Is the atom 330 fast enough for general use?

JonJ678

JonJ678

JonJ678

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Hey. I got partway through writing a spec me thread and realised that this is the only thing I'm unsure about. Trying to put together a computer for about 150 quid, choosing between dual core atom and an amd x2.

The amd option is a lot quicker, sure. A matx board is far more adaptable than a itx board. However, the main thing I'm looking for is small and quiet, where the itx pulls ahead. So if the atom is quick enough for general usage, I'll go with that.

So, what is an atom good for? I'm after something that will at least handle firefox/vlc/office/utorrent simultaneously, as well as running parity calculations for a raid 5. I don't game, and have no faith in either system doing well with cad.
 
"firefox/vlc/office/utorrent simultaneously, as well as running parity calculations for a raid 5"

thats a lot for an atom to do, any 2 or 3 of those fine but probably no at all if your loooking for a responsive system
 
Simply put, no.

With 1gb RAM it will manage Firefox and any one office app, any more than that and it will start to slow up.

With 2gb you'll get firefox, VLC and uTorrent, or VLC/uTorrent and one office app.

4 apps + parity calculations it will fail miserably - especially if you have multiple firefox tabs.

The atom is designed for web browsing, all the web browsing and nothing but the web browsing. I've done extensive dicking-about (I mean, testing) with my atom, and it really complains with more than 2 tasks at a time.

Perfect for the web and writing up a quick document, or OneNote with chrome in the background for facebook... no good for anything more. Netbooks, web browsing machines and thin clients.
 
Ah. Well that's not too surprising I suppose.

Is this based on the single core version or the dual core atom? I'm not confusing hyperthreading with core # :) Reasoning was (crudely) one core running os and parity, the other running applications. The hope was ubuntu server.

Any input on the x2 6000? I've not used amd since a laptop a long time ago which was far from stunning. I've got a bracket for my TRUE kicking around somewhere, so I suppose it shouldn't be any louder than the atom set up. Might get one from a high street store and have a play, then return it as unwanted.
 
Definitely the AMD. With Cool n Quiet on, you'll be able to tame the heat from the AMD pretty easily - they're fairly cool CPUs. The Atom isn't really designed for the kind of workload you're proposing and I reckon it'd get quite frustrating.
 
Well, I think this is settled. I found some benchmarks putting the 330's multitasking skills at about 20% better than the single core.

Unfortunately this means needing to learn some more about amd, as currently I know nothing. Cheers guys

Bit more informed. Good odds on the 7750BE.
 
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Ok so your current best option I would think is:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e Brisbane 2.6GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W Dual-Core Processor is your current best option.

Unfortunately OCUK don't stock them so you will have to have a look around but they are great for low power & quiet PCs.

If however you want more (and who doesn't!) and you don't mind waiting a couple of weeks AMD are soon to release some more low power energy efficient CPUs although I'm afraid they are 65w rather than 45w like the 5050e.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1137383/amd-shrinks-tdp-phenom-ii

Although there are some 45w ones listed here so I guess we will have to wait and see :)

http://www.guru3d.com/news/new-amd-athlon-ii-and-phenom-ii-processors-next-month

Hope this helps...
 
I'm not doing a very good job here, apparently don't know very much about cheaper hardware.
I'm going to go with amd, because so far everything has been intel. Performance before energy saving, so I think the 7750 is better than the 5050e. I'd like to order tomorrow.

I'll go out on a limb and say that a lapped true will have no problems cooling a x2 chip, so quiet is largely solved. I cannot for the life of me see how the bracket works unless I've lost a back plate and have to remove a big plastic thing currently fixed to the board. Were I more patient, your links would have been fantastic. Thank you :)

The 7750be, fairly generic ecs motherboard with ram and cooler is available locally for 150. This looks like a pretty poor deal, but I'm tempted anyway as I could have it tomorrow. Looking on the shop here, I'm still inclined to go with a X2 black edition at 50 quid. Ram at 20. So it hangs on what the 'ECS GeForce 8100VM-M5' is like as to whether or not 150 is reasonable.

Anyone offer a quick and dirty evaluation of nForce 430 vs the 8100 chipset?
 
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I've been using my Samsung NC10 for 2 weeks because my PC and laptop have both decided to be broken, and it will happily run Firefox, Thunderbird, play AVI files and run 2 monitors. Not tried HD files but I suspect it wouldn't play them very well.

I also don't think it would do parity checks very well either - esp not while using it as a normal PC. For this reason I've selected the Athlon 5050e for my newly-built NAS and we'll see how that performs some time in the next couple of weeks when it's up and running :)
 
Cheers Beansprout. I miss my nc10 occasionally, was a nice laptop. Not so hot at number crunching though, so raid 5 might be a mistake.

I'm going to go with the 7750 black edition. It's ridiculous to overclock a nas, but I'll probably give it a shot anyway. Quite excited to play with something that isn't Intel based, and looks like the price is going to come out similar to an atom after all. So, with various parts I already have, Specifics will probably be determined by whatever my local has in stock later today, if nothing looks good I'll buy online and suffer the delay.

7750BE
TRUE
Budget ram & motherboard
Gigabyte matx chassis
Pc power and cooling 860W
3-6 hard drives
Debian.
 
Well, thought I'd report back. It has taken me an astonishing amount of time to get linux playing nicely, but I'm now about done. Going with ubuntu, desktop at the moment but will probably switch to server + fluxbox in the future. Along the way I broke my raid 5, so that's now rebuilding itself.

The 7750 is more than capable of running an nas, I'm pleased. Moving data around the raid at the moment is not very quick, but in fairness it is degraded. Otherwise the system is quite responsive enough for normal use. It isn't as quiet as I might have liked, but that'll improve once I find the bracket for my TRUE. It doesn't rebuild arrays very fast, but that is also not surprising. Still not going to take more than a couple of hours.

Running Ubuntu from a usb stick, to be honest it's going fine. Cpu usage is at 10% per core while rebuilding and surfing the web. Power usage for the box might be quite nasty, but I shall worry about that later.

Cheers for all the advice guys, this is a much better call than atom would have been.
 
i would have gone with the atom 330, xp sp3 (nlited)

HD media might not play, but it would handle the rest with ease..

i had a pii400, 256mb, running firefox, office 2003, utorrent and media player classic with no problems

a fast hard drive, and no antivirus with few background processes goes a long way.
 
Good points there bledd, may I say why they are less applicable in this case.

For one, I run linux. Currently using a standard copy of ubuntu (from a usb stick!) and it's running beautifully, but I was using the atom I'd drop down to puppy or dsl. So operating system responsiveness isn't a big issue. XP without antivirus or firewall seems to have a depressingly short half life for me, I'd rather load Debian and then forget about maintaining it. Running XP from a usb stick is more difficult, and I can't see anything windows offers which linux doesn't here. An atom box isn't going to do games or cad, which is all I use windows for these days.

I was a bit worried about the atom dealing with software raid 5 and gigabit ethernet. I'm hoping mounting the raid remotely will feel as quick as native, and feared the atom would bottleneck large writes significantly. As it's running off a usb stick to free up space, the fast hard drive isn't applicable.

Finally, an atom board with four sata ports is somewhat difficult to find, and one with a raid card offers no expansion possibilities at all. So no wireless, and only one ethernet port.
Finally it's exciting to try amd when I've only previously run Intel. No regrets yet
 
Your power usage will be pretty low - the X2s aren't hungry, as for temps - the true will eat it alive, you should be more worried about defrosting it than cooling it.

Sounds like the 7750 was the right choice :-)
 
S.A.S said:
for me the atom is only good for netbooks while u wanna check some email on the move, nothing else
Click to expand...

It's superb for taking notes in lectures at uni - 8 hour battery life, as portable as a pad of paper and has wifi in case the lecturer is boring :-)

It's also great for doing work while on the bus/train, I use mine when nipping home for the weekend and carrying a full laptop is a pain.

But yeah, unless you're a student they're basically email+web machines - and I'd rather use an iPhone (given the choice) for the 3g access.
 
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