Intel vs. AMD

In all reality, Intel has always been the leader up untill the first time AMD took the lead some years ago. While I must admit, AMD may have not been the fastest chip years ago, it seemed more stable in the windows enviriment. of course even before AMD took over the lead there was always the false notion that AMD was the gamers chip! Intel got complacent and I do not see that happing again soon. But we are the winners now as AMD has slashed its price to the core. Benches are great but AMD chip are still fast and useful in the real world.

 

baltekmi,

Having used AMD and Intel chips since the late 80s, I consider that a myth! I've used every version of Windows from 3.0 through XP-Pro except ME with no stability problems in the windows environment! Anyone having stability problems with ME deserves it! It's an OS that wasn't ready, wasn't willing and sure wasn't able. It's the only OS I've ever seen that has compatibility issues with itself! Intel was content to let AMD dominate the speed part, not on a chip for chip basis, as there they were about the same performance as the Intels at even up speeds, but in that almost from the start, AMD always had faster models of the current hot chip available. From the 386/40 all the way through the pentiums they always offered faster chips. When they introduced the K6, thier first in house designed from scratch chip, it made Compaqs and HPs the laptops to own, and made Intel take a serious look at their P2s! AMD has always been at least competitive with current Intel offerings until now!

The good news is that the Government won't let AMD go under, no matter what! That would be bad for the computer industry! I can see the Government giving them all sorts of help, tax breaks, etc! They'll be back!

Clock On,
theone :}

 

Thinking about it Russ,

C2D's dropped 1 million iterations super pi times to around 19 secs at stock speeds.

AMD's FX62 overclocked was getting around 27-28 secs 1 million iterations.

If AMD can gain the same performance increase with their new cores we're
looking at some seious grunt.

 

i just wanted to put the "phenom" cpus' out there as a possibilty, probably because i'm not satisfied at this point w/ quad-cores in general...but i totally agree with your OPINION and feel that it's right on the mark i think your statement is accurate and i agree, but hopefully we're BOTH wrong and it proves to be something very decent.

 

@docty

have you ever thought about a xeon setup?

 

balktemi: I too consider that a myth. Intel CPUs seemed more popular until the Athlon XP, but they were certainly very little slower. Despite the fact that the Thunderbird architecture was a bit dire, AMD were the first to reach 1Ghz with it, and K7 vs P3 was a reasonable comparison. When the XP came out, the performance wasn't quite as great as the P3, but it was however better than the P4. AMD kept it that way right from the release of XP in 2001 all the way up until Summer 06 when the Core 2 Duos came out, a 5 year lead, and they weren't exactly far behind before.

 

No, not quite. lol

But it was the first time they took the old P3 architecture and made a faster, cooler, and more power efficient CPU. They needed it to compete in the mobile performance market. It didn't win any performance races but it showed a marked clock-for-clock improvement over Pentium 4 architecture.

 

Estuansis,

The mobile 1.4 and 1.6GHz ones still sell refurbished at good prices. Alas, I only have a 1.4 Dell Latitude that I paid $150 for 3 years ago. It's perfect for me! Has wireless and a combo cd burner DVD-Rom drive, 60GB 7200 rpm Hitachi hard drive I located for it to replace the 40GB 5400 RPM one that was in it, added 1GB of memory and it rocks! My boss borrowed it because his Daughter was using his "Yonah". She got to keep the Yonah and he shows up with a factory refurbished 1.6 P3 Dell, so I guess it's faster than the low end Dell Yonah, for business apps! I only used it once and I thought the Yonah was slower. Everything you did with it required a pause. Mouse click, pause! Everything you did just seemed slow! The screen was annoying as hell as it reflected too much light. It would suck on the train!

Clock On,
theone

 

I did like the 1.4GHz Pentium III. When I had it everything was so snappy. It blew away my old 2.4GHz Northwood Celeron. I got the Dell when my Pentium 3 died

 

You'd have to be at about 3Ghz with the Prescott series to beat the old Pentium 3s, isn't that crazy? The only thing that made them better PCs was more memory and better graphics.

 

I also agree on Prescott. Intel screwed something up on the Pentium 4. They made them hotter and slower and then adopted it as their flagship series... ugh.

I loved the Hyper Threading Northwoods. My uncle has one at 3.8GHz. I swear to all that is holy; That is the single fastest Pentium 4 I've ever seen! The only problem is the limit to AGP. But he has an X1950 Pro AGP and it's plenty fast enough for him right now. All he does is photo work and play FPS/RTS games.

@theone

I've seen the 1.7GHz and 1.8GHz ones at good prices. And they actually perform quite well(games/photo) despite the low application crunching power. I've seen 'em hit framerates close to the Mobile 3700+/3800+.

 

So basically everything you need a fast graphics card for?
A 3.8Ghz northwood? Overclocked I presume? As far as I was aware, Northwoods only went up to 3.4, Prescotts went up to 3.8.

 

sammorris,
I did a little research and you are right, the Northwoods only went up to 3.4GHz.

Even docTY's EE was only 3.4.

The mobile P3 1.6 is kind of a rare animal as Intel started calling them "Centrinos", along with the architecture changes the Centrino technology required within the chip, right about the time the 1.6 was introduced. Only the very first ones were true P-IIIs. I would love to have one to put in my Dell Latitude. Guess I'll have to "suffer" through with the 1.4! LOL!!

Clock On,
theone :}

 

3.4ghz is the highest available for Northwoods, both Sam + Russ are correct~ unless your uncle's Northwood is overclocked (assuming he has a 3.4ghz chip ---->3.8ghz is quite a feat as i've only taken my own up to 3.7ghz on a high end Gigabyte mobo for socket 478, nothing higher), sounds like he got a Prescott running in there and you are mistaken Estuansis.

 

sammorris,

The P-III was a remarkable chip that started life on a 100MHz FSB that gradually got all the way up to a 533 FSB. Combined with Intels love for Rambus memory which was very fast memory for it's day, it was a very competent machine. For the life of me I'll never understand how come Intel stuck with Rambus and ignored both Dram and DDR, long into the P4s run. Eventually when outside MB manufacturers started engineering their P-III and P4 boards for Dram and DDR and they were superior to Intel's product, Intel finally dropped the very expensive Rambus and moved on to Dram and then DDR!

It took me a while but I finally got a matched set of 1.4GHz Socket 370 chips to install in the "Slockets" I bought years ago. We are anxious to see what it can do. There are jumpers you can set for the multiplier from 1 to 4. 1 being 100 or 133MHz FSB and 4 being 400 or 533MHz depending on the MB setting. I don't know if I'm quite brave enough to use the x4 on the 133 buss! LOL!! Should make that old 420 workstation tap dance though. I'll be interested in seeing the DVD-Shrink times as with just 1 1.0GHz CPU it would copy a DVD about 10 minutes faster than the 3.0 Prescot in the Dell 3000! The Dell Precision 420 Workstation is a remarkable machine that's coming up on it's 7th birthday on December 5th. It's thorn in it's side has always been it's x4 AGP slot. I've recently discovered that there are some modern AGP cards that will work in the old x4 slot, so graphics is next. Russell wants to build it into and "Army" machine! You know, "BE all that it can be"! LOL!!! For what it cost new with Monitor, mouse and keyboard you could build 3 very fast Conroe 6600s all tricked out with good stuff and still have money left over! That it's still a very useful computer today, is even more remarkable! People shuck out three to $500 dollars at the local Frys or WalMart for something new, but not as good, every day.

My neighbor just recently bought a 1.8GHz Celeron-D store brand PC from Frys. I copied a DVD on it and it took 37 minutes with shrink. It's a good deal faster on the 420 as it only took 22:33 on a single 1.0GHz CPU! The time for the Dual 1GHz was 17:21. The 3.0 Dell 3000 did the same DVD in 31:23 according to my records. Not only was the Dual P-III faster, it was burning on a slower 12x drive compared to my neighbor's 18x!! I guess that proves that the 420 was worth the high price tag! The real winner was me as I Only paid $165 for it 3 years ago March when it was less than half it's present age.

All I had to hunt was the original Monitor and it was complete! Bought one for $50 and a week later from my Landlady's Nephew. After seeing how much people were getting for the same Monitor on E-Bay ($150) he tried to hold me up for more money, claiming that the $50 was just a deposit so I could try it out, and he wanted another $100! We were just about to have at it, nose to nose when his Aunt intervened and chewed his butt out for trying to pull a fast one. To this day I'm not too sure who she saved, cause I was pretty pumped and the adrenalin was running on high! LOL!!

Clock On,
theone :}

 

I would never have thought such an antiquated machine would be so powerful or I would have done the same! That's laughable that a 1.8Ghz Celeron D (which are still pretty poor) is barely any slower than your 3Ghz P4. It's also laughable that a P3 1Ghz smokes them both. Perhaps Intel didn't have to play so much with the P3s after all!

 

sammorris,

I would say that the high price at the time was justified! The original invoice from Dell was inside the case. Sit down before continuing!! $5003.71 for Dual 733s, Matrox Hammerhead Dual monitor AGPx4 card, SCSI Raid, 512 Rambus memory, 2 37GB SCSI 10,000 RPM hard drive in raid mirror, optional cooling for AGP, Dell 19" .026 DP Flatscreen CRT, Keyboard and Mouse. Including tax and shipping from Dell!

I certainly got more value out of it than the original owners! LOL!! I mean they did remove one of the Hard drives, because it was set up for both when I got it! LOL!! It was also minus one of the 733s when I bought it. now it's Dual 1GB and soon to be Dual 1.4s!

Clock On,
theone :}

 

Yep, what a bargain!
About the silverstones, since we both find the subject so fascinating (at least I do) I'm performing a semi-scientific experiment to show you what they sound like to me. I can't exactly give you a 'what I hear' of them using a microphone, but I'm running the fans at different speeds with the microphone against the case (and away from it) to illustrate the vibration noises they create. I'll mention what fans I use, but using one yourself the FM121s should be instantly recognisable above my Hiperflow 80mm, Noctua 80mm, Freezer 7 pro and Thermaltake PSU. I'll email the recorded files to you.
If you're able to do the same, that'd be great, I'm interested to see the vibrations in your case, and I'd also like to know what speed your PSU fan is running at (I suspect near minimum) to compare it to the volume of mine. Volumes vary depending on where the mic is, but the pitch of the noise determines the actual speed and therefore noise!
Lol I take quietening my PC seriously, so the noise these things make is a joke!

 

There's a new player on the c2d mainboard front from guess who?...



DFI continues their winning strike by providing quality motherboards, while never being first on the market, their products do benefit from time spend tweaking the BIOS, the end result is an Intel P965 based motherboard which flies past all competition.

For those who bought this fine DFI board we can heartily recommend this BIOS tweaking guide at TheTechRepository.

Stay tuned as we’ll soon explore the overclocking options of the newly released DFI 680i based motherboard; it might well be the holy Intel motherboard grail for Core 2 CPUs.

http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&articID=571

http://forums.firingsquad.com/firingsquad/board/print?board.id=hardware&message.id=103824&format=one

And here's one on the DFI LAN Party UT NF680I LT SLI-T2R:
http://www.ninjalane.com/display.aspx?docname=lanparty-680i

 

Nice, so now you can be outrageous with C2Ds too! It's about time, really!