Intel vs. AMD

Gonna update my siggy to reflect the new build

 

might want to check out this mobo...
http://www.abit-usa.com/news/2006/20061109.php

 

Cheers for the links.

At the moment the Abit looks a better bet than the Asus Striker, then it comes down to how it performs against the EVGA board, but the EVGA support doesn’t look too good, they haven’t even posted the BIOS and drivers than it is being shipped with.

I can’t believe that Asus have pitched the Striker at £230 compared to the IN-9 which is about £160, also as seems usual for Asus now, they have put the IDE connector in an almost useless position where getting the IDE cable to fit without interfering with the power connector seems impossible.

I have also just found this review from someone that’s actually using the board, as can be seen from his setup, he's pretty renowned in the enthusiast scene as a top end system user, and he normally has the newest kit to play with.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=122354

It does looks a though the 680i chipset will easily push the FSB up to 450 without any trouble, and other reviews I’ve seen have it up to 500+.
This seems to be offset with lower performance on the raid compared to the Intel chipsets, but they are extremely good, I get an average read speed of over 220MB/s and a burst speed of 2890 in HD tach (that is with the Intel Matrix Hard Drive Write cache enabled).

I’ve got issues with my board when it is cranked up, none of which are major, and can not be considered as faults, as they only happen when I really push the FSB up.

Also the memory I’m using which was raved about in reviews, has proved to be less than perfect and has not lived up to expectation at all.
The service from Geil is about the worst I’ve ever had from any company as well, they have receive 3 emails from me, which have come back as read, and have just never bothered to even reply to one of them.
Geil are definitely off any future build I ever do from now on.

Most of my system instability has come from the memory reaching its limits, so I’ve been looking at changing it to Corsair 8500, but finding any in stock seems to be impossible unless you want to pay a serious premium for the pleasure.
(maybe I’ll be one of the lucky 5 and win the Corsair 8888 18K Gold set, unlikely but possible!).

 

That would be the sweetest *drools*

 

You've got to be in it to win it (at least I've passed the first hurdle).

You've then got to have sucked up to Corsair (that was easy).

You've got to be at least half literate (so hopefully I pass that).

You've then got to be a lucky b*st*rd (that's where it runs out normally).

The 8888 memory is a serious bit of kit, but justifying £420 is beyond me, I've ordered a set of 8500 Dominator which was £265 with free postage, but it's a 2 week wait at best by the look of it.
The Geil is going straight on eBay where I'll be glad to see the back of it, at least that should get at least half of the 8500 cost for me.

The Geils not the worst memory I've had, it does OC pretty well, but reports on the Geil forum show plenty of other 975 Intel chipset users have weird issues with timings, and it seems standard practice for Geil to completely ignore all requests for assistance.

It's definately reached it's end for me, as it is the memory holding me back at the moment as far as pushing this setup any further and keeping it stable.

At last I can now get under 13 seconds for Super-Pi 1M, which was the lst main barrier I was determinded to get on this board.
The system is completely stable at 3.924 GHz, so getting an extra 1.524 GHz out of a £200 CPU can be seen as a pretty good payback.
I can't see me getting anything stable over 4Ghz until I get the other memory, I can boot and work at 4.1+ but benching causes shutdowns.

 

Wow! Lookin' nice BigDK. I'm expecting my new parts on Wednesday or Thursday. I will immediately try to get that 4400+ up to 2.6GHz which will put it at about an FX-60. Shouldn't be too hard.

 

That Mobo should be a very stable platform to build your system around.

I hope you get a good overclocking board, as I know the 570 chipset can be regarded as a real pain for overclocking..
http://www.motherboards.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=642402&sid=0190937654ffa29447b4cb2ad66b5077
But to be fair I've also seen other reviews with good OC results, but that was with single cores.

A lot of it is luck of the draw with what you get, hopefully it will be good batches that have plenty of tweaking in them.

 

I'm banking on it. I picked one of the best and I expect one of the best. You just wait. I'll have an FX-60 before sunday

I'll have to super tweak and lock that board so I don't get any stability issues. I remember forgetting to lock my PCI bus on my A8N-E and my sound stopped working

 

Sounds like you've done your homework, so you should get it up there without too much hassle.
Keep us updated!

 

@bigdk,

glad to see you got under the 13sec barrier and that forum looks like a glowing reccomendation for the nf68. now correct me if im wrong, but it seems to me that the hit you will get from the raid will be componsated by the extra brute force you will get from the fsb.

 

Actually looking at the HDD results, it appears that the 680i is not far behind the 975 Intel Matrix, with only a few % in it.

The out of the box FSB of the EVGA board does appeal to me, getting it up as high as possible, and thus enabling a 1:1 multiplier with the memory at 1000MHz is ideal.

A new BIOS seems to have filled in the black holes on the FSB which were there in the initial release.

Its ability to overclock the dual and now quad cores seems amazing; with no mods on the board a QX6700 was taken to a stable (passing 3DMark) 4.59GHz x 4 Cores.

Now regardless of any preference to chip maker, having that sort of performance available is simply outstanding.

In a very short period of time, the level of performance available to users has just gone mad from where it was.

Here is a very good review of the EVGA 680i compared with the Asus P5WDH, which shows just what sort of gains have been made with the latest NVIDIA chipset.
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4215&s=1

We can only expect bigger and better things from the combination of Intel CPUs and NVIDIA chipsets, now that Intel have decided to stop making chipsets, and ATI have joined forces with AMD.

 

4x4 final hardware details here, for the amd faithful

 

Finally AMD is releasing competitors to the Core 2 Duo. I won't get into the FX line because they need special RAM. But they look good. Basically just The FX 6X line with multi socket motherboards. Only really useful to the super benchmark rigs and servers.

But the new AM2 dual cores look like they'll stand up to the Core 2 Duo line as well. I might get the 5600+. They look nice. They're the FX-62 maybe with some stepping improvements. Maybe a 3.4GHz ceiling with air? I expect they'll match well with the e6600 until the stream processors come out a ways down the road(if they ever do.)

But I'll be happy with my 4400+ for a while until I see a need for any upgrades. I'm still hoping mom gets me an 8800GTX or even just a GTS would be awesome. I haven't exactly kept my bank account level but I earn enough to upgrade whenever I feel like it... minimum wage Not much on a part time job but I save every penny

 

I've also got my eye on an 8800GTX, the BFG water-cooled one looks favourite at present, but I'm waitng until after the initial rush and also after the R600 comes out so the price comes down (£600 is a seriously steep price for a card, even with the DD water-block).

As for the DX10 side of things, it'll be a while before that influences any decision on the cards.

I was dissapointed that the 4x4 was yet another socket variation from AMD, they sertainly like to make changes 940-939-940 AM2-F all within just a few years, not good for the consumers at all.

I do hope that any new CPU AMD bring out challenges Intels current grip on the top end, or even beats it, that will only be good for buyers in terms of price and forcing the pace of improvements from both sides.

After many months of forgetting about using XP Pro x64, I finally loaded that again today, and when using nero recode it was pushing over 1400 FPS on a film conversion off the HDD.

I'm going to start a series of tests using both 32 & 64 bit and at stock and 3.6GHz speed to see just what % change in performance there is.
I also have DVD RB pro so I will run the same film through with that, I ran similar tests with my old FX60 which was pushed to 3Ghz, so comparing the results should also be interesting.

 

1400FPS? Wow, blows me right out of the water. I've only done one conversion and I got around 850-900 on my 3800+. That's a heavy OC man

 

Here are the results of the tests I ran on the E6600 CPU at both stock and 50% overclock.

The tests were run with the following setup on the PC.

The system was running Windows XP Professional SP2 with all latest patches and updates applied.

At both 2.4GHz (stock speed) and 3.6GHz (50% overclock speed) the DDR2 memory was set to DDR800.

The film (The Terminal) was ripped from DVD to a separate partition on the HDD and the encoding was performed from that HDD file and stored back to the same HDD in a separate folder.

Before each test, the HDD partitions were defragmented, all non essential applications were closed and the memory was optimized.

Nero was set as follows:
Video preview – Enabled
Advanced Analysis – Enabled
High Quality Mode – Enabled
High Priority Set.

The film compression ratio resulted in a quality output of 80.9% after encoding.

I also ran the same film through Windows XP Professional 64 Bit Edition SP1, but obviously Nero Recode, although capable of working on the 64 Bit operating system, was not capable of utilizing it, and the results were exactly as found using the 32 Bit operating system.

Stock Speed 2.4GHz
Advanced Analysis Time: 3Min 28 Sec
Encoding Time: 6 Min 45 Sec
Copying file to directory: 3 Min 39 Sec
Total processing time 13Min 52 Sec

(Of which) Total CPU related processing time: 10 Min 13 Sec

http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/8987/nerorecode24x32uc3.jpg


Over Clocked Speed of 3.6GHz
Advanced Analysis Time: 2Min 20 Sec (- 1 Min 8 Sec) (67.3%) (32.7% faster)
Encoding Time: 4 Min 38 Sec (- 2 Min 7 Sec) (68.6%) (31.4% Faster)
Copying file to directory: 2 Min 59 Sec (- 40 Sec) (81.7%) (18.3% Faster)
Total processing time 9Min 57 Sec (- 13 Min 55 Sec) (71.7%) (28.3% Faster)

(Of which) CPU specific time: 6 Min 58 Sec (- 3 Min 15 Sec) (68.2%) (31.8% Faster)

http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/1070/nerorecode36x32jm8.jpg


And because I never had a valid reason to show a screen shoot of my 64 Bit desktop, I have posted this quick capture (just for the hell of it) ENJOY!!!
http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/9357/x64desktopua2.jpg

I never managed to get DVD RB working correctly on the 64 Bit operating system, as it failed to load either CCE or Procoder when required.

 

Cheers
My links always seem to fail if I post them.

 

well Intel C2D owns every other cpu's they r the fastest so far...i was thinking who ever designed this/these cpu must be very rich...like 1 million dollar a month...E6600 is a very good cpu...and its relatively cheap...

 

BigDK,

Not too sure what you are doing but you have to change the "IMG" to "img" at each end of the URL for it to work. Same thing with the older ImageShack set-up except you have to strip out everything in front of the front "img" and everything after the end "img" with the img being in between 2 brackets. For some reason every once in a while it changes from one to the other. It took me forever to understand that as you can't demonstrate as a post! If you go back to your post and change what Creaky did so that whats on the screen now has a bracket img bracket on each end of the URL, it would work and display your screen shots, rather than having to open them. Doing that should also take care of the proper size as well!

Happy Computering,
theone