Intel P4 vs AMD

Dear Sophocles,

I must be getting senile! How do I expact you to answer questions when I haven't posted the benchmarks? Here they are at 10% with Turbo On!

http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/9371/330turboonmath4bj.jpg

http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/8866/330turbooncachememory9bk.jpg

http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/3346/330turboonmemorybw7ys.jpg

http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/5821/330turboonmultimedia8ic.jpg

During the benchmarking the temp went as high as 58C. Computer seems very stable so far. Let me know what you think.

Thanks again,

Russ

 

ozzy214

Now who doesn't want flaming? Then it's obvious you shouldn't be allowed to spend money on anything without someone along to help you. If your system sucks and you don't have a clues as to what your doing then don't blame it on a piece of hardware. Note the power connector to the models below. You'll note that on the first one you can't see it but it's there.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102492

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102496

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814142052

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814129048

Now for some ATI made cards.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102492R

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102501R

You'll note that one of the cards is an ATI X800XL the same model that you linked to and yep it has a power plug.

 

Sophocles,
The math benchmark is wrong. It's the Multi-Media. Here's the correct one!
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/4723/330turboonmath1hj.jpg

Russ

 

Ozzy
There are different types of X800 graphics cards. Just saying X800 can lead to some thinking one and others another. The AGP card has the external power cord and the PCI Express doesn't. Since the Epox mobo doesn't support AGP and the board listed from Newegg is for PCI Express, that explains the power cord not being there.

I've not heard anyone talking about the power supply to the ATI card being a problem. I haven't even heard many problems from other builders using epox boards or Radeon cards. If getting power through the PCI Express slot was a design flaw in the ATI card, why aren't there more complaints. Even Epox has their own graphics cards and they have a selection with both Radeon and nVidia chipsets. If not getting enough power to the card is the problem, then it is a mobo problem. If it was a universal problem, we would have heard a lot more complaints. The big magazines and web sites would have hung ATI out to dry instead of constantly testing their hardware in comparison to nVidia and usually saying both are good. A design flaw such as setting up a card so a mobo couldn't properly power it would stick out like a sore thumb. As I mentioned before, depending on who did the latest upgrades goes the crown for the time being.

There's a lot of factors involved in how well a graphics card will perform on a given system. If there was a known problem, other than a novice builder yelling shit because he can't figure out where he went wrong, I might wonder (if I didn't know better). As it is, ATI with it's Radeon cards are doing well. I'll probably use one on my next PC. nVidia I like just as well, so it depends a lot on who has what available at the time. Most good enthusiasts would have solved the problem instead of just saying shit.

 

It's funny. I remember when I had an AMD 486 4x25MHz that ran as a 2x50MHz on an Opti MB with a WD 360MB hard drive and Trident 1meg video card that I bought just because the chip speed was 50Mhz instead of 25. I remember thinking at the time that it was so fast. Boy have the times changed!

theonejrs

 

Well it seems awful funny and strange that the two they sell at circuit city does not have a power connector. Just like the two I had posted did not. Maybe they are just the lower standard of the two. It still dont make sense.

All I know I tried one x700 and 2 x800 ati radeon. None of them worked right and in fact I remeber the one x800 started to break and pixalate even watching a dvd movie. So the one definetly had a bad frame buffer...But anyway there is something really...really fucked up then. Why did the two I post have no power connectors...but the ones ya had posted did? That makes no sense. You would think it would be uniform standard not differnet quality...,lol.

Well all i can say is come on over and throw ya ati in my comp for a test and we all see who is right or wrong. Because the minute I put that nividia gpu in I had not one single issue at all.

So I seriously dont think there is nothing wrong with the mobo or nothing else. I even remeber asking tech support if there were known compatibility problems with nividia nforce 4 chipset or epox mobos....the guy had said no. But I still dont think the tech had a clue as to what a computer was let alone how to fix it over at ati....lol.

So that is what it boils down. Bring it on over and we see if it was just a bad batch of cards or I dont know what Im doing or a compatibility issue...which is kinda funny cause I rewire and repair ecm on vehicles which aint too much dont different diagnosing a car ecm than a home pc.....:>

 

Might be a long walk to come over. LOL I pointed out the difference in the X800 ATI Radeon cards with and without the external power cords. You have AGP slots and PCI Express slots on a mobo. Your Epox board doesn't have the AGP slot. The X800 ATI Radeon card for your mobo is for the PCI Express slot. The ATI cards for the PCI Express slots don't use the external power cord. The ATI cards for a mobo with the AGP slot has the external power cord. The card for the AGP slot doesn't fit your Epox mobo. As I pointed out, some X800 ATI Radeon cards have the external power cord and some don't, depends on the type slot on the mobo.

http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx800/radeonx800series/index.html

 

Later

 

The new PCI express cards are meant to work with a 24 pin power supply so they still require more power but most supplies are 20 pin. To power my board up I had to connect my 20 pin to the 24 pin plug on my board and then connect the molex plug directly to the boards onboard molex plug. I'm not 100% sure that this is what's happening with Ozzy's board but if it is then without it the card won't operate properly.

Ozzy what is the make and model number of your board?

 

Its posted in my sig. Yes I have bith the 20 pin and 4 pin plug in the mobo. The comp wont run without. Dont ask how I now....I do lol.

Epoxx 9npaj

About the only difference between a asus and this board is the asus is hellava more money and has firwire ports. My board dont, but it is pretty much the latest nividia chipset and has sata and ide raid. So I dont think its a quality issue with the board and I know the cpu aint defective cause the comp wonbt even post if thats the case.

Brobear I had first misunderstand ya point, but now I understand. So most of the pci x boards dont have external power. Hmm sounds like a bad design to me...all nividia have external power cords has far as im aware. Maybe ati is a good manufacter of the gpu, but not the card. To me a external power cord sounds like a good idea. Maybe I will consider another manufacter like evga for the radeon gpu instead of ati. Even stranger is to use a power cord with agp...I dont think I have ever seen a agp with a power cord.....

So Im still waiting oh wise Sophocles....im really curious if it was my fault....just a bad shipment between circuit city and best buy.....or a compatibility issue...lol.:>

 

ozzy214

PCIexpress don't need the connectors that's why there's a power plug for 20 pin power supplies to work on 24 pin boards. I think that your difficulties were the result of insufficient power. To have just one bad card one let's it go but to have more than one bad card in a row doesn't make sense which means that the cards aren't the cause. I'm not saying that your board is bad either, just that something in your setup didn't deliver.

 

Im running an antec true power 430 wat with dual 12 volt rails at 18 amps each...combined 36 amps. So to me that is more than enough.

And Im only running 2 hard drives in raid...a cd rom for my music cds.....dvd burner.....6 fans inc;uding the chipset...gpu...and psu fan.

That aint much. I have seen people run more than that on this board with about the same psu or a tiny bigger...ie 500 watts. Plus this psu has all gold plated connections and a seperate plug just for pci express.

I kinda tend to agree with having 3 bad cards in a row, but it also dont make sense I switch nividia and problem solved..lol. Unless like I said and now am thinking ati makes the radeon gpu for all the card manufacters and the cards I bought. So maybe they suck at building a card, but good for the gpu. You know what I mean verne...lol.

Maybe I will try once again.....cause Im building another comp by april, but it aint going to be a ati card. Bad tech support and nothing but problems. Going to buy saphire like yours or something else like evga:>

One last thought was tech support said their driver may not be compatible with way gt game was coded...so maybe the nividia drivers are compatible.

 

I've built several machines with ATI cards back when they reined. I've used 7 ATI 9700 Pros, 3 9500 Pros, and 1 9800 Pro by ATI and 1 HIS ICEq pro 9800. I also have used a lot of Nividia which are great cards but usually at basic settings, when you add anistrophic filtering, anti aliasing, and other settings the ATI's tend to do better overall. But run them straight up and the latest Nvidias will push more frames.

 

Ozzie,
Ati and Nvidia have good cards of all shapes and sizes. Nvidia often has the edge on performance but Ati has been more reliable. Either way if you experience problems with a card, don't take the Ati is crap way out. Figure the problem out and share the solution or just keep quiet.
I fix harder computer problems regularly and instead of crying I just keep at it until it is fixed.

You might have noticed all of the 5 star reviews of your card on the link you provided. Looks like a lot of owners dissagree with your assessment.

 

Thats the thing donald.....I went through everything with that damn card and all I got was a little balder...lol.

After going round and round on the merry go here at ad....I think I found my anser. It made me think. I just dont think the ati can handle the way older games are coded like tech support was saying. Because I do remeber Doom 3 played fine on 2 out of three I tried. Doom is very intensive and a good test. So maybe nividia is set up to handle older and new games alike....kinda makes sense.

The only other thing is 3dmark had low scores with the ati, but a helluva higher with the nividia. If I had the scores I would post, but dont remeber. But like sophocles said nividia can crank higher fps....:>

Trust me....I tried everything and unless someone has a real good idea how to fix it...i doubt I will ever touch another ati:>

Now back to the modding........

 

All problems can be figured out. You either stick with it or you don't. It's fine if diagnostics isn't your thing, but if you don't figure out where your system went wrong you don't get to bad mouth any of the parts with any real knowledge.

Radeons have always been top of the line hardware and I have yet to have a single complaint with my systems.
On the other hand Nvidia has so many nightmare stories it isn't funny. All fixable but sometimes annoying.

 

ozzy214

Back when the ATI 9700 Pro came out Nvidia was way behind in frames but especially with quality settings and then ATI held the lead with the 9800 Pro card. Then the 6800 series cards came out and it became a bit of a tie except that for quality settings ATI still held the lead in frames and quality settings. Nvidia had in effect made some gains with the 6800 series cards but it wasn't a lead over ATI, only the 7800 cards really took the lead. The fastest 800 series card is an all around better card than the 6800 series is, the only real advantage that the 6800 cards have is their potential to run in a SLI configuration.

 

To all,

Does anyone know if there are plans in the works for Asus to support 2 7800 pci Express 16x cards in their future SLI motherboards. I understand at present Asus only supports 2 6800s. I don't know the technical aspects of doing this or if it's even possible so I'm just asking out of "lack of knowlege!" I know that there are other MB manufacturers but I am partial to Asus as my success rate with them is 100%. I would hate to build the system I am planing only to find out there is no future for the 7800 in SLI mode on any SLI MB. I know, I am trying to build the perfect system and you can't really do that but I don't want to go ahead and build it now only to find out that if I had waited 6 more months, I could have had the system that I had in mind with the 7800s in the first place. My technical knowlege is pretty good as I have taught elementry electronics at a night school. I'm just light years behind you guys when it comes to the working knowlege of the latest motherboards. It's almost too easy to adjust things these days. Thanks to Sophocles I now know that if you turn the auto settings off in the BIOS it will then display the current settings. 8 - 9 years ago everything had to be done manually with jumpers on the MB, then tested to evaluate the effect it had on the machine. You only made one change at a time and it was very much trial and mostly error. Such was the quality of the electronic components and memory in those days. We never even dreamed of GHz. It was just a word. Hell, Gigabyte sized hard drives were considered to be an impossiblity about 15 years ago, at least in half height drives. 10,000 rpm drives were only a wet dream. Quantum actually built a 3.5" hard drive on a 5.25" frame called "The Bigfoot!" I'm firmly convinced that this was done to hedge their bets so that if they found out that if the only way to get more capacity was bigger platters in the drive, they were at least half ready for it. Today the cheapest computer you can buy comes with at least a 20GB drive.

I bought my first CD-Rom drive for my Atari 520ST in 1986. It was a technical marvel. It also cost $499 (USD) which was a hell of a lot of money back then. Even the 20 MB hard drive Atari offered was cheaper at $399. The ST was a marvel for it's day. It was a better machine than a PC for about 7 years. It's OS (in ROM), which was a variant of Digital Research's GEM operating system was simple and very easy to understand. A 5 year old could figure it out in less than 10 mins. It even had true "drop and drag!" Up to about 10 years ago, the 1040ST w/1Mb of ram (2 Mb Max!) was coveted in the Music Industry. What you labored to do on a Mac was a breeze on the ST. Jack Tramiel, who built the Comadore 64 and later the Comadore 128 found out that he couldn't beat Atari in the market so he sold Comadore and bought Atari. Jack had to be the dumbest multi-millionare on the planet and promptly ran Atari into the ground! He just didn't know or understand what the hell he had, just how good it was or what to do with it. He had the computer world in his grasp!!! Even the Comadore Amiga which was introduced a few years later, and used the same Motorola CPU as the ST and the Mac, couldn't match what the Atari was able to do. Trust me when I say that had Tramiel had had the brains back then, you would all be using an ST compatible today instead of an I.B.M. compatible! Back in 92 I took my then 8 year old 520-ST out of a box in my closet, blew the dust off it and hooked it up so a friend of mine could take look at it. He was just blown away by the then 8 year old tecnology. Back then he taught Computer Science and Machine Language at a local college so he knew a thing or two about computers. With the 520-ST you got 512K Ram, The operating system in Rom (64k), a 3.5" 720 floppy (built in),a two button Mouse and a 13" Color Monitor for $399 640x480 16 colors & 600x800 in 4 colors! The monochrome set up was $299 w/ 12" 600x800. This doesn't sound like much today but back then this thing was the shits! We have come a long way!!!

Getting back to my project, Why do I want to build this computer in the first place? Several reasons. First of which being because I have the ability and enough know how (???)! And the money to pay for it. I also want the satisfaction of building something thats better than anything that I can buy. It's not for bragging rights but rather the sense of accomplishment of taking a lot of carefully selected individual parts and pieces and assembling them into what should be one of the baddest PCs around!

People today, especially young people have no idea of what things were like in the early pre-PC days of computing. Just a short history lesson and then I'll shut the hell up. Back in the early days, I.B.M. leased memory for their systems. It cost over $1000 per month for 16k in 4k blocks! So called floppy disks were 8 or 10 inches (I forget) and stored a whopping 120k. Most storage drives for the system were some sort of reel to reel tape drive or Winchester drives with removable drums . Even when true hard drives came out they were enormous, noisey and you could check their access times with an egg timer. My first SCSI hard drive was 20 MB and about the same size as a loaf of Sunbeam Cinamon Rasin bread. It would take up 4 hard drive bays today. It was slow, noisey and gave you fits trying to set it up! You had to buy a very expensive Adaptec SCSI card just to run it and a tight hat so you didn't rip all the hair out of your head every time you failed to get it right!

Like I said, Computing has come a long way.

theonejrs

 

Sophocles,

This is all I can get from Nvidia.

Q: Does GeForce 7800 GTX support SLI?
Absolutely, SLI is a must-have-feature for any enthusiast's board and the GeForce 7800 GTX is NVIDIA's new flagship card for SLI.

Whether this will work in an Asus A8N-SLI Premium MB, I don't know. The Implication is that the 6800 is supported as top of the line but in the technical Specs the implication is there that any pair of matched SLI cards will work. You can't e-mail Asus to ask them as their only e-mail is for RMAs. I'm just not up to holding on the phone for an hour right now or talking to some pre-recorded voice and pushing phone buttons!

Russ

 

Epox makes a board that supports two 7800 gt ib sli

I believe this is the board that can do it. Basically same thing as mine, but with sli. If in doubt contact expox...

http://www.epox.com.tw/eng/products_content.php?ps=371


As too all. I give up on the radeon. No one round here seems to have a clue or care what problems I had or how to fix it. So fusk it Im happy with the nividia.

And also I dont know what yall do for a living, but I work as certified mechanic and do anything including diagnostic work. So Yall would think if I could diagnose a car ecm, then I could diagnose a home pc. There nots much different.

Besides you try finding that one ground wire thats snapped and the car wont start and you tell me its harder to diagnose pc...yeah right. Espicially when you have to trace the loom and it ends up being buried under the goddamn intake and it takes 6 hrs to rip the fusking manifold to fit it. You tell me it harder to diagnose a pc....yeah okay....lol. :>