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**Brian Ellis** · 2 May 2001, 00:57

Is CPU speed that important? If we have a long project to render, cannot it be done overnight?

IMHO, go for Intel CPUs and chipsets every time, not because they are any better or faster or slower, but because they are the de facto norm that software and hardware developers use. You have a much better chance of everything working. I know of some software that absolutely refused to work on non-Intel-equipped m/bs.

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Brian (the terrible)

**Railie** · 2 May 2001, 02:25

Hello.
Athlon is fast, but there are more problems with motherboards, than in Intel platform.
P4 is good, but not for now. If you can, wait. I tested P4/1.3GHz and there is currently small benefit for real work.

Railie

**TIbrO** · 2 May 2001, 05:16

I am a highschool student with very limited cash, so I always take the cheap way out. I recently spent $250 to upgrade my 333mhz Pentium 2 on a BX440 chipset mobo to an Athlon Thunderbird 900Mhz and an EPoX 8KTA3 motherboard... I LOVE this new processor and mobo! With 3DNOW! and 3DNOW!2 Quake 3 Arena is hella fast, and so is encoding times in TMPGEnc. All I know is that I will be upgrading again, to a 1.2Ghz Athlon Tbird this summer, since that is the max that my motherboard can handle.

**Brian Ellis** · 2 May 2001, 05:56

FM

<color="#ff0000" fontsize=+1>Some<color="#000000" fontsize=+0> developers may test on both, but many, especially for scientific applications, do not, and I know some of them.

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Brian (the terrible)

**sergiovalentino** · 2 May 2001, 08:47

I have switched from P3 866 to Athlon 1200 and i'm very happy, it works great with ALL applications, games and multimedia soft. Rendering speed increase to 70% more (VCD Pal at 26 fps).
Pentium better than Athlon on multimedia is only a legend.

ciao

**Indiana** · 2 May 2001, 14:02

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Brian Ellis:
Some developers may test on both, but many, especially for scientific applications, do not, and I know some of them.
</font>

They better should or they might be left behind with their crappy coding.
Any program that ONLY runs on Intel or only on AMD is IMHO crap and the developers will get to feel the drawback when another program with similar features but acceptable compatibility appears.
And it deserves them right, optimizing software for one system is one thing but make it run only on one just because it's currently the market leader is just a sad (mad?) thing. Just like when developers coded games that are only running on NVidia only because they currently own the gamers market.

And the PentiumIV in it's current incarnation is not really a completed product, it has too few pipelines to feed all it's INT/FPU units at once rendering them partly useless (but costly) - together with other desing flaws.
No doubt that Intel will correct most of these things in the next P-IV versions, but that doesn't help the buyer who bought the current chip (that seems like it was released too early - most probably some insane management decision).

FM · 2 May 2001, 16:38

Brian Ellis, software developer use both Intel and Athlon. :-) Belive me, I work in this area for many years.

As to Athlon vs Pentium... If you have a lot of money and you want to change mobo each time when Intel invents new CPU (because of new socket/slot for each new model), it is your money not mine. :-)

[This message has been edited by FM (edited 02 May 2001).]

**Brian Ellis** · 2 May 2001, 23:08

Indiana

I agree with you in principle, but, for scientific applications, it is not necessary to go to all the extra expense when you may have only 10 or 20 users round the world. The software may cost $50k or more each and the hardware config will say, "This software is for use with Intel PII or PIII CPUs only, with an Intel BX chipset. No support is offered for other CPUs or chipsets.". As such software is run on a dedicated computer, this is no problem. One company I used to programme for supplied the dedicated hardware with the software even, which meant I could optimise it for that one configuration of hardware. This was great, because we were doing data capture at bursts of 20 million double-precision bytes per second (for 100 ms), number crunching it at leisure, saving the calculated results and repeating the process every 5 seconds for up to 3 months. You can imagine the disk array, as it was when 1 Gb was the biggest obtainable. Of course, this was not a Windows app! In fact, we used the DOS 6.2 kernel, which never crashed. The CPU was an ordinary Pentium 200, but there was a second custom CPU and memory on the PCI capture board. In this case, there was only half-a-dozen systems sold before the market was saturated, so you can imagine the price of a system. I would have been crazy to supply just the software and the data capture board and hope they would have been put in a computer that would work with them! In fact, out of curiosity, I did try the system in other computers I had lying around. It worked in some but did not in others. In particular, I remember a Cyrix maths co-processor overheated to crash the computer, although I think this was a slower machine. This was in a former life

I have never believed that all PCs were created equal (I've even had some IBM XTs in the early days that were proved to be not IBM-compatible!). We have seen over the past couple of years, or so, that VIA chipsets do not behave the same as Intel ones and that there may be both software and hardware incompatibility with them, where it does not exist with some Intel ones. Why take the risk of trouble when it can be so easily avoided?

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Brian (the terrible)

**Indiana** · 4 May 2001, 12:20

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Brian Ellis:
I have never believed that all PCs were created equal</font>

All the PCs are created equal, but some are more equal than the others?

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P4 or Athlon?

P4 or Athlon?

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