Question about the AMD64

aligator_am

Hi, i'm planning to build a new machine but i've been out of the loop for a while (the last time i built myself a machine the PIII 800 was top notch!!!)

Basically im in 2 minds; should i go for a PIV 3GHz or an AMD64 2GHz? and what i really want to know is the AMD64 2GHz, is that the equivalant of 4GHz in 32bit mode? that may seem like a stupid question but if i dont ask then ill never know.

Also, do i need a special type of motherboard for a 64bit CPU? or is it compatible with the boards that are already available? Ive been checking around on prices and it seems that komplett are doing good bundles deals (for the moment ill only need the CPU, RAM, board and HDD) in regards to memory shop4memory.com seem to be about the best ive found. I reckon ill get 1GB of RAM.

If anyone can help me out it would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Al

Matt Simis

Originally posted by aligator_am
Hi, i'm planning to build a new machine but i've been out of the loop for a while (the last time i built myself a machine the PIII 800 was top notch!!!)

Basically im in 2 minds; should i go for a PIV 3GHz or an AMD64 2GHz? and what i really want to know is the AMD64 2GHz, is that the equivalant of 4GHz in 32bit mode? that may seem like a stupid question but if i dont ask then ill never know.

Also, do i need a special type of motherboard for a 64bit CPU? or is it compatible with the boards that are already available? Ive been checking around on prices and it seems that komplett are doing good bundles deals (for the moment ill only need the CPU, RAM, board and HDD) in regards to memory shop4memory.com seem to be about the best ive found. I reckon ill get 1GB of RAM.

If anyone can help me out it would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Al

Learn the product names:
AMD64 is a platform name. It refers to Opteron, Athlon64 and AthlonFX and all counterpart motherboards.

I assume you are referring to Athlon64.

Of course the Athlon64 is not equivilent to a 4GHz P4, nor does it need to be. Athlon64 3200+ meets or beats P4 3200MHz level performance, with the promise of increased speed when 64bit apps are used on Windows XP-64. You can use Windows XP 32 bit without any problems. The Athlon64 uses socket754 motherboards with standard DDR ram and the Opteron and AthlonFX use socket940 motherboards and must use Registered DDR ram.

Motherboards have no bearing or effect on 64Bit compatibility.



Matt

Woden

ok i'll give this a lash, firstly i can't answer your question of which to get you'll have to look at the benchmarks and decide for yourself which is the way forward including cost and all that.

considering your comparing it to a pentium 4 3.0ghz i presume your not talking about the fancy amd 64bit FX 51 chip that costs about ˆ700 or something , your more looking at the amd 64bit 3000-3400+ chips.

afaik the the 3000-3400+ chips use normally non-EEC ram while the FX chip requires EEC ram. most ram you see for example on shop4memory is non-EEC.

is the amd 64bit @ 2ghz equivalent to 4ghz in 32bit. no, basically the chip will always run at 2ghz but perform for example equivalent to a 3.2ghz pentium 4. however when for example windows 64-bit is released for the masses we should find that certain things speed up on the 64-bit platform i think amd where estimating a roughly 10% increase.

www.anandtech.com did a preview on windows 64-bit and one of the areas that looks like it will have a big improvement on 64bit for the amd is encoding which is something that the amd chips are currently weak at which is good to know

yes you need a special type of motherboard for the 64bit processors for the ones i've been talking about i think its socket 754 you can find some on www.komplett.ie

more people shoud have more info for ya anyway

good luck

data

aligator_am

Thanks for that Matt, i appreciate the help.

So in your opinion you reckon go with the Athalon64 2GHz as opposed to the P4 3GHz? Ive been told that the Athalon is superior for gaming, do you know if this is true?

Thanks

red_ice

From what i know about the 64bit amd processors (which isnt much :P) I was told that they are changing the layout of the chip itsself so that it will look like the standard p4 chip? Its known that the larger the cooling space on a chip the easier it will be to cool, thats why p4s tend to stay cooler in most cenarios (afaik). And all the people i know that use it say they needed a certain spec mobo to support the chip.

leeroybrown

The Athlon64 products also have very large L1 (128k) ans L2 (1Mb for the 3200+). The cache size (especially the L1 which is 8 times larger than a normal P4) should give a big performance gain. The Athlon64 bit CPU range also have a DDR Ram controller onboard (instead of on the Northbridge) which should improve performance of memory access.

Running 32bit binaries on a the 64bit CPU is about 30% faster in the Athlon64's case. 64bit binaries cabn actually be slower than their 32bit equivalent compiles due to a larger cache footprint but can perform very well under heavy load or when large volumes of threads are in use. (For example Solaris 9 which mainly runs on 64bit SPARC CPU's has 95%+ of it's binaries compiled as 32bit)

The Athlon64 board will probably be slightly dearer than the P4 equivalent.

The best thing to do would be to read a few performance comparison between the two CPU's. I havn't read up in enough detail to give a definitive answer but I definitely think that the Athlon64 sounds like an excellent CPU.

Matt Simis

Originally posted by leeroybrown


The Athlon64 board will probably be slightly dearer than the P4 equivalent.

The best thing to do would be to read a few performance comparison between the two CPU's. I havn't read up in enough detail to give a definitive answer but I definitely think that the Athlon64 sounds like an excellent CPU.

I agree. Ive seen some review recently and they tried something a little different. They measured how long it took to load programs and games (levels) on each platform. The Athlon64 consistantly proved faster at loading.

From experience, the Athlon64 is an excellent chip. It feels considerably faster than the (massively) overclocked P4 I had beforehand.


Matt