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stay AMD or go PENTIUM

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StevenG said:
are you suggesting 3 screens is overkill??? and nearly 700GB of HDD space ??? these are essentials lol. i dont care it makes my life easy. having 3 screens :D

EDIT: i must admit ive never gone over 1GB of ram... hmmm overkill maybe
1GB is never overkill, now 8GB on an AMD AM2 motherboard would be at this moment in time. Remember Vista needs 512MB ram at the lowest to run, but thats what I heard Steven.
 
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FatRakoon said:
I personally dont run it 24/7 although I have run it on one system for 5 weeks once, but thats purely because I messed up and forgot it was running it.

Usually I run it for maybe an hour or two

5 weeks sounds reasonable :D . But 1-2 hours isn't enough...
I think you have to find a golden middle way :p
 
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No, I dont think so.

While yes, its best to run it as long as you possibly can, and yes, a few hours does not truly give it enough of a run, after that, you know it will have gone through the whole of the RAM, and thats enough in my books.

The thing is, that I have 16 PCs currently in my home, only 7 I admit are setup, but the thing is, that they are 100% realiabe, never crash, never BSOD and to be honest, on my own main PCs ( I have 3 that I use every day - the others are for the kids and when mates come round for a blast ) are on almost 24/7 ( Usually just when I have a lot of video encoding to do for the Ghost hunts we do ) and they are flawless, so I think that my RAM is 100% perfect anyway.

I honestly think, that for myself and the RAM I have, running it for longer than necessary will be a waste of time really.

Like I siad though, dont get me wrong, to do a proper test, a couple of hours isnt enough, but also in the same way, a couple of hours is plenty to tell me pretty much what I already know.

The P4 3.6 however, is an unknown entity and I am planning on setting that up in the bedroom in the next few days and that will be run for a few weeks, but again, thats also been flawless for a shport while, plus its currently my slowest PC @ stock ( I clock the AMDs so I suppose thats cheating, but hey, end justifies the means as they say ). And anyway, that will be priming for a bit cos the RAM ( 4x512MB Samsung PC3200 ) I am thinking of using in one of my AMDs and chucking the OCZ into this one to help give this one a boost, cos as it is, its a poor machine - Only the CPU is ok, the rest of it is slow as hell.

I am waffling arent I?

Tara for now then.
 
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stay with AMD full stop regardless of any CPU intel do purely on an ethical basis. regardless of what CPU Intel makes, INTEL are still a greedy unlawful money grabbing cheating corporate waste of space. hence why i wont buy there CPU`s... Think of it lik buying FairTrade Tea and Coffee... you know its not as good as tetly at times, but its just the right thing to do. ;)
 
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Yeah, stay with AMD.

Dotn know about comparing it to a cuppa, but I know what you are saying there.

My latest PC is a P4 3.6 Prescott 660, I have given it 2GB RAM, its running a 80GB Hitachi for C: ( 8GB with the rest for T: for junk stuff ) D: and E: are both 200GB WD and F: is a 120GB Seagate ( All SATA Drives ) and I also threw in an X800 ( Now @ 850 ) Saphire, and while benches are good, and gaming is ok, the whole system as a whole is still a pile of junk... Considering the money thats gone to it.

The thing is, that its the one and only PCIE System I have, otherwise, I would have ditched it long ago. ( Only got it in March )

In terms of a 1MB SuperPI, its giving me 35 Seconds, which is nice, and I am comparing it to a newcastle 3000, not the fastest system I have, but the closest physically ( lazy git I am cant be bothered to move any other better system closer ) but @ 2.4Ghz, the newcastle gets 36 seconds, and on a 2MB SuperPI run, its about 2 seconds quicker than the P4.

Its not just the CPU as thats perfectly adequete for anythign I want it to do, its everything else that comes with it... This HT stuff is supposed to make going between apps better, but its does not. Open up MS Office 2003 and have 2 or 3 windows open, and then open up Outlook, its slow as hell compared to any of my AMDs ( except the Semprons ) and then try running a half decent gme such as Q4 / D3 / BF2 / HL2 etc and the whoel system starts to die a death, and then shrink them and try mesing with an EMail or somehting and dotn get me wrong here, it does it, but the number of times its grinding to a halt for a split second is disgusting, and yet the AMDs just do it.

This is I recon down to the Motherboard, I will admit that its a poor board, but I am not willing to waste even more money on it just to find out. I dont like the P4 and very soon its going to go.

So anyway, a 3.6Ghz Intel P4 is onyl about the same speed as a 2.4Ghz AMD, and pretty much all of my AMDs happily run at 2.4, and a few go way over that.

I know I could get a better mobo, and will go way over 3.6 on that CPU, but why bother? I would rather just get another AMD Mobo with PCIE as I already have higher.

All in all, I am completely unimpressed with my P4 performance, while I have never been unhappy with any of my AMDs... Except the Sempron 3300 which was gone in less than a day.
 
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Nah... No matter how well I get this CPU, its still limited in many ways.

Its just not doing the tasks as I said earlier, its just too slow going between apps, and I like to have tons of apps all running at once, so if it cannot handle it at 3.6, then it wont be all that much better at 4 or even 4.5 so I cant be bothered with it anymore.

I have to be honest though... I said it before many times, that this Mobo is the real limiter, so perhaps a better mobo will make me change my mind completely, but I have a choice here...

I can risk all, get a Mobo for this and its 50-50 whether I will be happy with it, or get a PCIE Mobo for my x2 4400 and know that I am already runnign faster than this P4 is, or will ever be, plus I can clock it way further anyway.

Besides, I am an AMD fan more than Intel, so making my main PC an Intel is sort of going against the grain a little.
 
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juno_first said:
What worries me about Conroa is not all software uses multithreading; even todays games & we all know how naff a single Intel is at 2.4 or even 3.6 Ghz.

Yeah, I found that out in MArch when I got this...

Great Benchmarks, but naff real-life use.

---

Hey, while I am here... What temp is the CPU supposed to be at?

Its a Prescott 3.6Ghz 660
 
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Just done a small and basic test... Not quite real world, but still gives an idea of how the PC copes with a list of jobs.

I did the EXACT same thing on both PCs in the very same order. As I have all my PCs setup in very much the way way, with the same Desktop same Apps etc, I think its a close to fair test as I can do in many ways.

Here are the PCs as they stand right at this very minute...

Intel :-
MB = Asus P5GD1-FM
CPU = P4 3.6Ghz Prescott 660 ( HT Enabled )
RAM = 4x512MB Samsung PC3200
GFX = Saphire x800 @ x850
Audio = Audigy 2 ZS

AMD :-
MB = DFI LanParty 250GB UT
CPU = Newcastle 3000 @ 2.4
RAM = 2x512MB Corsair XMS4400 TwinX
GFX = Leadtek 6800GT
Audio = Audigy 1 LS

In order to make the test a bit fairer, I have a pair of WD200GB Sata Drives, and so, I have thrown XP Home SP2 onto both of them its a fresh install, no more than about an hour old each... I have updated all the drivers, but I have NOT doen any updates, nor are they activated ( Cos they will be wiped tomorrow and their own OS put back on )

Here is what I did

From the desktop, I double-clicked on...

3DMark 2000, 2001, 03 and 05
UnReal Tournament ( Classic ) and then UT 2004
I then clicked on FarCry, and then Quake 4
I then ran AdAware SE, SpyBot S&D, Noadware and Spyware Doctor.

Now, I did all of this as quick as I could, I moved the icon so they were all going down the right hand side of the desktop... This makes no difference in speed as such, but it was just to allow me to double click on them all as quickly as I could.

I did it first on the P4 and then on the AMD...

The AMD brought everythign up in somehtign like about 25-30 seconds, the P4 seems to be hanging there, but I can move the mouse every so often, and the display is still definitely trying to load up more thigns.

The games on the AMD come up, they obviously take priority and I have just played a round in UT Classic ( Morpheus - Skilled - 7 bots ) and had 180-220FPS just fine, no glitches or slowness of any kind.

I quit it, and up came UT2K4, I quit that and FarCry, and then I quit all the 3DMarks and not once did it have any kind of lag in any way. As soon as the last App closed, I double clicked on UT2K4 again and it came up in less than a second.

The P4 however, still has not loaded up any game at all, although it looks like UT Classic is in a fullscreen window at the back ,but the mouse movement is so poor, that I have tried to click on the window, but I dont yet know if it is bringing it up to the front.

TaskManager is showing that UT2K4 and 3DMark2001 are both taking up 50% of the CPU, and that I have not yet taken up 1GB of the RAM, and its definitely updating that as you can see the free memory changing all the time.

----

About 8 minutes into it now, and UT Classic has just displayed the PRECACHING message just before it launches into the game-start demo, so, I have ALT-TABBED and the popup window has come up but nothing seems to be chaning on that yet.

---

Further 4 minutes later, and Taskmanager is back and I am sort of able to move the mouse and highlight the apps, so I am killing off UT2K4 and 3DMark2001, but the system, while better, is still unresponsive, so I have killed off the rest of the 3DMark apps.

So far, the P4 has taken about 15 minutes to fail to start up what the AMD started up, allowed me to play UnReal Tournament with the other junk going on in the background, and then quit everything and then reload UT2K4, dump that into the background, and then type all of this...

And like I said, the P4 is still trying to start some things up!

This P4 is perhaps the most pathetic PC I have seen in a very long time. with the exception of a Celeron.

Its got 50% faster CPU ( In HZ that is ), 400% bigger Cache, 100% more RAM, same HD and yet its so much slower under load than the AMD, and yet the AMD is only a Newcastle, so its far slower than some of my others, its just the Newcastle is right next to the Intel, otherwise I would have used one of my real AMDs.

Utter pathetic.

Given a choice between a fairly top end P4 or a Mid-range AMD, then I would go for the AMD anyday.
 
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