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Athlon1900XP or Pentium4?


Gamesniped
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Hrmmm...hey do u guys think I should go with a P4 or an Athlon1900XP?...although P4 is 2gigz the 1.6gig Athlon supposidly outperforms it But Will I have compatibilty on all the same games I could play on a pentium? I also heard that the Athlon gots sum pretty good floating point capability's.

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Well, athlon is notorious for unstablility, but they've actually got that handled as of late, more then pent lovers are willing to admit. If you want to get techinical, the P4 spanks athlon cpu's...BUT, that is ONLY if games take advantage of the P4 "special" qualities, when it comes to that athlon doesn't stand a chance, so if a game goes that route, athlon people will suffer. Dev's aren't going to cater to pent's until pent can prove they can sell, so, in 2 years, if pent sells, games will start being made that use to their full extent, then another year or 2 for the game to be made...but by then, it'll be about time for a new cpu anyhow. I say athlon, because on a normal game, it can do as good as (and sometimes better) than a pent. In 3 or 4 years, though...who can tell. Maybe athlon will match pent's special things, maybe they'll get REAL close then do something stupid and end up getting bought out like 3dfx did.

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Plus if your heatsink fails on the P4, it will survive. On the athlon if your heatsink fails, within like 10 seconds your athlon will reach a temp of 300┬░ and spontaneously combust - no BS. Personally I'd wait and see what the 2.2 Ghz from Intel looks like with the northwood architecture.

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lol Yeah pent can last a few minutes without a sick, where as a athlon can last a few seconds. But those are things that don't bother me, when you look at price. Buuut, pent had that big price drop (because athlon is spanking them) so I don't even know what pent's are running at now. I should start checking, I'm about to start upgrading...wonder which I'll get.

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Pretty damn rare...there are programs to monitor the temp of your pc, but I don't know any, because I don't have any, because like I said...it's pretty damn rare. hehe Heatsink failure is going to hurt ANY cpu period, so they make them sturdy.

I've decided to get the XP 1.4 and a MB that supports the hefty 133 ddr (which clocks out to 266 :: drool: all for a grand total of $310 + tax. Not bad... after this, I'm getting a gf2 gts ultra. -->happy<--

This'll be my first time to upgrade because I want to, not because something broke... heh.

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It wouldn't be so much the failure of a heatsink as it would be the failure of the cooling fan attached to that heatsink.

And 300 degrees wouldn't be a hard stretch when running a few volts through micro-miniature circuitry. Besides, the result would be more of an explosion than it would be a meltdown. Nothing like opening things up and finding shrapnel and a nice hole in the middle of your chip.

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Except when a fan goes dead, the cpu can actually go longer...easily long enough for you to turn the comp off. The poor guy is going to be so paranoid of his fan or heatsink going dead now that he won't play any music or have the TV on, so he can hear his fan...and probably DL a tempature program too.

Should point out that if you get a decent-good fan, it won't go out either.

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Virtually every AMD motherboard has a BIOS option to monitor the CPU fan RPM, and turn off the system if the fan dies. They also all have a temp alarm or shutdown in the BIOS.

The only time these don't work is when you do something STUPID like what TomsHardware did, run the dumb thing with no heatsink/fan on it. Then it burns up before the thermal monitor can catch it. As long as you are a competent builder, this will never be an issue. If you have doubts, have the store you get it from install it for you.

Now, just so I don't sound too up on AMD, I actually do not like the way their CPUs can burn up if you screw up, and I REALLY HATE how easy it is to chip the core when installing the heatsink. It's not a good design compared to the way the Intel's self regulate the P4s temperature, and build the metal heat transfer plate which can't be chipped. But you can't deny the price to performance ratio of the AMDs.

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Well if you look at all the benchmarks of the new Athlon XPs they beat the Pentium 4s hands down, the Athlon XPs just do more per clock cycle. Not to mention they are cheaper. Also if you use a Nforce motherboard

(its a chipset by Nvidia and it is AMD optimized) you get a even greater preformance jump.

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Yeah I ment to check on those nforce boards, cant decide between an asus or nforce...all will just come down to how much for a board that supports 133 ddr, as well as having no intergrated (the devil thought up intergrated cards).

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Welp, made my choice. asus a7m266, athlon XP 1600 (1.4 gig)...have it all done by friday. Then, on the 30th I'll see about a gf2 gts ultra. :: drool::

[ 11-12-2001: Message edited by: DOAM ]

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Guest dnoyeB!

quote:

Originally posted by DOAM:

Well, athlon is notorious for unstablility, but they've actually got that handled as of late, more then pent lovers are willing to admit. If you want to get techinical, the P4 spanks athlon cpu's...BUT, that is ONLY if games take advantage of the P4 "special" qualities, when it comes to that athlon doesn't stand a chance, so if a game goes that route, athlon people will suffer. Dev's aren't going to cater to pent's until pent can prove they can sell, so, in 2 years, if pent sells, games will start being made that use to their full extent, then another year or 2 for the game to be made...but by then, it'll be about time for a new cpu anyhow. I say athlon, because on a normal game, it can do as good as (and sometimes better) than a pent. In 3 or 4 years, though...who can tell. Maybe athlon will match pent's special things, maybe they'll get REAL close then do something stupid and end up getting bought out like 3dfx did.

What???

I havent read on any of the review sites about the Athlons "notorious" instability. Nor that the P4 is spanking the Athlon. In fact quite the opposite. The Athlon has the far better architecture which allows them to get more work done by skill and not simply brute force MHz.

As for SSE, the Athlon does have SSE, just not a complete set. the New Athlons have the complete SSE set. They call it something different though. P4 has SSE2 which the Athlon does not. But who cares about special instructions? I'd rather have the optimized architecture that will benefit _any_ instruction.

As for taking advantage of SSE, thats usually not upto game developers but upto the compiler writers. Unless you want to start coding your games in assembly. I understand some small sections can be optimized directly in assembly, but in general its upto the drivers, the OS, and the compilers. All of which I agree developers have some degree of control or influence over.

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Guest dnoyeB!

quote:

Originally posted by DOAM:

lol Yeah pent can last a few minutes without a sick, where as a athlon can last a few seconds. But those are things that don't bother me, when you look at price. Buuut, pent had that big price drop (because athlon is spanking them) so I don't even know what pent's are running at now. I should start checking, I'm about to start upgrading...wonder which I'll get.

Are you sure? compare apples to apples.

A P4 1.6MHz is running much faster than the equivalent Athlon 1600XP.

Running the same application I expect the Athlon to be victorious as far as heat production, of course because the Athlon will get the work done in fewer instructions.

if you want to compare a 1GHz Athlon to a 1GHz P4, then the P4 will be cooler. But thats because its doing less. I agree that AMD used to have heat issues on the K6, but they were overpushing their chips to keep up. I don't think so anymore.

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Guest dnoyeB!

quote:

Originally posted by DOAM:

Pretty damn rare...there are programs to monitor the temp of your pc, but I don't know any, because I don't have any, because like I said...it's pretty damn rare. hehe Heatsink failure is going to hurt ANY cpu period, so they make them sturdy.


Why am I picking on DOAM

The newer processors, Intel first, include thermal diodes. I think as far back as the celeron the Intel was able to shut itself down in case of Thermal overload. Or at least work with the MB to accomplish this. The new Athlons are getting on die Thermal diodes finally.

I remember first installing my celeron without the fan just to check the temperature. I was young then

It woundn't even post. I touched it and burned my finger... It didn't die.

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Guest dnoyeB!

I suppose I should give an opinion. Get the Athlon. No reason to waste money on a non-performing name brand processor.

Athlon is commited to their socketA for longer than Intel will be so if you get an Athlon 1600XP today you will likely get all the way to 2600XP+ without a new MB.

Intel just made a big blunder with their RAM fiasco. Trying to force the industry then getting bit by the monster they created in RDRAM.

I have a K6 and its been completely stable in all applications. I also have dual celerons which are quite stable till you OC em.

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Eh, my turn to correct... XP's have a full SSE compliment, and actually work well...but pent's do better. It is here where the pent's spank athlon, and if pent's sell well, it is quite possible EVERYTHING could be based on it. While athlon does have a good SSE now in the XP's, it still isn't up to par with pent.

The athlon XP 1600 is actually running a 1.4 gig cpu...not 1600, so of course it runs slower than the pent 1.6...but yeah I see your point, even though it's 1.4, it beats the pent's 1.6*. And in a few charts I saw, it was just barely behind P4 2 g's...

The autoshutdown is in most, yes, but as with all things, they can fail, and that is why I said it's pretty damn rare...

I'm glad yours has been stable, but fact is, athlon cpu's used to run VERY hot, and end up shutting down. That is unstable. The XP cpu's run about 5 degree's cooler than the t-birds. Very good improvement.

[ 11-12-2001: Message edited by: DOAM ]

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Well I'm just on a little posting spree here...

Nforce: don't get it.

Integrated audio and graphics. That means, when you upgrade vid/sound cards, it's going to slow your gaming down some. I think someone here actually posted a first hand experiance...incase you don't believe the newbie.

There is another board out there, I think by via (or whatever their name is), that is actually VERY good with the XP's, but I don't trust via all that much.

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Its the clock cycles! AMD is doing the same thing that Mac did with the G3s and G4s. A Mac G4, say 1200 runs to equivelent of a 1500 or 1600P3. They took some out. All in all, it was a smart move. With incresed actual speed increases, more heat would be a problem, but still is with AMD anyway, but who cares. AMD is the greatest company in the world. For price vs. performance, AMD is the way to go. Much better floating point anyway

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AMD beats the crap outta the P4.

SSE? You remember the old days of MMX and all its hype? The chips had the stuff..but the industry did not release programs that actually USED the MMX technology up until maybe the P2 was in the market. Same with the SSE when it came out.. programs did not take advantage of it until years after it was in the chips, heck I think most programs still dont take advantage of them NOW.

The one thing I would REALLY love to see is an AMD chip that could use the RDRAM. I believe it would be blinding fast. Intel screwed themselves by forcing people to use a 400mhz RAM that was incredibly overpriced (just like the P4 itself was overpriced)..now they trying to compensate by using SDRAM with their P4's.. which will REDUCE the speed of the P4 machine down to the 133 (or is it going at 166 now?) mhz the SDRAM works at. They'd be better off with DDR ram @266 bus.

Compare the price of the chip, and compare the performance. The AMD beats the P4 in both. Then think on upgrading. Intel virtually changes the slot/socket its chips uses every new P# chip comes out. AMD on the other hand, stays with the same one. I have my AMD 1.4 ghz in an ASUS A7M266 mobo.. and I know that in a year from now, when I want to upgrade to the AMD 2.5ghz Palomino (or XP whatever they call it), ill just change the chip!

On a P4.. heh, good luck. You have to buy a new motherboard, quite probably have to buy new RAM for it as well (like the poor saps that went from a P-3 to a P4... had to buy the expensive RDRAM!).

Intel is after your wallet, AMD is after your satisfaction. Choose.

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