Slashdot Mirror
ASUS P4 Motherboard Bests Intel, Says Sharky
ravedaddy writes: "The Pentium 4 has been out for a few weeks now but with only Intel's own motherboard having come out upon release of the P4, the choice was limited. SE has reviewed of the first Intel 850 based motherboard from ASUS the P4T, which is actually faster than Intel's own. With features including the i850 chipset, a 400MHz FSB, four RIMM slots, ATA/100, five PCI slots and AGP Pro 4x, the ASUS P4T looks formidable. Using this new board, the authors were able to overclock the Pentium 4 1.5GHz easily up to 1.68GHz." Does it seem like the 2nd GHz mark is approaching a lot faster than the first one did?
The article does make reference to an Athlon on a 760 board with DDR RAM at the bottom of this section, and makes note of the fact that the Athlon pretty well matches performance for a better price. I don't think that the authors are biased, maybe they thought the article was encrusted with enough numbers, and trusted readers who wanted to compare to check the relevant review.
Or maybe these guys increased the 400MHz bus to 410 :)
Apologies for the ObAOL, "me too", but I've been using a deeply old Dell PPro180 with FreeBSD 3.x and 4.x for around a year now. And you know what? It goes like a rocket.
:)
Now admittedly it hasn't been too badly abused, it runs headless for a start and I suspect that helps a lot. I also do a lot of work with networks, so disk IO is neither here nor there.
But I do munch a lot of integer numbers (the processor gets really quite hot), and suspect the memory bandwidth gets caned quite heavily. And also beat on the network cards which, incidentally, are i82559's connected via 33MHz PCI. As opposed to that horrendously old fashioned i82557's connected via 33Mhz PCI. Yay progress!
The point is..... there is no point, this is a me too. The PPro was a fundamentally good chip. It still is, and when you bear in mind the not spectacular advances in (for example) system busses and the still earth-shattering cost of gig ethernet, it's a pretty hard business case to push anything with much more power.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Wow, one of the reasons I never liked RDRAM was the seemingly universal concept of only two memory module slots; this is just terrible for expandibility. I'm glad to see a board that can go with four, my favorite number of them.
# debian/rules
I am impressed! 1.68 GHz is 10% faster than 1.5 GHz! Man, that rocks! Woo-hooo!
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Well, yes. If power doubles every 18 months, you would expect this kind of increase in growth over time. It took over a decade to get from 4.77 MHz to 100 MHz, and then look what happened.
Apologies if this gets past the pedantry filter...
Regards,
Tommy
I don't remember ever considering intel boards high performance choices.
Most motherboards reviews generally show intel boards as middle of the road performance wise.
Ok, I'm into more power as much as the next person, but seriously, who needs a personal desktop PC that has clockspeeds of billions of cycles per second? They should be working on how to make it smaller. If they fit a 400Mhz chip in my cell phone, I'd be much happier, than say a Tera-hz machine on my desk.
Although a Thz machine would be pretty nifty.
Part | 1990 | 2000 | Difference
Proc | 286 12MHz | Athlon 1GHz | 83X faster clock
Memory | 1 MB | 128MB | 128X more and faster
HD | 42MB | 60GB | 1500X more and faster
Modem | 2.4kbps | 56kbps | 23.3X faster
Network | none | 100Mbps | 41kX faster than 2400 modem
video | 320x240 256 colors | 1600x1200 2^24 colors | 25X more pixels 2^16X more colors
Make of this what you will, some components have increased in power faster than Moore might have predicted, some slower, but there is no mistake that every single part of the computer has made huge strides in the last decade. It's true that today the processor is less likely to be the bottle neck on a system than 10 year ago, but the performance increase is huge nonetheless.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Intel can't develop it's own DDR or even normal SDRAM motherboard design for months due to a licensing agreement it signed with Rambus.
Asus is using the Intel design for the i850 with a few tweaks, therefore it uses RDRAM.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
People keep pointing to Moore's Law every time Intel ups the Mhz bar, without considering that Moore was referring to transistor density on the mask and not clock speed. Anyway, in the time Moore formed his "law" there were no pipelined architectures or multiple bus speeds... everything was one clock tick per instruction fetch and one bus speed.
I note that the change from 33Mhz to 66Mhz and 120Mhz 486 and Pentium systems were primarily the result of clock doubling and tippling, and not main bus speed advances. This has been the trend across the '90s, which is why as CPU clock speed increased performance enhancements per release cycle diminished. Yeaaaa, we're about to break the barrier with 2Ghz systems that are no more than two to three times faster than my PPRO-200. Big deal. Disk I/O is not significantly faster -- though transfer speed from disk cache is great (so what), FSB memory bus speed is a bit faster, and the main I/O and expansion bus is twice as fast (33Mhz to 66Mhz).
This is not a significant advancement, which is why I'm still using my Dual PPRO-200 system quite happily.
--Maynard
Gees, old news, that ASUS has already been benching p4t's with TomsHardware motherboard test of the P4. Tom has already said that the p4t whopps the Intel board bug time. As usual, ASUS come through again, and this time it's an overclockers dream!
Is it just me or are there a whole lot of hoops you have to jump through to use a P4? A new case, a new PS, a FRIGGIN' 1 POUND heatsink, whack-ass heatsink clips, expensive as hell RIMM memory (does this mean that Intel is giving us a RIMM-job?) and in this motherboard's case, a rubber sheet and a second metal motherboard tray?
;-)
Oy! I guess I'll take my P166 anyday.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Regardless of the specific case Moore was observing, his "law" can be generalized to any number of different technologies. Bandwidth, RAM, storage space, and clockspeed all appear to follow similar curves, though the exact amount of time it takes each to double (six months, 18 months, 2 years, etc.) may be somewhat different, the fact is that "Moore's law" is more than simply a statement about transistor density. It is a general rule of thumb that may be adapted, in some form or another, to fit many developing computer technologies.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Is that just some subtile advertising for Intel or did they forget to benchmark it alongside some Athlon, Alpha, bi- or quadri CPUs boards, etc ?
Well all that this article reads is that the newest P4 ASUS motherboard is quicker than the previous...
Well, the opposite would seriously amaze me.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.