Intel P4 vs AMD

Amen to that. Although it needn't be ASUS, there's definitely no problem going that route. My school uses ASUS microATX PCs, about 120 of them, and in three years they've only ever had two failed ones.
So far my MSI has been OK too.
Touching wood repeatedly, but after a devastating power surge, it still survived!!
How is anyone's guess. The only complaint I have about it is a loose PS/2 connector at the back, meaning the keyboard plug occasionally falls out. But hey, nothing's perfect!

 

theonejrs

I'm holding out for the Toledo Core (X2 4400+)because it has 2X 1 megs of L2 Cache and a multiplier of 11X. The biggest problem that people have over clocking the AMD Venice 3000 and the X2 3800 is largely a result of the low clock multiplier. To get a CPU with a multiplier of 9X to 2.6 is not an easy task, and with a command rate of 1T virtually impossible. That's why the best choices for serious over clockers were the 3500+ Venice core or the 3700+ San Diego core, they were willing to pay a little more to get the higher clock multiplier.

The same thought holds true for the X2 4400+, it is the best deal out of all of the X2 series. It's now down to $497.00 and I expect it to bottom out at around $400 but I'm going to pick it up soon. The 3800+ is a good chip but to over clock it and maintain a command rate of 1T most speeds are limited to no more than 2.2 GHZ. The 4400+ however easily hits 2.6 GHZ with a command rate of 1T and many are getting it to 2.7-2.8 GHZ with a few using water cooling actually hitting 3.2 GHZ.

 

To Sammorris,

I didn't mean to slight other MB manufacturers. MSI Makes a good product. I just got done building an MSI/Athlon XP 2500+ a few weeks ago. We have been hearing a lot about Shuttle MBs in this area and I built one of them as well. These seem to have decent quality and features for the price. Some MB companies that used to build junk now make decent MBs. PC Chips for one. Years ago you avoided them like the plague. Back then chipsets were the main factor. Opti was the chipset to have. SIS was to be avoided yet today they make a decent chipset. Everybody wet their pants when the HX and HT chipsets came out as they were light years ahead of every other chipset at the time. Asus seems to have been the most consistant quality wise. Back in the late 80s, early 90s Asus was the king of linux and it was very important what cards you put in the machine as Linux was very fussy as to componants. Some of their BBSs even posted recomended lists of what cards to use (pre-internet @ 300 baud)and what cards to avoid. Systems were very expensive to build. Memory cost around $100 for a 4 meg stick of EDO Ram. Especially after the Japanese burned down the factory complex for the major worldwide producer of resin used in the chips. Funny how this just "happened" right after they lost in the US courts for dumping cheap memory on the market to kill the competition. Also interesting was the date of the fire, the 4th of July. Guess they were declaring their independence as memory prices jumped to around $80 per meg!

Years ago I upgraded my mechanic's computer with a new MB. The original hard drive was still in it. When I removed the drive there was a price sticker on it from Fry's. $1340.99 for 40 megs! It was twice as thick as todays drives, slow (3600 rpm) and noisey! The original 386 from Compaq which beat IBM to the market by about 6 months, cost 3 grand with a monochrome monitor and 1 meg of static ram. A 20 meg drive was standard but you could have a 40 for another grand. With the 40 I believe the price was about $3753. Considering inflation, we are getting very cheap computers today indeed. Back in those days all you could change to overclock was the base speed and multiplier and you had to do that by jumpers on the MB. How we all afforded it on the salaries we made back then is still a mystery to me. One year I built 27 complete systems for customers between Thanksgiving and Christmas at an average price of $1800. It was also a lot more work. Drivers had to be installed in the config.sys and called in the autoexec.bat, all done manually. Nothing was built in. If you wanted an IDE drive then you had to buy a controller card (ISA) and set up it's drivers manually. Getting a Sound Blaster to work properly was a major operation. Windows 3.1 was a nightmare compared to today. Plug and Play didn't come along until Win 95 and it didn't work half the time! I remember I had the last beta version of Win 95 before the final product came out. I loved it and ran to get 95 the first day it was released. Biggest disappointment of my life as the final product was nothing like the last beta and much slower. I love it when M$ claims that XP is the fastest starting windows yet. I guess they forgot about 3.1 as it booted in about 5 seconds. If you tried to multi-task in 95, it usually blew up the system.
Anyway, enough nostalgia! Those days are gone (Thank God!)

You have a good day and sorry for the MB slight,

Russ

 

I didn't mean to suggest you were slighting other motherboard manufacturers, so sorry for the confusion, the nostalgia was interesting - I have only really been in touch with the computer world for a few years, so the days when 40MB hard disks of housebrick thickness cost the average monthly salary were days before I was using computers, possibly before I knew what a computer was, possibly even before I left the womb!
The first 'PC' I ever used was one of those Acorn educational ones, don't know if you know about those.
After that it was straight to Windows 95 Pentium 133mhz units with something like 1GB of hard disk space. I've only really been interested in hardware since I upgraded my old PC with a GeForce 4 Graphics card, so to many i'm still a newcomer.

 

it seems that AMD is better for gaming.. im very mad at myself for buying a A64 3000 instead of a 3500 because thats the only thing thats holding my system back. with a 6800 GT and a gig of 400 mhz ram in dual channel i can run every game i know of highest settings with no lagg excpet for doom 3... but who plays doom 3. my first machine was a P1 66 mhz i dont remember much else about it expect that a month later i got a P3 667mhz 128 megs of ram with a ATI Xpert 2000... i thought that was the best machine ever... but the industy will never stop...

 

No, right out of the box with the stock heat sink I was able to crank the 3800+ X2 to 2.4 GHz with 1t timings. Temps only went up a few degrees C under load. Of course the DFI is one of the easiest boards to overclock. Here's link to anandtech.com's take on the DFI nF4 overclock ability.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2465&p=12

Since AMD Cpu's overclock by the memory then if you get DDR600 instead of DDR400 it makes overclocking easy. In theory, DDR600 memory allows me to run the bus at 300MHz with 1t timings, equaling 3GHz at stock 10 multiplier for the cpu. I'm now tearing down the first build and installing the new heat sink and have bought some shorter SATA cables to install on the hard drives to help cut clutter. I'd like to get a minimum 2.4GHz system with cpu voltage at or close to stock and heavy load temps under 50C, from everything I've read I should be able to do this and maybe more.

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/index.php?

Most folks are getting 2.5 to 2.7 GHz overclocks on air on the 3800+, but I'm not going to push it since I want cpu temps to stay in their low 40's C range. Check out dfi-street.com for lots of info on X2 overclocking. Also I had thought to get a X2 4400+ because of the larger cache, but performance tests (you can find links on DFI-street.com) show that the larger cache is only a minor player in the performance, whereas the higher GHz is the biggest. And there are some reported heat issues with the 1GB cache chips due to the higher transitor count because of the larger cache. Although this might be limited to some of the early batches, as I've seen lots of reported high OC's on the chip lately. But then some of these guys are running their chips close to the maximum temperature, not something I'm looking to do.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=58

Xtremesytems.org has lots of X2 overclock threads on it as well.

 

Perhaps but few are getting beyond 2.4, I hear lots of talk but little proof. I don't believe that many are hitting 2.5 let alone 2.7 (which I'd doubt the veracity of). I also never said that it wasn't being done, that it was a reason that many don't make it. Go to any site such as Anandtech and they'll tell you that the best is those that I previously mentioned. Your score is closer to the top. BTW, none of your links showed an X2 3800 over clocked.

Just for fun why don't you post some screen captures of Sisoft benchmarks and some CPU-Z shots as well.

Demondog

I think I'm familiar with the overclocking capabilites of the N4 chipset, my board also has it and if you look at my specs you'll see that I'm also using a Venice Core.

 

I can verify that a 3800 X2 will run stable at 2.5 ghz using 1T.
Mine runs happy at 2650 but the timing is 2t.
2650 mhz is the sweet spot. 2700 is stable but only with a substantially raised cpu voltage of 1.56 and loaded temps in the high 50s with the stock heat sink.
I did drop 10 degrees with a coolermaster heatpipe HSF.

I can post CPU-Z but it doesn't prove stability. Only your own experience can do that.

 

64026402

I would like to see the CPU-Z shot anyway. 2650 GHZ with a 9X multiplier would require a front side bus of 295 MHZ. I haven't tried to see how how I can get to because anything over2.64 GHZ 1T would require a setting of 2T to run stable. That's why I stated earlier that most (not all) serious over clockers will go for the 11X multiplier. It places less stress on the memory to reach higher speeds which allows for more aggressive memory settings. Anything higher than a single core of 3500+ or dual core 4400+ is a waste of money but anything and you might get less.

 

Sophocles why did you buy a SLI board when you have an ATI card? it just doesnt make sense

 

I'm waiting for the nvidia prices to come down, they always do. It's kind of like an anti obsolescence insurance, in a year from now I'll still be able to get high frames on the latest multi threaded games. My ATI card is slated to go into another machine but for now it serves its purpose. Want to hear something that really might not make sense? I'm also upgrading my Venice core to an X2 4400, and why you ask, because I can. LOL

 

The 3800 dual core has a 10X multi.
I agree that a higher multiplier comes in handy. That why people pay the extra money for the FX. The unlocked multiplier can go as high as you want.

 

Thanks, now how about a CPU and memory bench? I'm curious.

 

I was thinking more along the lines of the CPU arithmatic benchmark and the memory bandwidth benchmark.

 

Thanks that's what I was looking for, I'm on the edge of buying a dual core. Could you run the memory one when you get a chance.

 

I'm running single channel on my x2. Still waiting on a bios update.
The 3800 x2 has spotty support from the motherboard manufacturers.
I haven't heard of any problems from 4200 on up.