7 on:** May 12, 2002, 05:26:10 AM »

Stability is the big issue for me. I need a system that handles both the applications I use regularly - AH of course - and Cubase for the music - (this usually is the hard part !). Both require very high floating point capabilities, but the music software is more demanding on read/write capabilites.

Tried the alternatives before, AMD, Via chipsets etc. - never found a combination that would give stability as well as performance - could always get performance for a period, then some 'unique feature' would appear in one of the applications.

In the end, I found Intel 'usually' provided a good match between the CPU and the chipset, which in turn gave the stability albeit at some loss of speed. I'm curently using a PIII 1ghz with an Asus CUSL2 MB - not the fastest, but very stable.

The quest now is to retain the stability and get more SPEEEEED !!

Again, thanks for the advice. Just put the order in for the Asus P4B266 and the Intel 1.8a Northwood. - Let's hope it all works !

Fox
Krait Squadron

SKurj · « **Reply #8 on:** May 12, 2002, 12:58:42 PM »

i run AMD, once upon a time i too would not even look at an AMD, and only used Intel.

Now its the other way around +)

Stability?? I've not had an instability issue since i tossed w98 +)

SKurj

Tumor · « **Reply #9 on:** May 15, 2002, 01:45:34 AM »

You want stability, go Intel. You want speed, go with AMD.

Lephturn · « **Reply #10 on:** May 15, 2002, 08:08:02 AM »

AMD's floating point power still owns Intel's P4's.

Stability... stay away from a VIA chipset IMHO. I can't argue with you about Intel CPU/ Intel chipset being the most stable... I have to agree there.

If FPU power for the $ is what you need, you can't beat AMD though.

DES · « **Reply #11 on:** May 15, 2002, 10:50:13 AM »

I see people talking about intell being more stable but I see no difference in the systems I build. At one time there were issues but those have been over for a while. I get the same results using intell or amd.

DES

SKurj · « **Reply #12 on:** May 15, 2002, 01:30:36 PM »

I've used VIA chipsets with all my AMD setups and not had a stability issue, cept for SMALL issues with SBLive!

SKurj

Tumor · « **Reply #13 on:** May 15, 2002, 07:14:21 PM »

from Tomshardware (Oct 01). This was a stress test they did comparing ALL the top processors at the time (16 total).

"Another factor is the stability and product quality of a system: while all Athlon processors suffered from occasional instability in our tests, the Pentium 4 platform ran without a glitch. Reasons for this behaviour might not lie in the processor itself, but rather in the motherboard design and the chipset used. Future driver updates might not just improve performance but also stability of a platform. And of course, every user knows that the lightweight price tags on Athlon XP processors may have a downside compared to their more expensive Pentium 4 rivals."

There, and thats coming from a guy with his head stuck so far up AMD's .... well you know lol.

Tumor

bloom25 · « **Reply #14 on:** May 15, 2002, 07:22:12 PM »

I've built both types of systems. Intel systems are easier to get stable, but AMD systems on VIA chipsets can be made equally stable. The problem is that people often don't install the drivers correctly (or right after Windows install). Another issue is that the VIA boards often have memory timings and the like tweaked in the bios for additional performance. If you have cheap ram you often run into issues. Intel's OEM boards run very conservative timings and cap the PCI bus bandwidth well below it's limits to maintain stablity.

Performance (neglecting price differences) between the top of the line AMD and Intel chips today is on the whole roughly equal. The 2.533 Ghz P4 is faster than the XP 2100+ at this time, but may change in the next couple weeks. (You can buy 3 XP 2100+ processors for the price of 1 2.533 Ghz P4 though...)

One area where the P4 is extremely lacking is it's x87 FPU. Applications that are not optimized for SSE 2 FPU operations are not going to perform nearly as well on a P4 than they would on an Athlon. If you look at Sandra benchmarks for a P4 vs Athlon, look carefully at the P4's results. It is broken into two parts: x87 performance and SSE 2 optimized performance. Unless your application is optimized for SSE2, you can see just how badly the P4 is going to do vs an Athlon XP. I personally run my Athlon very hard with circuit design and simulation (and Matlab) applications. It's never let me down, and compared to the P4 1.7 Ghz machines I have access to, it is much faster. (And this is just a 1300 Mhz Tbird, 200 Mhz FSB.)

There are alternatives to the VIA chipsets now: AMD makes an extremely stable dual CPU chipset (760 MP), and my own experience with the nForce chipset leads me to believe it is quite stable. One last big advantage of the Athlon XP (MP) is in low cost dual CPU systems. The Athlon's EV6 based FSB allows dual Athlon CPUs to often outperform the MUCH more expensive P4 Xeons. (Look at http://www.anandtech.com , they recently compared their AMD servers vs their Xeon systems.) When you consider that you can buy a dual MP 2000+ system for well under the price of a 2.4 Ghz single CPU P4 system with Rambus ram, you can see just how competive the AMD stuff can be.

I've also attached a benchmark (ALU and FPU) of my personal CPU (Tbird 1300 @ 1313 Mhz, 101 Mhz DDR FSB on original KT133 Asus A7V motherboard, 384 MB PC133 SDRAM, in other words, old). You can see the split result for the 1.5 Ghz P4 and see just how badly it's going to do with x87 FPU operations...