Intel vs AMD

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: RussianSensationThink about it, would I recommend an A64 cpu if I myself own an Intel if it wasn't worthy of my recommendation?

or a better question might be why would you recommend something you've only read about

i would trust your insight on the pros/cons of your intel a lot more than i would your insight on something you've merely read reviews about; living with a system over time will give you much more to offer an opinon on. someone running a half-dozen benchmarks on a system for a review has a rather limited perspective.

also, hl2 is not that cpu intesive. it's shader intensive (which is why fx series cards run the dx8 path). a 2100+ thunderbird can run it 50fps with a decent video card example

 

[PumpActionWalrus]

I am not sure what you will be doing on this computer exactly, but I would suggest getting the A64. I have a northwood 2.53 and a 2.8, and also a prescott 3.2. They are fast processors, and with HT they do multitask fairly well, but using my 3200+ or my 3500+ system it is noticebly faster, cooler and ran my audio encoding faster. AS far as multitasking on AMD goes, the only reason it does not perform like that of the intel is the task manager. If you go into your task manager while running two games for instance and lower one of thems priority, you will not see the problems of cpu lag at all. Intel does have great memory performance, but you can get a 939 that does the same or more and is not a cpu that is memory limited. Furthermore as far as single core goes, Intel just released their last P4 where AMD still has life left in its single core products.

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: PumpActionWalrus
If you go into your task manager while running two games for instance and lower one of thems priority, you will not see the problems of cpu lag at all.

i've found this method not only doesn't improve performance, but caused instability in game where priority has changed (daoc is an example).

 

[Mik3y]

cainam, are u an intel fanboy? or amd fanboy? or just plain unbiased? i cant seem to exactly see which side tickle's your fancy more. it kinda changes around.

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: Mik3y
cainam, are u an intel fanboy? or amd fanboy? or just plain unbiased? i cant seem to exactly see which side tickle's your fancy more. it kinda changes around.

lol.. just trying to be objective & callin em as i see em.. i don't think i "change around"; in fact i'm pretty consistent. i just don't stay "pro intel", "pro amd", "pro ati", or "pro nvida" as each has their redeeming value. if someone asks help on overclocking their amd for instance, i don't jump in and tell em they have a crap cpu and should buy an intel (or vice versa), i try to stay to the point and offer any help i can. when i get into this "vs." stuff is usually in reaction to another post.

as this is the industry i work in, i mess around with alot of hardware. i have both intel and amd based pc's (5 in my home office) and both amd and nvidia. i don't base my opinion's on website reviews (just use them to support my own findings); i like to talk about hardware and try to know what i'm talking about; too many ppl only know one side or the other and rely far too much on limited reviews from websites to form their own.

imo opinion if the dual core amd's are solid, they'll overcome their last hurdle in overtaking intel completely. intel needs to come up with something better than their "emergency edition"; pulling something out of their ass at the last minute isn't going to cut it much longer.

anyway, my shift is over, so i'm gonna quite being so damn long winded now..

 

[Ackmed]

Originally posted by: CaiNaM

Originally posted by: Thermalrock
dont get a msi board. they make crappy boards and last year they cheated. oced ppls cpus without asking them when the cpu load hit high %age just to win review benchmarks vs gigabyte and asus. that company shouldnt have any customers.

now there's another rather biased statement offered..

i have 2 msi boards - neo2 865pe and k8n platinum. they're both rock solid. as a matter of fact, the k8n has been picked the best s939 board by AnandTech, as well as several other review sites. most recently Hot Hardware. while 1 good review coupled with a bad reputation would make me skeptical, msi has a decent reputation (both in motherboards and video cards) and there are many reviews all picking the k8n as a top board. in addition, from following forums most people seem to like theirs.

while every part produced by a given manufacturer is not perfect, and it's quite possible you may have had a bad run with msi, that's no reason apply that to every product made by that company.

asus also makes a good s939 board, but frankly nf3 chipset has better features (love that i can have both ata/sata raid), and i don't particularly care for via chipsets.

The fact is, they did up the FSB thus overclocking whenever a 3D app was detected. No it wasnt much, but that IS cheating. When benchmarking motherboards, they are usually very, very close in speed. And extra few Mhz can help make you look better. If it had been disabled by default it wouldnt be a problem.

It would be like ATi setting Overdrive on by default.

 

[VIAN]

The p4 is less efficient in almost every way.

Efficiency, semefficiency. That doesn't matter. Who gives a crap who is more efficient at what.

The most important thing is:

Who is faster at doing what you want to do at the same price point.

So choose a price point and what you want to use the chip for.

 

[PumpActionWalrus]

Originally posted by: CaiNaM

Originally posted by: Mik3y
cainam, are u an intel fanboy? or amd fanboy? or just plain unbiased? i cant seem to exactly see which side tickle's your fancy more. it kinda changes around.

lol.. just trying to be objective & callin em as i see em.. i don't think i "change around"; in fact i'm pretty consistent. i just don't stay "pro intel", "pro amd", "pro ati", or "pro nvida" as each has their redeeming value. if someone asks help on overclocking their amd for instance, i don't jump in and tell em they have a crap cpu and should buy an intel (or vice versa), i try to stay to the point and offer any help i can. when i get into this "vs." stuff is usually in reaction to another post.

as this is the industry i work in, i mess around with alot of hardware. i have both intel and amd based pc's (5 in my home office) and both amd and nvidia. i don't base my opinion's on website reviews (just use them to support my own findings); i like to talk about hardware and try to know what i'm talking about; too many ppl only know one side or the other and rely far too much on limited reviews from websites to form their own.

imo opinion if the dual core amd's are solid, they'll overcome their last hurdle in overtaking intel completely. intel needs to come up with something better than their "emergency edition"; pulling something out of their ass at the last minute isn't going to cut it much longer.

anyway, my shift is over, so i'm gonna quite being so damn long winded now..

Well, I am not sure why it doesn't work for you, but I usually run vice city, counterstrike, and diablo 2 on my 3200+ no problems while playing tunes. It may be you don't have enough ram, or that you possibly set it too low or some other unforseen problem. May even be the game itself but I have never experianced a problem with it on any of my games.

 

[RobCur]

Originally posted by: ThePiston
Intel costs a lot more.
If he's dong media creation (video editing), then get P4.... otherwise, gaming, bidness software, etc all do better on good ol' AMD... and you save money

True, that's why middleclass and upperclass prefer the more expensive even if it has some weakness vs amd. My cousin louis prefers Intel regardless of what I say or you he, or he says etc.. he has P4 1.5ghz and P4 2.0ghz and is proud like " intel inside' = the best!
why? I dunno. ignorance maybe, too much money to burn..

 

[Thermalrock]

asus made it something you could either enable or disable and let everone know about the feature. msi didnt. they just sent their board with the secret oc to a friggin review without telling anyone and only told ppl what it was AFTER they got caught. i referred to that as coming up with a bs excuse. when you send a motherboard to a review and know that they will benchmark it against other motherboards you should have the decency to tell ppl the results will be different because your motherboard overclocks. its obvious they wouldnt have told tom or the public about it before selling the first boards.

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: reactor
simple answer:

For basic computing(internet, email, word processing) it won't really make a difference what cpu you go with.

If your into gaming then the Athlon64 is your best bet.

If you do video editing for home movies, dvd's etc. or audio/video encoding the P4 will handle that better.

this is basically the way I feel as well.... I have also used both, and do on a daily basis, I have a P4 at work, and an A64 at home... the A64 just feels slightly faster overall, but really not much difference in the real world.
I'd still go with A64 just cause I love the CPU, very fast, not too expensive, great gaming prowess... I :heart: mine!!

either would serve you well though.

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: PumpActionWalrus
Well, I am not sure why it doesn't work for you, but I usually run vice city, counterstrike, and diablo 2 on my 3200+ no problems while playing tunes.

that's not running 2 games.. or even more than 1 cpu intensive task. try running multiple tasks that each request big chunks of cpu time. you'll see what i'm talking about.

here's an example of how someone uses his pc where the intel makes more sense:

If Im only burning movies, it takes an average 25 minutes per movie start to finish. If Im playing a high end game, add about 2-3 minutes. A friend of mine has an AMD64 3200(I have a 3.0C), and he uses the same programs I use. His takes about 3-5 minutes longer than mine on average when its done as the only task. Now, when he trys to play a game its quite a different story. First off, his frame rates in Far Cry(and pretty much any game like that one) get real close to unplayable(I have an Albatron 5900 non ultra, he as an Asus 9800 Pro - the real nice 9800Pro). And the movie, omg, it more than doubles the average time to complete. I do 6 movies in 3-3.5 hours while playing games with good FPS. His games get sh8tty FPS, and would take him roughly 6-7 hours to do the same movies. To me, that means I would have to choose between making movies OR playing games, not both. Instead, I choose Intel and do both.

or

For the same price, we probably could have an Athlon 64 chip, perhaps a 3000+. This may have bought us a little speed on individual benchmarks, but we had a very good reason for choosing a Pentium 4 in this configuration. Our machine is meant to watch and record TV, rip CDs, watch DVDs, do offline 3D rendering, edit photos--you name it. Frankly, the Pentium 4's HyperThreading feature makes it a much better multitasker than the Athlon 64. When you load up the CPU with very intensive tasks, HyperThreading lets you continue to perform other tasks without the system becoming quite so unresponsive. To see what I'm talking about, look at the multitasking performance charts from our most recent Pentium 4 CPU review.

or

For the multitasking scenario, we chose to run Norton AntiVirus in the background while using Windows Media Encoder 9 in the foreground to convert a 30-second AVI clip to a high-quality WMV file. We report the time it took to run just the video encode by itself and with NAV running in the background. The results show that Intel's Hyper-Threading clearly pays off. The Pentium 4 took about a minute less time to run the multitasking test than the Athlon 64 FX-51 systems did.

now those are cases where a pc is used in a certain way, and may not be a big deal to a lot of people, but it IS a valid point for those who do more than surf the net and play games. the key here is as stated in one of the comments above, "When you load up the CPU with very intensive tasks".

my particular annoynace is runnning 2 sessions of DAoC, which runs flawlessly on p4c's with HT, but cannot be done on an a64 (clients laggy and cannot stay connected to server).

 

[whorush]

get an amd.