battle of the computers

[RattDawg 0]

Hmm Havnt been around for awhile...surprised to see this thread still growing.

[pimpin_228 0]

OK i just retired the full tower now i am down to a mid tower , but it's coolmy sound card is finally dead too and i am runnin windows me for the time being. but i since we are gonna get cable in our town i want to set up a counter strike server so i am holding the full tower for that.

 

 

server specs this is what i hope to have

 

duel duron 900

mother board is what ever there is of duel socket a's

512 megs of ram

video card will be a cheap one

beater cd rom

ibm 60 gig

and not sure what else

 

but hopefully amd or whoever is makin the duel mobo for socket a get's it done soon

 

but i do want to make a server though but though but if they don't make the dual socket moco soom i will go with duel celery 800

and a abit mobo

[Cynan 0]

I wasn't aware Durons supported SMP, and afaik, Celerons don't either now so you might have a lil problem there.

[Brian Frank 0]

The Duron's are eventually supposed to be SMP capable, but not right now. And Cynan's right, the current Celeron's aren't SMP enabled. As I recall, SMP Celeron's only go up to 466MHz without overclocking.

If you want a dual board now, it's either got to be the Celeron I or Pentium III, and I personally don't see a duallie AMD system being viable at this point in time.

I got me an MSI 694D Pro-AR version 1.0 and it's a good board.

Tyan also makes some good boards, but they are not for overclocking at all. You can overclock 'em, but they suck for doing so, just keep that in mind, but they are good boards.

Personally, any component that costs more than a cheap store-bought pc is way outta my price range.

As far as I know, AMD does not make consumer motherboards, and any that they do make would just be a reference design. The duallie AMD reference design is the Tyan Thunder K7, but it's the only one out and costs around $600--depending on where you get it and which features come with it.

MSI supposed to come out with one real soon, but there's some incompatibility with the AMD 762 northbridge and the Via 686B southbridge which they were planning to use. Abit and Asus should have there duallie boards out by the end of the year...

I'm hoping for duallie Durons, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

 

irrelevant side note: looks like I got the second most number of posts here on the board, with Eddie being 100+ posts ahead o me.

We now return you to your regularly schedualed musings.

[pimpin_228 0]

yea i hope they come out with the dual for a cheap price3 cause thats all i relly like processor wise

[INFERNO2000 0]

All AMD 6x86 chips are SMP compatible. Though, not necessarily supported

 

 

even the K6-2s were SMP capable, they just didn't have a chipset/board to use it.

 

When the Tyan came out, they ran dual Durons on it with no problem

They ran dual Athlons on it with no problem

They ran dual Athlon MPs on it with-you guessed it. No problem

 

 

 

 

And how's this for my rig this fall(or winter if I hold out)?

 

Black (anodized aluminum) Coldforge AA-15 w/ extra hdd rack(giving me 19 bays total)

 

 

DUAL Palomino(Athlon MP) 1.4 or 1.5 ghz(depending on what's released)

DUAL Swiftech MC462a heatsinks

DUAL Delta EHE 80mm 80cfm 53dB fans (on a rheostat or 7/12 switch)

DUAL Enermax 465 Power supplies(modded for continuous Panaflo 80H & 92H operation)

DUAL Adaptec SCSI controllers(2940U2W, and 39160{which gives me DUAL channels}) giving me a total of 45 devices)

DUAL IBM Ultrastar LZX 18gb 10k Ultra 160

DUAL port Compaq NC3122 10/100 Ethernet card

DUAL Plextor 12x10x32s(or 24x if they come out with it in time)

DUAL(or Four, depending on motherboard) Corsair/Crucial PC2400(or PC2600 if released) 256 mb DIMMS.

DUAL Panaflo 120mm H series for exhaust

DUAL Panaflo 120mm M series for hdd cooling(intake)

DUAL Panaflo 120mm M series for system cooling(intake)

 

and for the stuff that isn't dual

-undetermined- 760mp(x) motherboard(MSI, maybe?)

Hercules Game Theater XP

IBM 4.5gb 7.2k U2W

-undetermined- GeForce 3 or better

Removeable(hotswap) 20GB IBM 60GXP or 9GB IBM U2W

Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro

Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer w/ Ratpad

 

things that will not grace my computer:

floppy

modem

AOL

legacy devices(no parallel-unless for LCD-, no ISA, no serial)

 

 

 

all this in addition to my current rig(check sig), which will remain unchanged unless I decide to grab an Athlon

[pimpin_228 0]

thanks infreno for the info

[INFERNO2000 0]

not a problem!

[Uykucu 0]

I do agree that athlon is a better architecture (I know have a degrees in electronics and mathematics) But what i do not understand is why does people still stick to it. It is uncapable of running a decent nt4 or 5 machine no matter what peripherials you have. It is not the CPU itself all the time but support and chipset this or that. or some patch not existing.

 

Why does people even bother OK, Athlon is about half the price of P3 (for the literal ones not exactly but verry close). If a computer is not going to run properly and you keep tinkering with it than you might as well get a PS2 since you are only using it for games otherwise you wouldn't be having time to tinker with it in the first place.

 

And may i also point out that more than half of help or troubleshooting questions on this board is based on a Athlon system.

 

for the subject of Dual Athlon. There is no such capability neither in the old ones or the new. It does not matter what they claim on the tech sheet. The reason there was no MB's was cause it was not working. If you really require dual CPU power than you should get Xeon or Itanium. Or if you have more money and Alpha (although a bit harder to get nowadays still the best).

But I forgot. You can not run your Quake on it.

To conclude. If it sounds like a duck, looks like one and feels like one it probably is a duck. If you ask get what is recommended if not stop complaining.

[Xiven 0]

Quote:

Originally posted by Uykucu
I do agree that athlon is a better architecture (I know have a degrees in electronics and mathematics) But what i do not understand is why does people still stick to it. It is uncapable of running a decent nt4 or 5 machine no matter what peripherials you have. It is not the CPU itself all the time but support and chipset this or that. or some patch not existing.

Well no problems here thanks, no crashes or any sound card troubles (even with my old SBLive)

Quote:

Why does people even bother OK, Athlon is about half the price of P3 (for the literal ones not exactly but verry close).

That's a fairly compelling reason

Quote:

If a computer is not going to run properly and you keep tinkering with it than you might as well get a PS2 since you are only using it for games otherwise you wouldn't be having time to tinker with it in the first place.

What kind of logic is that??

Quote:

And may i also point out that more than half of help or troubleshooting questions on this board is based on a Athlon system.

Agreed, but once you remove all the ones that are fixed by the 2 standard patches (AMD reg patch and SP-2) and by BIOS updates you'll find there are a lot less problems remaining. Oh yeah and there are more AMD troubleshooting questions on the boards because there are quite a large proportion of people on these message boards with AMD processors because the people on these boards are more technically minded than most IMHO and so many may have built their own systems (OEM systems tend to be mainly Intel)

Quote:

for the subject of Dual Athlon. There is no such capability neither in the old ones or the new. It does not matter what they claim on the tech sheet. The reason there was no MB's was cause it was not working. If you really require dual CPU power than you should get Xeon or Itanium. Or if you have more money and Alpha (although a bit harder to get nowadays still the best).

Eh? So how do those Dual Athlon motherboards work?

Quote:

But I forgot. You can not run your Quake on it.
To conclude. If it sounds like a duck, looks like one and feels like one it probably is a duck. If you ask get what is recommended if not stop complaining.

To conclude: don't listen to hype or blatant lies.

I'm done

Regards
--
Xiven

[INFERNO2000 0]

wow! What an idiot!

Uykucu

 

I'm not one to judge, but that's blatant smearing. And glaring stupidity

 

I'm convinced you're an idiot.

 

 

 

 

AMD Athlon, and AMD Athlon Thunderbird are different chips

 

I had tons of problems with the Athlon(meaning the classic, the slot-A) and Via KX133 chip. It made me switch from AMD to Intel.

I hated AMD for a while, only reccomended intel

 

However, toss in a Thunderbird on a KT133, and things are great

 

my 1.1 Tbird and A7V133 had no problems at all. AT ALL.

 

my Duron 750 at stock speeds, runs rings around my PIII 800eb@ 954.

 

 

 

NT4 can't run most peripherals anyway. No USB support, remember?

 

 

ok, so make it 2k(or NT5 as you referred to it as, assuming you didn't mean service pack 5).

 

The problems were dealt with months ago, and the remaining problems deal with the SBLive more than anything else.

 

Solution to that? Get a Hercules XP and listen to what a QUALITY card sounds like!

 

 

 

 

Why do we stick to it?

The chip is better than a Pentium 3

Pentium 4?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Give me a break!

 

 

Like it was mentioned.

 

The majority of rigs out there running Pentium 3 are consumer, or corporation.

Corporation goes for Pentium because Intel has a reputation, and their foot in the door

 

Consumers go for Pentium 3s because of THOSE DAMNED DELL COMERCIALS!

They go for intel because they know the name. It's always been pentium to those people. They tend to NOT do the research necessary to see the AMD chips kicking intel's *** around the floor, spitting on it, etc.

 

They think the Duron is like a Celeron. The performance is more comparable to Pentium3 though. Hell, my 750 beats out what my Pentium3 did.

 

 

Assuming you stick to the X86 architecture:

 

Modern Uniprocessor performance rigs usually aren't Pentium 3.

 

Multiprocessor rigs have been Pentium(or Xeon) rigs up till now, simply because there wasn't a chipset out for the AMDs. They had the SMP capability, just not chipset. There are tests with Dual Durons, Dual Thunderbird B and C.

 

 

 

 

and as for cheap processors:

 

Duron 750 costs 25 bucks

Celeron 766 costs 50 bucks.

 

 

 

The only bad thing about AMD is the power/heat. And if you're smart about your rig, you can deal with that by buying a quality heatsink and power supply.

The same care needs to be taken with intel and amd installations.

 

 

Tinkering? once you do it once, you know what to do from then on, the tinkers are the same. No tweaks needed for my rigs though. At least, nothing I didn't do when running my P3.

 

 

 

 

 

As for dual AMD versus Dual Pentium 3/Xeon...check the tests. The dual AMDs are greatly surpassing the dual Pentium 3s in most, if not all tests.

 

And there's more boards coming out--the 760mpX boards will be out in a month or 2 most likely. These will only improve upon what the Tyan Thunder is doing, as the mpX chipset is similar to the KT133a vs KT133.

 

If you need the power, why would you waste it on the powerless, soon to be DISCONTINUED Pentium 3 line?

 

Why would you buy a non-upgradable Pentium 4 that was obsolete the day it was released. Until the new chip comes out, the current Willamette is a big mistake.

 

Put on SDR or DDR on an RDRAM chip, you LOSE PERFORMANCE. I hate Rambus, but SDR and DDR will hurt that chip even more than it already is.

 

Ah screw it. Do your research. Do some frickin homework! Then buy AMD. There is no better x86 chip out currently.

 

"To conclude. If it sounds like a duck, looks like one and feels like one then Uykucu is a dumb****"

[Brian Frank 0]

Exactly.

And if it wasn't for AMD pumping out faster chips, Intel may have had us a slower speeds, possibly below 1GHz now. Plus, as previously mentioned, the Duron is better to compete with the Pentium III.

Unfortunately, the ones that don't do their homework and go by what's on the TV, see Intel advertisements, and think that's it. And they fall into the clock speed trap--the assumption that the fastest chip automatically equals the fastest computer. Even if they don't go for an Intel-based PC, the clock speed still fools people. It doesn't matter how fast the chip is, 64MB ain't enough! I've seen configurations with a 1GHz+ or P4's with a TNT2 card! We all know the TNT2 isn't a bad graphics chip, but it's crap to pair it up with a cpu like that.

Oh yeah, Rambus: Intel sold their soul to Rambus. Rambus probably would be great if not for two minor details: it's double the price of SDRAM, and it hasn't been proven to boost performance anymore than SDRAM on any chip. The P4 was designed, so I'm told, to be able to use RDRAM. Unfortunately, the T-Bird, the competitor to the P3, is able to beat the P4, although not in every situation in comparably equipped systems.

Oh yes, AMD could be very well to do for dual Durons, providing that they don't start being able to whip the Athlon. However, instead of severely crippling the Duron, like Intel did to the Celeron, they're letting it keep the 200MHz bus, SMP, and such. It's got a smaller core, and less cache. It is a scaled down version of the Athlon, but it supposedly performs at 90% of the Athlon.

The Duron is cheap, but that doesn't mean it's crap. The only problem it really has is heat, like the Athlon. Of all the chips out, the best value is usually the Duron, unless you find an Athlon similarly priced to a Duron of the same speed.

Intel needs to get DDR for the P4 out, and make it look good. Via has their solution, which so far, seems to be very appealing.

I'm not about to say Intel is out, but they could go down if they continue to bet on uneducated consumers.

If you want to buy Intel only, go ahead. Intel is fine, but their past successes are only going to carry them so far.

AMD is supposed to be sticking with Socket A at least through next year. Intel, on the other hand, seems to have a nasty history of introducing a Socket layout, then releasing a new version, and changing to a new socket. Socket 8--dead in the water, Socket 7 had a longer useful lifespan than that. Then came the Slot phase, which I think AMD was just following what Intel was doing, and then back to the socket, AMD also following. However, with the P4, the Socket 423 was introduced, then Intel---for no sane reason, changes the socket layout for the new P4 coming up shortly. Oh, then we've got Itanium, which has it's own socket too. AMD seems, at least so far, to keep the same socket layout for all of it's chips, Athlon, MP, and Duron.

Intel it seems want's to suck your wallet. I don't know if it's thought out this way, but it's that or some inane procedure requirement for each new chip. Or drugs.

Intel's reign may be up. Yes, Via has issues, but some people make a bigger deal out of it than others, and the SBLive! issues are not completely Via's fault either--Creative doesn't seem to willing to work with SBLive! users with Win2k.

If your smart, you'll go with whoever puts out the biggest bang for your buck. Whatever chip has the best performance for the best price is the one to look at, even if it ends up (in a very bizzare situation ;() the Cyrix somehow ends up on top.

[EddiE314 0]

actually the Tualatin (New P3) runs as fast if not faster than the Athlons, i suspect that the new celerons will compete with the Durons. I agree that AMD forced Intel to push out faster cpu's and i'm guessing there will be another price war soon, good, cause i wanna upgrade for cheap. Personally, i like intel chips, the new p3's have a .13micron chip wafer and the athlons have a .18 or something, the plus side to having a .13 chip is the low power consumption and lowered heat issues, i don't like amd products because most of the time the amd cpu will run at 125F+, i can't see having a chip that runs hotter than 95F, with my PIII, i only hit 89F at full load, it's great, a cooler chip = better performance.

[Uykucu 0]

Hey buddy I was not repeating propaganda of evil Intel or something like that

 

I was just telling you what I keep seeing. Not on the board but about %70 of the times, when myself or one of my engineers go for troubleshooting, for this and that it is an Athlon Or Duron. And trust me, these are not the problems that can be fixed with Reg patch.

 

I do agree it is not the CPU. But as general there is no SW that supports Athlon except 1-2 games, And Chipsets and controllers are plagued by trouble.

 

My comments were more like a question to people who use athlon.

 

About the Dual, Athlon has not been designed for parallel processing. Whoever claims otherwise go read up. But for that sake neither is P3. It is Pentium Pro, Xeon and Itanium that real multi CPU devices. And even if the athlon works I ask again If you need so much MIPS as of Athlon 2 or 4 CPU's

 

PS: BTW I have a feeling yours was mildest comment i am going to get.

[INFERNO2000 0]

hehe

 

sorry about that

 

I just hate seeing people bash a perfectly good chip and platform

I feel compelled to defend the best option available.

 

 

 

Most of what I see when I deal with customers is delusion about the Pentium, and about clock speeds.

 

 

I was called up last night to help a person with a virus. They said they would be upgrading soon, from their 64mb P2 333, to a Pentium 4 1.7 ghz.

 

 

I asked them why they wanted to do that....they said that 1.7 is the fastest they've seen.

 

I laughed, and told them I'd have some paperwork for them when I came by to pick their PC up(mind you this is at 9:15 at night)

 

 

Just fired up some benchmarks, webpages, etc. and had 20 pages of information for them to read. Independant sources. no bias one way or another, just pure numbers.

 

All of it showed an Athlon, at 1.4ghz(the fastest out right now) surpassing the Pentium4 1.7 in all the tests except for memory tests(which we all know RAMBUS wins at).

 

They were rather surprised.

 

They Will be buying an AMD Athlon next month, not intel.

 

 

 

 

 

and as for SMP capabilities for Athlons and durons and such....it was AMD itself that I read about the SMP capabilities from. Even the Slot A. There was much speculation about a dual Slot A board a year ago.

 

It's much like Intel's stance on the original Celerons. Support isn't official, but it can sure as hell do it.

Especially the Socket A. I can't find the page, but I know that it was anandtech that did the review with dual durons.

 

I will work on finding the page this weekend, unless someone can help out real quick.

 

 

 

 

I'll just leave it at this. If you're not willing to spend some extra time and money researching and preparing/outfitting your rig for an Athlon, then by all means go with an intel. There's more work for the Athlon required. But there's greater benifits. Heat is an issue that is easily dealt with by NOT BUYING A F*CKING $10 COOLERMASTER HEATSINK WITH A 9CFM FAN! Invest in your computer, buy an Alpha or Globalwin, or whoever makes the SK6. OR REALLY invest and buy a Swiftec MC462(or 2 when you go dual 3 months to go!).

[Brian Frank 0]

Hopefully the Celeron will be able to get a performance boost, but the only way that's going to happen is when Intel drops the PIII. That would create enough of a gap that the Celeron could not be able to overtake the P4. The bad news is that if you wanted to start with the Celeron and then go to a P4, you would have to buy a new motherboard and RAM, unless the Celeron starts seeing DDR when the P4 does.Of course if I'm missing something about the Celeron here, speak up, but I haven't heard of any plans to move the Celeron from Socket 370 yet.

I really wish that Intel had not cut out SMP from the Celeron 2's, or I'd probably be running that instead--900MHz C2' are supposedly good OC'ers, like 1.2GHz.

Intel does have it down with heat control. Even the P3 has a smaller die than the Duron, and does produce a lot less heat at a similar clock speed. This is a fact that I can testify too myself.

Hell, you only need something like an Orb to work on the P3 and your set, you don't need a Global Win for those, or any cooler that is for the Athlon to cover your heat problems.

 

If the i845 does end up utilizing DDR, it might be a very good solution. The problem with this is, of course, Rambus. Intel needs to drop them asap. While the P4 does make use of RDRAM, the latency kills it still. Why should anyone pay for a memory technology that offers no performance benefits, if any, over a more conventional standard that is half the cost?

The problem with the P4 is that the 1.7GHz incarnation is competing with the 1.4GHz Athlon, in comparably equipped systems. 300MHz diff here, and the 1.4GHz P4 is no match in most scenarios against the 1.4GHz Athlon.

But either way you go, you will probably end up paying roughly the same price for a similarly configured AMD or Intel system.

I would rather have a laptop with a P3 than either AMD chip, basically because of cooling concerns. And that also comes into play in rackmount systems at 1U, as you can't have some big @ss heatsink fans on it.

Hopefully, AMD is still working on this issue, or we could see some problems.

[Uykucu 0]

I had already agreed on better architecture

But your and my customers are a bit different. They are not home users. They are small to medium businesses. And if the brand spanking new machine they just paid for does not make the perfect coffee in the morinings and give a blow job. They are on the phone giving my poor technical support staff grief about it!

 

So I say, I vote for the stability...

 

And Brian, have you ever tryed RDRam (AKA RamBus) It is more unstable then athlon! and on top of it they had to cut down on the MIPS for the P4 to accomodate the MMX2 or whatever they are calling it now.

So taking everything in to account. P3 first athlon sec. Celeron and P4 I do not find worth mentioning. (Sorry to everybody who has a celeron or P4 but it is the sad truth.

 

PS. Higher Freq. on the same architecture will cause more registry misreportings, corrupt data and process pockets and L2 Cache overflow which will immediately lead to lower MIPS than expected and in some cases lower MIPS than the original Freq. since CPU registers have to keep going back and correct the data. I do not see it necessary to mention Latency, voltage and heat problems...

[Brian Frank 0]

I haven't ever used RDRAM for the sheer fact that there are still plenty of platforms that use SDRAM still, and that it is double of normal SDRAM. We all know RAMBUS is pure crap, unless someone can truly say it has useful about that shows.

AMD does have a RDRAM liscene apparently, buuut they're not using it.

Hmmmm, gee you wonder why that is?

[clutch 1]

I have RDRAM in my 733 at work (384MB) and I have yet to have any issues with it. I have had this machine for over a year now. I don't think that it's unstable, it's just really expensive for what you get.

[Uykucu 0]

I think there is a case of miscommunication. to clear it up,

RDRam Good,

Rambus Bad! For the newbees P4 stuff that claims 1600Mhz etc...

[clutch 1]

Quote:

And Brian, have you ever tryed RDRam (AKA RamBus) It is more unstable then athlon!

I must have misread that, then.



RAMBUS does suck tho, and I wouldn't suggest users run out and buy that memory on its own merit. But it can be one SWEET database serving system when running in a 4-way system, using a Gig or two of it.

[Uykucu 0]

Sorry i always get stuff mixed. There are so many types ...

I am getting fed up. they should give Tecnology reference numbers or such

So we will know what came late and distinguish them.

 

Sorry Guys;)

[INFERNO2000 0]

Actually, my customers ARE home users as well

 

 

 

I reccomend no less than a Duron to either group. I deal mostly with gamers(wannabees) and families. I don't get many corporate jobs, and when I do, it's usually troubleshooting/upgrades. not new installations.

[pimpin_228 0]

i am goin intel this christmas ,cause amd has just gave me to many problems,it works for now but this will be my 3rd mobo and for no reason at all should i have to replace more than 1 i shouldn't have to replace any so i am goin intel

[Brian Frank 0]

The only reason I've had more Intel than AMD problems is because I've only had one AMD rig--and that's the one I'm running right now.

Looooove my VP6, and where I was supposed to get the 2nd P3 667 they're getting me a GF2 Pro 64MB of DDR goodness as the sheer amount of credit I have at that store.

I did what I should've done in the first place and got 2 new cpu's.

2 800EB's.

 

Pimpin', look at Asus, Abit, Tyan, or MSI for a new board. If you're going to overclock, skip Tyan tho, but otherwise look at the Tyan Trinity 400. Yes it uses a Via chipset, however it was a very stable motherboard and has 1 AGP, 6 PCI, and 1 optional ISA--ISA is on the model without on-board sound.