What CPU/System Would you Buy Today?

[KvHagedorn]

Wow.. (through 51 votes) if we MURCers were the world, then AMD would have over 79% market share when you look at how many chips are sold up there! But I have a feeling we on this board are a bit smarter than the average guy/girl buying a PC today.

[WayneHu]

Originally posted by Wombat
I'm thinking of building a dream system right now:

Tyan Tiger MB: $220
1.4GHz TBird: 2 x $140
1GB of Crucial DDR2100: 4 x $36 (inc. shipping)
G400 MAX : free
60GB 60gxp drive : $148 + 9

The look on MY face when I rip and encode a DivX movie in 4 hours: priceless.

Good Choice!

But I prefer the system that is not hungry for high power supply and does not need high-noise fan cooler.

Right now my Athlon AXIA are running 1GHz with Vcore 1.4v. The power comsumption is probably about 35w during peak performance instead of 55w when Vcore = 1.75v.

Unless those CPUs go into 0.13 micron process, I am not interested in the super-GHz processors.

[isochar]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
Wow.. (through 51 votes) if we MURCers were the world, then AMD would have over 79% market share when you look at how many chips are sold up there! But I have a feeling we on this board are a bit smarter than the average guy/girl buying a PC today.

Smarter? By buying a system that is not going to speed up at all with future applications? Or a system that requires weeks of tweaking to become stable?

[Novdid]

Isochar, it seems like you still haven't understood that Athlon (palomino) is just as advanced (prefetch, bla bla bla) as the P4 (northwood), and the fact that AMD 760 boards do not take weeks to get stable + the fact that a 1,4 GHz Athlon is cheaper than a 1,5 GHz P4 (and we all know wich one is faster).

And I almost forgot to mention that DDR is ridicolously cheap for the moment.

Who's smarter now.

[ALBPM]

Ya, but your still taking chances with a crappy Via 686b Southbridge chip. That's the part of the chipset causing all the problems.

Paul

[WayneHu]

Originally posted by ALBPM
Ya, but your still taking chances with a crappy Via 686b Southbridge chip. That's the part of the chipset causing all the problems.

Paul

It looks ok if the North Bridge is AMD761. Previously I tested it with Diamond MX300. Unlike VIA or i815e chipset, I did not get lost sound problem without the modification of PCI register on Win2000. Before I moved to KG7-RAID, my Athlon system used KT7A-RAID and it was indeed made me crazy sometimes.

But you are right if we use others IDE devices rather than HDD. Either The VIA IDE controller's or driver's quality is not as good as Intel's or AMD's. To avoid some strange problems on it, I think it is necessary to use SCSI CD-ROM and CD-RW instead of IDE ones.

The second issue is about HPT370a. The controller always hangs under heavy disk i/o load although its win2k driver always tries to reset the controller. During that procedure, the system is totally unavailable and waiting for its recovery. To get rid of it, my solution is simple. Just disable it, and put my Promise FastTrak 66 back again and attach the HDDs to it. No more IDE controller hanging up problem.

As I know, Promise's UDMA 100 controllers do not seem as stable as its UDMA66 controllers, either. Thus it looks like it is not a good choice to go to UDMA100 if the controller is not reliable at that speed.

ps: my HD is IBM DTLA 15/30/45GB and DPTA 20GB. (all 7200rpm)

[KvHagedorn]

Smarter? By buying a system that is not going to speed up at all with future applications? Or a system that requires weeks of tweaking to become stable?

Looks like all of us aren't fully educated yet. ;o)

Ya, but your still taking chances with a crappy Via 686b Southbridge chip. That's the part of the chipset causing all the problems.

I think that's why everyone is so excited about this new Tyan Tiger MP board, Paul. Full AMD 760MP Chipset (North and South), a top notch dual processor board with 64 bit PCI for around 200 bucks. (And don't forget the 3 year Tyan warranty.) That's the board I'd be getting right now if I were in the market for one.

[[GDI]Raptor]

I have just got my new system:
ASUS A7V266 with VIA KT266 Chipset
AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1,4Ghz
512Mb PC266 DDR RAM

Will change to a AMD "Thoroughbread" processor in Q1 2002, when AMD release it! 0,13 micron Athlon.... hehe

Perhaps I'll change to a dual Athlon when ASUS releases their AMD760MP board...

[isochar]

Originally posted by Novdid
Isochar, it seems like you still haven't understood that Athlon (palomino) is just as advanced (prefetch, bla bla bla) as the P4 (northwood), and the fact that AMD 760 boards do not take weeks to get stable + the fact that a 1,4 GHz Athlon is cheaper than a 1,5 GHz P4 (and we all know wich one is faster).

And I almost forgot to mention that DDR is ridicolously cheap for the moment.

Who's smarter now.

Perhaps you should read up on the P4 architecture a bit more before you say that the Palomino is "just as advanced".

From my experience with the AMD760, the biggest problem with it is lack of updates from AMD. It is not as stable as an Intel solution under Win2k. (May be partly due to the VIA south bridge on my A7M266)

RDRAM is ridiculously cheap too. Approximately $15 more for 128mb than DDR. Well worth it considering its bandwidth advantage over DDR. (Unless you're building a budget system where every dollar counts)

[borat]

although the P4 MAY be more advanced than the Palomino(although the benchmarks suggest otherwise) i would'nt wait around in the hope that software will start to take advantage of the pentium 4's features.we'v seen it all before with MMX SSE and SIMD. at the moment AMD's hardwar prefetching is far more usefull(as is the fact that in most applications a 1.4Ghz thunderbird will outperform a 2Ghz P4)

[Novdid]

isochar, I have actually been doing some digging into this Athlon vs P4 thing.

The p4 (northwood) is correctly as you say a more advanced CPU than the thunderbird, it has more features (supposedly) than the TB core etc etc.

BUT...then there is a Athlon4 (palomino), wich enables athlon with just about every major feature it lacks compared to northwood except SSE2. Now don't come here and say that the P4 is far more advanced than Athlon4, or plain Athlon either for that reason.

Then there is rambus. I don't see the bandwidth beeing a helluva lot more than DDR (RDRAM - 1.6GB/s, DDR - 2.1GB/s) offcourse there is dual channel RDRAM...with the painfull inconvenience that you have to use two modules of the same size of RDRAM at once...and that the latency just plain sucks...offcourse you already knew this.

RDRAM is ridiculously cheap too. Approximately $15 more for 128mb than DDR. Well worth it considering its bandwidth advantage over DDR. (Unless you're building a budget system where every dollar counts)

And I have to say that 2:1 ratio in price between RDRAM and DDR certainly do not make RDRAM worth the price. And I bet if you look closely it's 15$ more than 256MB of PC2100.
The last on was a joke ( I do not want to contribute to the harsh environment many are sensing here)
Maybe if the price ratio were the other way around it would make up for the flaws (latency).

Say what you want about SIS and VIA but you have to admit that the SIS735 and the KT266A are performing wonderfully. But sadly enough both of these companies always in some weird way manage to release their boards with one or two (maybe more) major flaws.

All hopes to nvidia.

[isochar]

I don't mean to make my comments sound as if they are flame material. I'm just pointing out facts that I've observed/experienced.

Now that's out of the way:..

BUT...then there is a Athlon4 (palomino), wich enables athlon with just about every major feature it lacks compared to northwood except SSE2. Now don't come here and say that the P4 is far more advanced than Athlon4, or plain Athlon either for that reason.

The only differences between thunderbird and the palomino are multi-processor support, hardware prefetching, and *slight* architectural changes to lessen the heat problem.

I refer you to this thread that discusses the advanced design of the Williamette/Northwood:

http://www.sharkyforums.com/ubb/Forum27/HTML/000225.html

The guys there explain it much better than I can.

Then there is rambus. I don't see the bandwidth beeing a helluva lot more than DDR (RDRAM - 1.6GB/s, DDR - 2.1GB/s) offcourse there is dual channel RDRAM...with the painfull inconvenience that you have to use two modules of the same size of RDRAM at once...and that the latency just plain sucks...offcourse you already knew this.

And I have to say that 2:1 ratio in price between RDRAM and DDR certainly do not make RDRAM worth the price. And I bet if you look closely it's 15$ more than 256MB of PC2100.
The last on was a joke ( I do not want to contribute to the harsh environment many are sensing here)
Maybe if the price ratio were the other way around it would make up for the flaws (latency).

At least we agree that $15-30 will not impact the price tag of the computers we build. That said, who cares if RDRAM requires pairs of modules? The stuff is so cheap these days that people are filling their boards.

Price set aside, the performance needs to be addressed. Let's look at the review of the P4X266 at vr-zone.com: http://www.vr-zone.com/reviews/via/p4x266

"The VIA P4X266 performs very well in rendering, business/office applications and quite surprisingly memory performance too. It lost out to i850 when the applications become more memory intensive like gaming, video and content creation." I use my processor mainly for multimedia purposes (gaming, video, content creation) - places where peformance counts most. Who cares if DDR's lower latency lets you access office applications a few milliseconds faster? If that's all your PC does, just buy an AMD solution in the first place. Everyone knows that Intel is making the P4 a multimedia processing monster with little focus on speeding up business applications.

Say what you want about SIS and VIA but you have to admit that the SIS735 and the KT266A are performing wonderfully. But sadly enough both of these companies always in some weird way manage to release their boards with one or two (maybe more) major flaws.

I personally am one of those individuals who will sacrifice speed and price for stability. (Just like us Matrox users sacrifice speed and price for video quality) I don't see myself using any Taiwanese chipsets in the forseeable future.

All hopes to nvidia.

Yes, nvidia is AMDs only hope for a stable, mainstream chipset. (The nForce is not it though, too high-end for the average joe)

[isochar]

I want to point out one more thing about RDRAM... it is the memory architecture of the future.

Why do you think all the interfaces in our computers are going to based on serial protocols?

• Serial AGP will replace 8x AGP
  Serial-ATA will replace IDE
  RDRAM will replace SDRAM/DDRAM (unless the company is forced out of business)

[WayneHu]

Originally posted by isochar
I want to point out one more thing about RDRAM... it is the memory architecture of the future.

Why do you think all the interfaces in our computers are going to based on serial protocols?

• Serial AGP will replace 8x AGP
  Serial-ATA will replace IDE
  RDRAM will replace SDRAM/DDRAM (unless the company is forced out of business)

Yes, you are right... in the future!

But currently it does not look economical to use RDRAM system for both business and consumer users. Many tests show current DDRSDRAM even has better memory bandwidth efficiency than current RDRAM system. Don't you think it is ridiculous to spend double but get only the similar performance? Actually, I do not even count the price difference of chipset and MB parts. If they are included, the difference would be more.

In the production view, RDRAM cannot beat DDRSDRAM because RDRAM die size is about 50% more than DDRSDRAM one. If the yield is compared, RDRAM could even never match DDRSDRAM.

Can you explain why Dual P4-Xeon 1.7GHz cannot beat Dual AthlonMP 1.2GHz on most applications? Why we have spent such money but got such unsatisfactory result? Is that Intel's chipset engineers' fault that they cannot produce a good RAMBUS chipset? Why don't we wait for i870's reveal to see how dual channel DDRSDRAM performs? I think it is much fair to compare when both of them are dual channel configurations.

Also, please don't forget the DDRSDRAM system are still improving. Only when DDRSDRAM system has reached its physical limitation and serial protocol system has better C/P than it, it is the time that DDRSDRAM would be taken over. But I do not think current RAMBUS will be the one.

AGP 8x? I just think that even AGP 16x does not help a lot, either. The reason is quite simple. In the situation that the 3D controller needs a lot of AGP texture memory, the CPU should also need a lot of main memory bandwidth to process its data. The shared memory architecture never performs good if the memory controller cannot provide enough bandwidth. Why don't we just put more video memory on the 3D adapter instead of spending 3x times price or more for the expensive and ridiculous high bandwidth shared memory system to achieve the same performance?

[KvHagedorn]

Yes, nvidia is AMDs only hope for a stable, mainstream chipset.

No, AMD is AMD's only hope for a stable, mainstream chipset. Let's hope they can come to grips with that fact and produce them in quantity, and give incentives to mobo makers to include them on their boards.

Isochar, you're biased and uninformed. Stability is not an issue in AMD systems using decent (AMD) chipsets and a good power supply. I don't see why either of these issues applies to any of us here, now that there are 760MP boards available for $200-220 which utilize AMD north and south bridges. Furthermore, AMD prices allow you to buy the two cpus for about the same money as a single P4 would cost. The performance of 760MP using the EV6 bus is pretty darned impressive, the moreso when you can have the following system for the ridiculous price of about $850.00.

Tyan Tiger MP board
2- 1.2 GHz Athlon MP processors
512MB DDR RAM (Crucial)
PC Power and Cooling 450W PS

If you prefer Intel, great! Buy one, and keep our friends here employed. They don't make bad products. I have bought many of them over the years. In my humble opinion though, the system laid out above would be my current choice if I were putting together a PC right now. And I doubt seriously that I would see the stability issues you seem so fearful of. This is not a super high dollar system, but it is seriously high-end for the money, and with those 64 bit slots I could add a full length Mylex Ultra 160 SCSI RAID card if I chose to do so.

How fair would you see it being if I were to stick an Intel chip on a VIA motherboard and compare its stability to an AMD chip on an all AMD motherboard? Stop insulting people's intelligence here. Now look at my current (2yr old) system and tell me if I am, in fact, not MORE obsessed with stability than you are:

Tyan Thunderbolt GX Motherboard
onboard dual channel Adaptec LVD SCSI
onboard Ensoniq Audio PCI sound
onboard Intel 10/100 NIC
2- P3600 Katmai Processors
512MB Corsair Registered ECC SDRAM
Matrox G400 MAX
USRobotics v.everything hardware modem
Seagate Cheetah Hard Drives
Plextor SCSI CDROM drives
PC Power and Cooling 450 Watt Power Supply
Elan Vital S30 Case with SCA module

I wouldn't hesitate to buy a 760MP system to replace this, but I just am not one of those people who replaces his computer every year or so. I really can't afford it (especially since I have so much invested in this system), and it's plenty powerful for me right now. Next year when I can get a dual Hammer system with a Hypertransport bus, I will think seriously about it though.