Intel P4 3.2GHz HT or AMD Athlon 64 3200+

[LuKa]

I'm planning to buy a new computer very soon. I pretty much figured out all hardware stuff, but I can't decide which proc to buy. So which would be better for me P4 3.2 or Athlon 64 3200+? I'm using the following sowtware: Max (with VRay of course) ,XSI , Rhinoceros, Autocad, Archicad, Photoshop, After Effects, Corel Draw and similar sttuff. I also play games occasionally

[jujubee]

How long will you keep this processor for and would you plan on upgrading to the 64 bit Windows platform anytime in the near future?

[Erik de Graaf]

You may also want to keep in mind that by the end of this year the P5 will be introduced with speeds up to 5 Ghz. I don't know if you can wait that long, but i'm sure it will be woth the wait. I know i am waiting for it.

Erik

[Hallock]

You may also want to keep in mind that by the end of this year the P5 will be introduced with speeds up to 5 Ghz. I don't know if you can wait that long, but i'm sure it will be woth the wait. I know i am waiting for it.

Erik

You also need to keep in mind that is 5 ghz by their standards. AMD and Intel currently do not run on the same rating system for their processors. An Intel P4 at 3.2 Ghz is equal to a 2.5 ghz AMD Barton. Barring that I can fry eggs on their new Prescott, I'm wondering about how hot the P5s will be. In my opinion, do not upgrade your computer until the start of 2005. My opinions are a bit slanted because I've been using AMD for about the past year and I've gotten great results from it, my current computer is a Athlon XP 1800+ overclocked to 2 ghz. I've never had any instability with it. I was thinking of picking up a AMD mobile 2500+ since they are under $80 some places. (They created the mobile series for their PowerNow stuff, it changes speed to the application, for this reason the chip has to stay unlocked, unlike some of their other processors. AMD had problems with people overclocking their processors and reselling them at the overclocked price, so a lot of their newer stuff is locked except for their mobile series. The AMD 64 series is not locked however.)

[LuKa]

How long will you keep this processor for and would you plan on upgrading to the 64 bit Windows platform anytime in the near future?

Well I should keep this processor for at least 1 year, and yes I plan to upgrade to Win64 (if it will speed things up). Btw, are Win64 out yet? When approx. will 64 bit applications (3d,2d) starting to show up?

[Hallock]

Like I said, wait before you jump out and buy anything right now. There is uncertainty about if the 64 bit applications will catch on or not, so you may just be pissing in the wind if you buy one now. I wouldn't hold my breath that the architecture of the P5 will be so amazing either, the prescott gets outbenched or is extremely close to the Northwood, their older architecture, with the sacrifice of the new architecture running at about 10 degrees celsius warmer. On the benches I read, they said without a sort of freezing supply for cooling your computer, the Prescott lacks stability. This is what I fear might happen with the P5, since the Prescott architecture is what they are moving forth with.

[mike.edel]

btw: you might want to consider waiting till 2005 because of other reasons - the form factor for pcs is going to change again (from atx to btx)

this will result in completely new mainboards, cooling systems and system cases

old systems will not be compatible to this form factor and upgrading those later on would mean having to change boards, coolers and cases.

currently there only is a 64bit windows server version (beta) and of course all the various linux/macos(?)/unix flavors support 64bit

problem being that most software currently doesnt profit from being run in 64bit
you'll get some performance because of the higher clock frequencies of athlon 64 tho'

finally: the new ahtlon 64 models have dual channel memory interfaces (like the ahtlon fx) which makes them about 10% faster in average
additionally you can use the new athlon fx models with normal unregistered ddr 400 ram (which is much cheaper)

bye, mike

[sdesvb]

I would go for a dual Xeon. 3GHz. that will be faster than anything.
Asus is doing a very cheap and good motherboard.
Always prefer multi CPU machines... dont believe that HyperThreading cr@&.. not much difference.

Even a dual Xeon 2.8 GHz will be faster tnan those two configurations you mentioned and it may cost you nearly as much

[dusan]

Dunno, a dual xeon configuration costs like three better single processor configurations.
I bought a new machine recently, couldnt wait any longer, so i took a prescott 2.8 1mb cache, asus p4c800 875p, 2gb ddr400 transcendt and two samguns 120gb hards to go with it, kept my old radeon 8500LE because i couldnt afford a serious card at the moment. I must admitt that HT is pretty cool and gives about 15-30% speed increase.

[jujubee]

I just assembled a new machine. It's a Athlon 64-bit 3200 with 1 gig DDR400 ram. It screams in comparison to my 'old' 2600 Barton. Before I was shoveling 400,000 polys before things started to get slow in shaded mode. Now I can get around 1,500,000 before things start to get hairy... I was also testing out a BFG 6800 GT which helps inflate the numbers a little but this should give you some idea as to the performance increase.

But talking to the guys at Microcenter- they all claim that the Intels don't hold a flame to the 64 bit Athlons.

[MarioRothenbuehler]

we have a dual 3.2 GHz xeon here with 2GB memory....

maybe we can make rendertests to see what is fast.....
have anyone a 64 bit AMD system... single or dual.... ?

/.mario'

[jujubee]

Hmmm. A rendertest sounds good as I can't trust 3D Mark any longer. Guess we need a decently complicated scene (plain or vray?) that we can all share amongst ourselves. We'd also need to be using the same version of Vray so I think a plain Max scene would be in order. That's all we would be observing is processing speeds to see who gets the biggest bang for the buck- not necessarily a competition. Perhaps two threads would be needed to sort things out. One for default speeds and the other for overclocking.

I gather the information we would need to gather from everyone is:

1) Processor type (Dual or Single)
2) RAM (and mem bandwidth)
3) Graphics card
4) Motherboard
5) Processes running (number of)
6) Service Pack 1 (Direct X 9.0b mandatory - though not sure if this really makes a difference)

So who wants to kick this party off?!?

[Hallock]

Intel is holding up the line for Win 64 to come out, they basically made Microsoft wait a year and then some because they wanted to get their stuff out there, the EMT64, Intel's 64 bit processor is, "The worst implementation of AMDs 64 bit architecture ever conceived." I wouldn't take a Xeon over a 64 bit AMD personally.

[RErender]

I'm glad my proccesor's maker can swing so much power! Looking forward to another 20% to 30% of speed with 64bit.

I just put together a dual nocona 3.0 this in first tests it is 325% faster than my 2.4 p4, I'd love to see some numbers from the opterons, maybe we can agree on a file to render, a dual 244 would be interesting.

the EMT64, Intel's 64 bit processor is, "The worst implementation of AMDs 64 bit architecture ever conceived."

Hehe, thats a pretty strong statement hallok, the 64bit is of yet unproven but only because the XP64 beta doesn't run on it not because it doesn't work well, I have faith that the differences are for good reason. Intel knows their stuff.

[Hallock]

Intel knows their stuff.

Not so much in recent years. Their 64 bit architecture was taken from AMD and Intel's open resource agreement, and they still managed to butcher it. Also, I just read today that Intel's 4.0 Ghz P4s are going to be released the first quarter of 2005 instead of the slated last quarter of 2004. So, more reason for you to wait until 2005 to go out and buy something.

Win64 doesn't run on Intel's EMT64, you're right. Intel has been holding up Win64 because Microsoft was ready to make it compatible with AMD nearly a year and a half ago, and had already done so. Then Intel came out and said their 64 bit architecture was going to be different and demanded Microsoft oblige them (Technically they had to or Microsoft would have given full control of a market to AMD, which would have caused a nasty lawsuit) Then around seven months later, they changed their architecture more towards AMD again. I'm not talking about benches between the AMD 64 bit series running on the Win64 server beta vs. EMT64 running alone. I'm talking about EMT64 running against 3200+ AMD 64 and losing on basic Windows. I'll see if I can scrum up some benches.