Intel P4 vs AMD

Donald

That Northwood was a good find and at $269 if they still have them in stock it was a pretty good buy.


brobear

The die manufacturing size is proof positive that it's a Northwood. Northwood's come in a .13 micron manufacturing size and Prescotts in a 90 Nanometer manufacturing size (NM).

 

I called Starmicro to see if they had 3.4 Northwood's available and they told me they might have 1 or two in stock but their inventory PC was down. He recommended I call back in the morning, PST.

 

Thanks guys,

Thanks for the info on the Northwood. I don't know whether to try it again with the Dell OEM board or not. I'm seriously wondering if it's worth the trouble. It was a learning experience I must say. Never believe anything will work till you see it... I'm curious to find out if there are any decently priced P4 3.4GHz Northwoods still available. I suspect Dell probably has a horde of them, but they're charging robbery prices. If StarMicro actually has them, it will be a find.

 

Yeah the 3400 is news to me, but if you can get it, I'd expect to yield better results than a prescott.

 

@Brobear

There should be no problems with your MB accepting it since it is part of its current bios. The prescott was the problem in 3.4 not the northwood. Besides, mine has been running at 3.74 24/7 for over a year with idle temps at 32c and full load at 52-53c with stock heat sink and fan.

 

I fried the dvd rom drive... LOL ....
I am getting a new video card for my b-day, got any ideas....

 

ScubaBud
I researched the problem before I left on vacation. I had to move fast because there was a 7 day return policy on the CPU. I didn't have much time to discuss things before leaving on vacation though.

I was made aware of the issues of dealing with a proprietary OEM setup during phone conversations with Intel and Dell. I had to cross reference a bit of the info. If one is willing to wait a few hours, they can eventually find someone in support who knows how a computer functions. I wish someone had mentioned some of the hazards before instead of after the fact. I'm aware all socket 478 processors are not equal.

The Intel support page you posted was familiar. I'd visited that one before. The problem is OEM boards can be limited and not have the full support for CPUs that a chipset like the 865 or 875 will normally support. No one in any of the "camps" paid attention to the particular application and Dell is "close mouthed" on their systems (they want them left box stock); they like system sales, not useful upgrades. Intel techs tried to prove how smart they were, but they didn't have a clue until after the fact. They're better at troubleshooting than supplying enough information to prevent conflicts. The problem is some boards support a socket 478 irregardless and some don't and it's a pain to find out if you happen to have an OEM system. I'm aware of the limitations of the board I have.

I didn't think cooling would be a problem as Dell did a good case setup and they were running the faster CPUs with the same case and board setup. I guess that was why Dell was willing to sell me a CPU for $700 or so. LOL Funny, I asked if it would be a problem to upgdrade the processor later on if I wanted to improve my setup. At the time of purchase, the tech said no problem. Sure...

 

" I fried the dvd rom drive... LOL ...." - How'd you do that???
TO Brobear: I'm well aware of how little system manufacturers are willing to help if their systems are customised in any way shape or form. My system is so far stretched from the original it's not recognisable. Merely one optical drive, the CPU and motherboard are left plus the memory card reader. Not even the case. Mind you they've gone bust now anyway!!! Trouble is, the PC's wrecked. Hence why I'm upgrading it in the summer, if it lasts that long. You see a 3000 rated CPu with a high-end 256MB GPU and a large RAID array and think it's a good system. It was before I wrecked it, or mttp, before Qtec wrecked it.

As for the what graphics card, you need to give us a price range. I could list all kinds of cards for various applications. For a start what do you have now?
£ for £ or $ for $ or whatever for whatever, I think at present the X700 is the best value for money card, but you can do better and worse, dependent upon finances.

 

sammorris
Luckily my PC has been a rock solid work mule since I got it. I just wanted to speed things up a bit. Had it been apparent I was limited solely to the Northwood processors, I would have been trouble free on this one. Now I'm out for the shipping costs, thermal compound and cleaning materials, time, and labor with only a lesson learned for this one particular PC.

It's not exactly the same PC I purchased. I added a DVD burner as soon as I got it and over the past couple years added larger hard drives and ended up removing the small 80GB HDD it came with. I bought this model because it could be upgraded from the original package. I just didn't realize the proprietary setup of the OEM mobo and it's requiring the Northwood CPU only.

 

To kronos: You can actually get a retail boxed "San Diego COre" AMD 3700+ for $210 at zipzoomfly.com and that includes shipping. So I doubt you will be able to find a prescott 3.2 or 3.4 retail box Intel for that same price

 

By the way, anyone do business with Star Micro? The prices are good, I was just wondering about the merchandise and service.

 

To Sophocles: Sorry about that then. Your listed overclock speed that I referred to is on the very first page of this thread. YOu stated that it is currently at 3.64ghz. I should have realized that it was mistake myself. So tell me more about this Opteron option that you were considering. Are you still considering it or have you reconsidered the X24400? I'm trying to learn more about the Opteron's myself since you brought it up. Never even considered them before hand. So are the Opteron's very overclockable? Do there performance match well witht the X2's and FX57

 

The X2 4400 and the Opteron 175 are essentially the same CPU meaning the core designs are the same except with a couple of small differences. Opterons, are manufactured on superior silicon, they are binned for higher tolerances, and they have slightly lower voltage settings. The end result is that they're made more stable because they're expected to survive in a server environment. In effect they're better over clockers. When I was thinking about getting the X2 4400 an Opteron 175 was over $800 for the best price but not they're only about $20 more. They've only been around for a few months and now they're being discontinued to be replaced by Socket 940 processors. The Opteron 175's are still highly desirable and they're getting harder to find. An over clock of 2.9 Ghz per core on air is not uncommon. They're considered to be the cream by over clockers.

 

@ Brobear

Currently they do not have it in stock... the Northwood 3.4 at Starmicro. Did you purchase the last one?

 

novicebb

Thanks I fixed the error, can't have that crap floating around in rumors. LOL

 

CPU(s)
Number of CPUs 1
Name AMD Athlon 64 3700+
Code Name San Diego
Specification AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3700+
Family / Model / Stepping F 7 1
Extended Family / Model F 27
Brand ID 4
Package Socket 939
Core Stepping SH-E4
Technology 90 nm
Supported Instructions Sets MMX, Extended MMX, 3DNow!, Extended 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, x86-64
CPU Clock Speed 2208.1 MHz
Clock multiplier x 11.0
HTT Bus Frequency 200.7 MHz
L1 Data Cache 64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L1 Instruction Cache 64 KBytes, 2-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Cache 1024 KBytes, 16-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Speed 2208.1 MHz (Full)
L2 Location On Chip
L2 Data Prefetch Logic yes
L2 Bus Width 128 bits

Mainboard and chipset
Motherboard manufacturer MSI
Motherboard model MS-7151, 1.0
BIOS vendor American Megatrends Inc.
BIOS revision 080012
BIOS release date 10/17/2005
Chipset ATI ID5951 rev. 01
Southbridge ATI SB400 rev. 00

Memory
DRAM Type DDR-SDRAM
DRAM Size 1024 MBytes
DRAM Frequency 200.7 MHz
FSBRAM CPU/11
CAS# Latency 3.0 clocks
RAS# to CAS# 3 clocks
RAS# Precharge 3 clocks
Cycle Time (TRAS) 8 clocks
Bank Cycle Time (TRC) 11 clocks
DRAM Idle Timer 16 clocks
# of memory modules 1
Module 0 Micron Technology DDR-SDRAM PC3200 - 1024 MBytes

Software
Windows version Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
DirectX version 9.0c


That is all that i can get... I dont know what half of that means, And i did not edit or change anything... !!! Seriously...

And i will pay up to 210.00 for a video card...

 

Sophocles
I heard a rumor there was a guy at AD who OCed an AMD to 3.6GHz without liquid nitrogen. LOL

ScubaBud,
Now that I know what the issues are and that it was just a matter of a particular CPU, I decided to go with the Northwood from StarMicro. I called to make sure it was exactly what they had advertised down to the hyperthreading and dual channel capabilities. Looks like they would have had that in the ad. Guess all that's left is the $900 model. I guess those high priced obsolete items may be worth it for some consumers, but not me. Didn't know I was getting the last one. I may just take my current CPU and build an ultra cheap PC to surf with and act as a backup.

 

brobear

I heard one guy that claimed to have reached Ghz using water cooling. I bet his nose is to long to turn around in small room. LOL

 

His nickname may be "Woody". LOL

 

To Sammorris

Its from a london based shop www.goldenelectronics.co.uk
This package is being sold by them on Ebay, with a 3yr warranty- sounds great. They have excellent feedback too.

Also checked the cache on the Athlon, its 640k cache.
Also the mobo is a ASROCK 939 NF4 - does this seem ok?
hink ill go for this one, the processor speed should be faster than the pentium 4 aswell shouldn't it? I want to be able to run multiple programs, download and video encode with little slow down.

My current PC is very low spec (Intel Celeron 800mhz, 320mb ram 20G HD, and to encode a video freezes up my entire system.

Once again, many thanks for your help.