AM2 any real performance increase

paddy001 · 21 May 2006 at 19:01

Socket AM2 does it offer any real performance benifit.

I currently have an operton 144 and havent had chance to use it yet (tested it in my mates asus board and is stable at 2.9Ghz without any major effort) should i get the new DFI board skt 939 crossfire or sell the opteron and get a new am2 chip and board for crossfire??

not massively bothered about future upgradability. Just how am2 performs currently.

If anyone could point me in the direction of a good review on am2 performance it would be highly appreiciated (no competitors obviously)

Thanks in advance
Paddy001

Joe42 · 21 May 2006 at 19:42

As far as i'm aware AM2 performs about 5% better than 939. It was developed for economic reasons not performance.

If your concerned about upgradability above all else then go for AM2, otherwise go for 939. It should be cheaper now thanks to AM2.

Ideally you should wait for conroe if you can.

Ladforce · 21 May 2006 at 19:43

its got better memory bandwidth but thats about it for the time being. there will be a marginal increase in speed which no where near offsets the upgrade cost from a 2.9ghz opteron.

Joe42 · 21 May 2006 at 20:06

Ladforce said:
its got better memory bandwidth but thats about it for the time being. there will be a marginal increase in speed which no where near offsets the upgrade cost from a 2.9ghz opteron.

But its got much higher latency and that architecture is very sensitive to latency and not particularly affected by bandwidth, so i've heard.

Ladforce · 21 May 2006 at 20:10

it responds to both hence why the pc4000 memory at cas3 is roughly the same speed as the pc3200 at cas 2 for 2 gb kits.

Jay_t · 22 May 2006 at 11:01

It won't really come into its own until the latency's for DDR2 tighten up a lot. This may take a long time and it might be better to go for Conroe. Thats what I'm thinking of & I haven't gone the Intel route since my pentium 2 400MHz.

paddy001 · 22 May 2006 at 16:46

cheers for the advice guys conroe definately looks nice but im just not sure i can wait or afford the predicted price premium that will be on it when its comes out.

Paddy001

Muzy · 22 May 2006 at 17:00

My advice: do not upgrade until the release of vista and Dx10 cards

the best performance for new mobos/CPUs/GPU to come around december this year.

if you can't wait because you have a crap system, then go for something cheep now,

and 3-5 percent increase in some benchamrks for AM2 over 939

paddy001 · 22 May 2006 at 17:31

systems not crap yet lol see sig give it a couple of months though.

im still not holding out for vista and DX10 as they keep moving the date back and current build ie 5308 are slow and laggy. Its been said that it still needs lots of work.

personally i think vista inc dx10 wont properly take off until about 4/5 months after its launch and thats at the absolute earliest.

Paddy001

maddness · 22 May 2006 at 17:42

reading cpc, the new 590 boards with a 7900gtx should give a good "linkboost" performnce boost.

Minstadave · 22 May 2006 at 17:46

<maddness> said:
reading cpc, the new 590 boards with a 7900gtx should give a good "linkboost" performnce boost.

I'm not convinced about this, maybe in an SLI config we'll see the benefit of some more bandwidth, but AM2 CPUs themselves seem to offer little boost clock for clock over S939 going by the results over at XS.

Stelly · 22 May 2006 at 18:10

I'm not convinced about AM2 yet, waiting to see benchmarks

Stelly

Duke · 22 May 2006 at 18:14

Latency doesn't effect the A64 as much as the old Athlon range, but lower latency DDR2 will help a little.

Minstadave · 22 May 2006 at 18:20

Duke said:
Latency doesn't effect the A64 as much as the old Athlon range, but lower latency DDR2 will help a little.

Are you sure about that? I thought A64 loved low latencies, there's no point in having an onboard memory controller if you're going to feed it with high latency DDR2. This can be compensated for by ramping up clock speeds to some extent, but I think AM2 is going to like lower latencies as memory bandwidth is not even close to a bottle neck.

Participant · 22 May 2006 at 19:40

Everyone says "wait for conroe", but the fact is that AMD will be bringing out 65nm technology on the AM2 platform at or soon after the time that conroe hits the shelves. It won't be as simple as "conroe is the bomb, end of story"!

Minstadave · 22 May 2006 at 19:44

Robbie G said:
Everyone says "wait for conroe", but the fact is that AMD will be bringing out 65nm technology on the AM2 platform at or soon after the time that conroe hits the shelves. It won't be as simple as "conroe is the bomb, end of story"!

Yeah 65nm is coming, but if they don't do something more than a small speed bump then its not going to make a lot of difference. I'm sure AMD will be working hard, but since AMD64s introduction we've seen very little advances (if you ignore dual core), all we've seen is a little more clockspeed, a little extra cache, and dual channel with S939. The K8 architecture is excellent but they need to build on it, I just hope they haven't been sitting back being smug for the last year

NathanE · 22 May 2006 at 20:00

Robbie G said:
Everyone says "wait for conroe", but the fact is that AMD will be bringing out 65nm technology on the AM2 platform at or soon after the time that conroe hits the shelves. It won't be as simple as "conroe is the bomb, end of story"!

AMD 65nm production starts at the end of this year. It won't be overtaking their 90nm production until mid-'07. They'll use their small quantities of 65nm chips as their high end parts, not mainstream parts.

Also, for the remainder of this year I am almost 100% confident that it will be a simple case of "Conroe is the bomb end of story." Sorry but AMD has lost this round. They don't have any cards left to play. Until K8L hits they have run out of steam (and even then K8L is a workstation/server affair, not desktop like many people seem to think...) so really we are looking at K10 until AMD hits the big time on the desktop again. AMD doesn't care about the desktop market really. Historically and even currently they perform exceptionally bad there. Where they have gained ground on Intel is with the server and workstation space. To the point of Intel running a very high fever. AMD executives aren't holding any secrets that this market is where their company is focused and where the majority of their R+D is targeted.

Duke · 22 May 2006 at 20:55

Minstadave said:
Are you sure about that? I thought A64 loved low latencies, there's no point in having an onboard memory controller if you're going to feed it with high latency DDR2. This can be compensated for by ramping up clock speeds to some extent, but I think AM2 is going to like lower latencies as memory bandwidth is not even close to a bottle neck.

I'm not sure about the higher DDR2 latency, but from reviews over the last year or two, there was only a 1-2% performance difference from the extremes of CAS2.0 to 3.0. Click Me

I haven't seen what the benchmarks are like for retail AM2 chips (they are out tomorrow I think?), last time I saw they were just about matching Skt 939. However the DDR2 latency has already dropped a touch, and I bet by the end of the year we'll see CAS4 around.

The SktA Athlons had a much more noticeable increase in performance from using low latency memory, hence the release of the Corsair LL memory etc several years ago.

Jay_t · 23 May 2006 at 09:21

hence the release of the Corsair LL memory etc several years ago.

Ah, the original 3200LL BH5

What price some high end DDR2 with 2,2,2,6 latencies, bet that wouldn't be cheap.

harris1986 · 23 May 2006 at 11:35

anyone know how much cache the am2 chips have got?