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AMD And THG update
Mhrmnhrm writes "In the interests of responsible journalism, the gang over at Tom's Hardware has developed this article in the interests of setting the record straight about their original AMD burn-out video, and the new release (possibly from AMD) of this past week. It would seem that BOTH videos are correct, and that the question of whether or not somebody is hiding something depends entirely upon your own point of view."
So both articles are right adn wrong? THW used the basic setup most of us would use, while AMD used extra hardware? hmmm ok then............
"Nevertheless, it must be said that the facts as shown in the video remain plausible and can be reproduced at any time. At the moment, none of the mainboard manufacturers offer a solution to this. Even highly reputable companies such as Asus and Gigabyte offer no support for this particular problem. "
Cruise TT
AMD should have given the specs on the thermal diode to the mobo manufacturers well before the release of the chip, so it could be implemented in the motherboards that are out at the time of the chip release. It does much less good to tell them later, as they must amke costly revisions to already designed boards.
It is much more likely for a fan to die on the heatsink, than for the heatsink to fall off on its own. Someone should do a test to see if this also causes chip failure or if the sensors on the motherboard can shut down the computer before anything is damaged. The results would mean a lot more to actual users.
But in the end - its really not an issue. Yes, existing Athlon owners are at a SLIGHT risk of failure if their heatsinks fall off (I'd love to see REAL stats on how often THAT happens) But in the end, its still cheaper to replace your Athlon once than to go with an equivalent Pentium 4. So lets be glad AMD listened to the folks at Tom's Hardware - realized they were getting a black eye, and did something about it. Hopefully in a few months we can buy mobos with the Maxim chip safty valve or some tryp of clock throttler. Then the Pentium freaks will have to argue over real stuff like benchmarks and performance instead of making snide comments about Athlons burning you house down.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I say good work to 'em. It seems THG was correct all along, but I couldn't detect the faintest sense of gloating or grandstanding in their article. They've pointed out a fairly big problem with some of AMD's chips, AMD have responded with new info to MOBO manufacturers (who will no doubt consider this new feature fairly important after the attention the orriginal article on THG received). Great. No threats of legal action by either side (AFAIK), no finger pointing, no FUD. Now if everyone could behave like this......
Remember that thing with the IBM hard drives ? I still don't know who to believe.
I think this problem is only going to get worse. In the interests of responsible journalism, could someone at slashdot investigate, and actually come to an editorial conclusion ? The truth is out there, I just don't have time to sift through all the spin and hype to get at it.
Who does ?
In the more common case of the CPU fan failing, the CPU will heat up more slowly. Hence the other protection mechanisms in the CPU will be used, and the user will get a chance to save their data.
However, AMD should have designed the safety circuit they have shown off in the article INTO the actual CPU itself, so it can save itself. And it should save itself by basically clocking itself down to 100MHz or slower, so that data loss does not occur and the user can save their data. Hopefully this will be implemented in a future revision of the CPU.
However, the instances of CPU heatsinks falling off are extremely rare, and probably attributable to either a poor initial fitting of the heatsink, or a bad socket with a weakened retention mechanism. In a tower case, the heatsink would probably fall onto the graphics card or spring onto the memory and damage these anyway...
Yes, it would have been nice if existing motherboards did it, but at least AMD didn't bury their heads in the sand and ignore the issue completely once it was pointed out to them.
No, I don't want a free iPod
... the video released by AMD that showed no overheating problems? I didn't spend the time/bandwidth downloading it, but IIRC the claim was that it showed Quake3 running even after the heatsink was removed.
This is contradictory to the claim that AMD's fix is to close-down the motherboard.
The Tom's Hardware Article, although it was informative as TH articles usually are, made no comment on this video. Does it exist? What did it really show?
Enjoy Y2K? Roll-on Year 2037!
it should be integrated into the cmos to choose if you want to shut off the power instantly, or throttle the cpu to a lower speed and managable temp to let the system shut down properly. I'm sure a 1.5GHz cpu could function at a low temp if reset to a 66mhz bus (or even 33) and lower multiplier, just enough power to save any data and exit gracefully.
:P
then again, isnt that what intel got bashed for doing with their p4? i'm not sure on the specifics of the why's how's and when's of p4's power throttle, all i remember is people pointing at p4 and saying "bad". Doesnt sound so bad now tho.
I imagine the most important point to any failsafe like that is letting the user know clearly why exactly their computer shut down, or is running incredibly slow. maybe having the soundcard play some 70's pron music in the background would be a good enough indication that something is getting too hot?
I think they're taking this a tad too seriously...
s tr ike-01.html
www.tomshardware.com/column/01q4/011029/counter
Several things strike me as odd about this "news" (2nd article) and the first article which spawned it.
;)
-"Siemens assured us that the thermal protection circuitry is definitely working on their motherboard." (1st article)
Well, it did not work anyway, whoops. And therefore AMD must be at fault here?
-"We rushed to the telephone to confer with Siemens. The engineers assured us that what we had seen was for real. The thermal diode of Palomino is unable to react quickly enough. Only 1 degree/s is what the thermal diode is able to handle." (1st article)
Okay, they check with Siemens. Why not have a chat with AMD? If the thermal diode can only work this slow, why can the AMD engineers make a working shutdown with a common electrical component?
-"AMD showed us how all Palomino CPUs could be protected against overheating with relatively little effort." (2nd article)
Wonder why Siemens could not make this? They where the ones who claimed that the MB would protect againt meltdown, and that it worked. AMD said that the thermal diode worked. And showed it on a modified MB, which have no protection from the start.
THG is making a big fuss, about a somewhat minor problem. And THG was too biased against AMD, I can only hope I was biased enough the other way
And what is up with this "We saved the hardware manufactors and you" theme in the 2nd article?
Are they losing commercial revenue?
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Toms hardware originaly covered this. Whilst the majority of problems you will experience is a failed fan and therefore a slower temperature rise. The issue of whole heatsinks falling off is becoming more of an issue as CPU's get faster they get hotter, hotter means bigger headsink/fan systems. Bigger means *heavier*, Heavier means the little plasic bits that the sink is clipped to can break!
-- Vagnerr - (www.vagnerr.com) Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
AMD zone also has an update on this story. The most interesting thing (to me) is that they have a 2nd video that show the P4 shuts down. With possible data loss like the modified XP tom was shown in munich.
OK, I suppose I want to see AMD as the good guys here, since I love their products. Even so - I can see how things could spin a little more in their favour if you're inclined to be generous.
Firstly, let me say that I belive that thermal protection integrated into the CPU, like to P4 has, would have been the best way to go - but then we'd all be complaining about how expensive the new Athlons are, wouldn't we? AMD give us lots of grunt for our dollars, and we can't expect them to pack every little feature into the CPU for the great prices they give us, any more than we can expect Apple to sell us an iPod for 50 bucks.
Now, the original article at Tom's has the following interesting quote ...
We rushed to the telephone to confer with Siemens. The engineers assured us that what we had seen was for real. The thermal diode of Palomino is unable to react quickly enough. Only 1 degree/s is what the thermal diode is able to handle.
I pointed this out the other day, too. A Siemens Engineer was consulted. Excuse me? An AMD CPU just fried itself on a Siemens-made board, and they don't ask the CPU manufacturer why it happened - they ask the board manufacturer. That's not where I'd be directing my enquiries if I was doing the test.
Now AMD prove that with a simple external board, everything shuts down and saves the CPU - just like we'd want to happen. To me, this suggests that the thermal diode has no problems reacting in time, and that maybe the board manufacturers screwed up or cut some corners when they were developing support for it.
It's understandable, for the same reason AMD didn't pack the chip full of power management goodies. Keeping costs down on goods that are bought by very price-conscious buyers looking for maximum performance at the best price. They implemented support that was adequate for a fan failure, which is the most likely thing that'll happen in real life. They could well have decided that a simpler circuit was all that was necessary, since a heatsink isn't likely to fall off.
Most likely we'll never know the full sotry. Everyone will blame everyone else, and in a year or so we'll forget all about it because the hardware will be obsolete. We'll have new problems. In the meantime, everyone has the message that they should be careful that they install their CPU cooling devices properly. AMD will recover from any negative press. Hell, Intel put out a bunch of CPUs that couldn't do Math at one point, and they survived. :)
Wasting your time since 1997.
There is no stability problems for the AMD CPUs. RDRAM is prohibitively expensive. SSE2 is hardly supported anywhere - Hammer will support them. DDR has much better bandwidth utilisation specs than RDRAM, it can use 70% of the available bandwidth whilst RDRAM can only use 45% of the theoretical bandwidth.
Wooo, a 10% overclock. That is nothing to should about. I would worry about the cooling mechanism that has to be bolted onto the board, bending the board in the process. Looks at VansHardware.com for some more information about the problems with the Intel P4 and chipsets.
Let me get this straight - no, really. If I remove the apparatus that helps to cool something down, its temperature will go UP? Increased temperatures might cause something to melt?
I really don't see the rocket science in all of this. Heat sinks are strapped down to your CPU by a firm metal clip for a reason - they are necessary to keep your CPU cool - and by 'cool' I mean 'functioning'. Run a current through a thin piece of metal and the metal heats up. Physics. Try it yourself with some thin copper wire and a 9V battery.
Motherboards that are equipped to switch off when things get too hot would be great, but how many of you have had your heat sinks fall off? I am guessing a very small percentage - hardly worth the economic cost of equipping all motherboards with the sensor device. (Remember, that cost will just filter down to us anyway, so you might as well buy the device separately if you are worried.) If you're kicking your PC down the stairs twice a day, it might be worth investing in a little protection, but chances are you've got other worries by that point.
Tom's site has to be the single best example of independent oversight via the web. One more example of the internet showing its shregnth of fighting corporate ass-covering FUD. It's just amazing what started as a one man web project can do to get the truth out. Last I heard, Tom really isn't a doctor, but he sure has earned the respect of netizens and corporations alike.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
First of all, there is nothing wrong with AMD processors and never has been in terms of design and engineering (certainly from K5 upwards). Intel, however, have had to recall their chips on at least one occasion, unlike AMD.
It is true that once upon a time some chipsets (particularly VIA) for AMD processors were unstable. But this is simply not the case any more.
Before anyone thinks of getting a P4, they should check this out:
http://www.emulators.com/pentium4.htm
it shows how badly Intel broke the P4, and why it's so much worse both in terms of value for money and speed than the new Palomino core Athlons. And yes, this far outweighs the benefits of SSE2 instructions.
Tom's shows what happens if you use any Athlon
with any currently available motherboard.
While it's correct, it's like griping about no RDRAM support on an Athlon board. The feature isn't supported by the motherboard yet. End of story.
The AMD video shows what happens when you use an Athlon with a thermistor in motherboard that has the Power Now thermistor support..
And while it's also correct, it's basically vaporware until such a board debuts.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Mod up parent.
This is exactly the reason I feel much more comfortable using an Athlon, than I was right after the original, alarming Tom's article.
Sigged!
Toms stated:
t e_papers_and_tech_docs/24309.pdf). The fact that most MB manufactures doesn't use the diode might tell something about the likelihood of the cpufan falling off!!
"In conclusion: as a result of our findings in the Hot Spot video AMD decided to consider finding a solution to protect its CPUs from overheating and the company wants to bring it to the market"
, but the fact is that the Athlon XP have had a thermal diode from the beginning (http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/whi
Thomas S. Iversen
While I've followed the Athlon performance discussions with no little amount of awe, I've been frustrated by the heat issues and the related power consumption. Due to reasons beyond my control, heat, relatively speaking, is an environmental issue where I work. Humongous HFC's aren't the ideal solution to this problem IMO.
;-) VIA's latest C3 (800Mhz) looks technically "cool" but it understandably lacks DDR support and tick-for-tick its performance still sucks compared to the K7 designs by AMD.
Recently I've started pondering whether it would be possible to take one of the newer Palominos (eXPee+ series Athlon) and underclock it (e.g. from 1,333Mhz to 1Ghz or even lower) via the multiplier and voltage while keeping the external bus speeds (which aren't part of the heat problem) intact or even slightly overclocked.
Has anyone studied the underclocking opportunities of Palominos with the latest mainboards? Waiting for the move to a 13 micron silicon-on-insulator process is starting to get on my nerves.
Also, does anyone know if the upcoming "finer" Athlons will be compatible with the mainboards on sale today?
Or should I just give up on AMD and go for a P4 when the DDR-boards become available?
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Yeah, that explains all the Pentium 4 ads that were on his page when he did the original article.
I hope you didn't spend too much time working on that reply. A simple word replace would do quite well.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Their whole point is to be cheap crap. nVidia doesn't even have a product out yet, and when they do it will be version 1.0, so don't even start talking about quality, stability and reliability.
You made the original posters point for him, one should be wary of AMD systems because of their lack of quality motheroards.
I just finished my first week with my AMD 1.4 TBird. I've had to make a lot of changes to the system, as I was having heat issues. I rely on sites like THW and AnAndTech, but now I'm confused. I read that story THW did, and I downloaded the "AMD" video. Why is it so freakin hard to find out the truth about something?
Um, this is my sig.
Intel stuff is just better engineered.
That statement is not supported by most benchmarks I've seen (excluding quake demos).
I have both Intel and AMD based machines and I'm not seeing any discrepancy in stability as measured by crash rates - Windows will as happily crash on the Pentium as it will the Athlon. As long as you cool the AMD properly and feed it clean power, it does just fine. Cheapo cooling and/or power supplies will break any cpu.
The bottom line for me is stability.
The bottom line for me is stability and performance. In my business (I grade children's arithmetic tests), I need all the fpu performance the Athlon can deliver and I'm not particularly inclined to pay 3 times the price for equivalent performance. Nor am I about to rewrite my code to take advantage of proprietary sse2 instructions to get that performance either.
Tom's site is known to be a "take a stand" site where Tom and crew are looking to piss on whatever company didn't send them a reviewer sample quickly enough (how many times has a bad review started with "We barely have time just because they just sent us the board. All the other sites got theirs last week. Wahhh! Wahhhh! RESPECT MY AUTHORITY: I AM THE TOM!"), or because someone didn't return their phone call, etc. They're like some sad gang of retaliation experts looking for an axe to grind. It's like the National Enquirer of hardware sites.
dont they keep on playing (Q3) for several more minutes after they shut down the cooling mechanism in the alledged AMD video ??
If the power is cut off abruptly, it makes no sense, the new AMD modified board detects the extra heat and shuts of the power, and according to THG the processor would fry withing seconds, so how did they play for several more minutes ???
"Yes, existing Athlon owners are at a SLIGHT risk of failure if their heatsinks fall off (I'd love to see REAL stats on how often THAT happens)"
This happens a lot with computers that are shipped (eg from Dell, etc). Thats probably one of the reasons why Dell doesn't do AMD, replacing all the chips that get fried by a heatsink coming off in shipping would be a lot more expensive.
(and I've had this happen to me before actually, although it was with a P3, which of course didn't fry because Intel put some thought into the design)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
That's nice, but better engineering hasn't translated into significantly better performance, has it?
I Dont know of any hardware site that says that an AMD cpu + some AMD or VIA motherboard can even approach the stability of Intel CPU+chipset.
Even if that is true (and that's certainly debateable) I can tell you first-hand that all of my Athlon systems, and my friends Athlon systems as well (including my friends Athlon 1.4 GHz which currently acts as his main server) is rock-solid stable. At least as stable as any Intel platform. On Windows 2000/XP it has only hard-crashed a handful of times ... as far as i'm concerned, the superior stability of the Intel platform is a myth.
My current box is a P4 2GHz (socket 478), Intel 850MV motherboard (tho an Asus P4T is probably just as good), 512Mb PC800 DRDRAM. It runs Linux and FreeBSD very well.
My Athlon runs Linux just as well as any Intel chip. I'd take my AthlonXP 1.4 GHz over your system any day of the week.
I'd urge Linux users not to dismiss Intel chips out of hand. You do pay for quality. Remeber these chips have SSE2 instructions (which even XPs dont have and probably never will), the thermal diode *IS* a kill switch here -- you will not burn them up, much greater memory bandwith than with DDR, they overclock decently (you can usually get 200MHz above spec), and benchmark very well.
You pay for quality? Well, in some cases yes. But in my opinion if you buy an Intel platform these days you are throwing your money away. Let's pick apart the issues you've stated, shall we?
1. SSE2 instructions. A nice boost to performance, but can you name anything that actually supports them (hell, can you name anything which supports SSE?) which isn't called Quake 3? Very few applications support SSE2 or even the years-old vanilla SSE instructions. By the way, the Hammer line of CPU's will support SSE2 instructions, so it isn't totally out of the question that future Athlons may support them as well, though i'm wondering why they would bother if no developers optimize their applications for it.
2. Heat issues. I'll give you that one, at least. If you want to pay twice the amount of cash for better thermal protection (which will eventually be solved on the AMD platform in the future) by all means. Like others have pointed out, it is pretty rare that a HSF will fail or fall off. I've personally never had it happen, but that doesn't mean it never does.
3. Greater memory bandwidth. Is this really relevant if it doesn't really translate into better performance in most situations? It's like your previous comment about the Intel platforms superior engineering -- what does it really matter if real-world performance isn't as good as its nearest competitors offering?
4. Overclockability. 200 MHz above spec? That's probably the equivalent of a 75 MHz increase in clock speed on an Athlon CPU. Sorry, I don't believe that's worth paying the extra money for.
Definitely go with i850 and RDRAM, the 845 is meant for low-end situations and doesnt perform nearly as well.
Of course not. And do not settle for anything less than PC800 either because it will drastically cripple the performance.
The bottom line for me is stability -- I dont think AMD can match Intel CPUs and chipset for that. Look in the Linux kernel source code -- VIA chipsets have many PCI quirks that Intel boards just dont have.
It can match the Intel platform in terms of stability, and it does. I am not a programmer, but any quirkiness with the Via platform hasnt' affected my experience with the Athlon platform in any way, shape or form whether I am using Windows, Linux or whatever else.
-- Jim
What i did see on the P4 video:
-It first slowed down.
--> This indicates some thermal protection is available. Or what part of the thermal protections are you reffering?
-It shuts down after some time .
--> you did expect a cloud like tom's AMD procs?
And according to the intel link you posted this is exactly what should happen. Seems like tomsh P4 did not run hot enough (135C) to completely shutdown.
You do pay for quality
Like Microsoft products? I do think that the Pentium III was a very good chip (certainly better than the old AMD k6), but right now, I would take an AMD processor over any Intel. Check out this article for a good read on the subject.
Have you even read Toms for the past month? Read his article on the AthlonXP CPU's ... read his articles on the Tualatin and the P4 2 GHz ... all of these are in the span of 3 months. Yeah, Tom changes sides whenever AMD and Intel one-up each other, huh?(sarcasm) It would be nice if you had actual evidence to back up these baseless claims of yours.
-- Jim
On Ace's Hardware, this subject is discussed thoroughly the last days. An interesting article can be found here. Some thoughts from this article:
- the component needed for proper protection of the cpu costs $0.85 (in quantities of 1K).
- "Obviously, Siemens used an external temperature probe and tried to pass it off as using the internal diode."
- The reaction time of the thermal diode is certainly not 1 degree/second: "At our worst case rise of 300C/sec, that translates to a response time of less than 1ms. No way would this result in a fried CPU if power off is immediate upon the signal occurring."
For a matter of fact, an engineer told a friend of mine it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to develop a thermal diode with such characteristics (1 degree/sec response time).
You can find the main thread of this article here.
As you've probably seen in the video (and no, it isn't a fake, this issue has also been reported by german computer mags), when removing the cooler the cpu's core _melts_. At a temperature noone would expect anything else.
When your cooler suddenly stops cooling, this will force you to buy a new cpu, and probably also a new mainboard. Even if the computer is stopped after 2 or 3 seconds.
And the problem is - you can't build in two coolers. Modern servers have multiple power supplies, voltage regulators etc pp. But when your cooler stops, just for 4 or 5 seconds, you can throw away your cpu and mainboard. And that's not cheap if it's a multiprocessor board. Hope you have a good guarantee arrangement.
If there is any company out there with even an ounce of marketing savvy, they will create an adapter board that contains the thermal protection circuit. It will plug into any motherboard's CPU socket and the Athlon XP/MP will plug into it. If they want to add more pizazz to it, they can add an alarm beeper, LEDs, or a temperature readout.
Think of the number of potential customers! There's a huge market of upgraders out there -- people with existing boards into which they'd like to plug an Athlon XP. Then there are server guys who have so many systems that failures are statistically guaranteed. With this device, they'd just have to replace a fan/heatsink. Without it, they've got to install a whole new CPU.
I just got an athlon 1.4 GHz and the freaking heat sink is the size of a softball and the CPU fan makes more noise than a Pratt & Whitney JT-8D jet engine. I'd KNOW when the fan stopped blowing.
It is funny how people will talk about the instability of AMD chips, but never mention that they've even used one. I personally will only buy AMD for now because they are cheaper and have more power than anything Intel has to offer. So I conscede that I don't have any of the top of the line chips, but I can argue quality and stability any day. I personally run a Duron 800@1000 and a Thunderbird 800@880 stable 18 hours a day every day. Never had a crash in Linux yet. So whose fault is it if you can't get an AMD chip stable?
:)
Look in the Linux kernel source code -- VIA chipsets have many PCI quirks that Intel boards just dont have.
What does that have to do with anything? Since when does a PCI quirk that is patched have anything to do with stability/quality/performance? If it is patched, it doesn't matter! Furthermore, since when is VIA = AMD? I thougt you were saying AMD wasn't stable? Oh wait.. you're contradicting yourself. Not only does AMD make chipsets, but so does SIS and ALi. Oh wait.. that means there isn't a monopoly and you aren't paying for overpriced chipsets.. sorry
BTW, if you have a P4 2gig, I'm sorry. Likely you paid $600 for it, and I could have bought a dual AMD mobo and a pair of 1.4 giggers for the same price of your single CPU. Now do you want to talk performance?
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
I've been purchasing AMDs ever since I breached the 200MHz barrier. I absolutely love them, but yes, there are quirks in the chipsets you have to be aware of. Especially the VIA chipsets - yuck.
:)
Imagine my surprise when I had to purchase a new sound card because of conflicts with the video card, which only existed in VIA systems! Installing that 4-in-1 IRQ routing driver crap is no fun either. Also, I've had to rebuild my system a couple of times because the motherboard resources unexpectedly shift assignments on Windows somewhere, and cause IRQ conflicts all over the place. On jumperless PnP systems no less.
It's a lot like balancing an elephant on the head of a pin. On the other hand, when everything is worked out and in place, the system works great, and I see the improvements in internal streamlined archetecture win out over the GHTz mythos. The problem of stability then shifts over to the OS, and as another poster already mentioned, Windows seems to happily and flawlessly execute the Random Crash Instruction Set in any hardware environment.
AMD is for people who have a passing interest in mucking about with hardware, and as far as I remember, they've never denied that fact. In fact, you almost have to be a hardware monkey to use AMD, since Intel in overwhelmingly favored by the Big Names That Build Computers. The benefits of being a hardware monkey are worth it, and, speaking just for myself, I've learned a lot. I feel much more comfortable buying parts to make and upgrade my own machine than I do trying to figure out what's Dell or Gateway decided to put in their systems this week. Plus, I've got 24-hour tech support, right inside my head.
Tatsujin
The car is clearly defective since the wheels fell off when I removed the lug nuts.
And what's worse is that my drink tasted awful when I slurped it out of the carpet.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Small problem: how are you going to get the heat sink to fit with an adapter board between the CPU and the socket? I think you could actually increase the chance of frying your CPU because you'd have to have a more complicated (and therefore more failure-prone) heat sink mounting mechanism.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
So, how long you been working for Intel?
C-X C-S
While, I was setting up my dual Athlon system. I wanted to test system with just one processor in it. So, I took the fan off and forgot to remove the processor. The processor fried in under 2 seconds. It was my dumb mistake so instead of returning the processor, I bought a new one.
After this recent news, maybe it wasn't my fault. Who's responsible? Am I for making such a dumb mistake or AMD for not providing good thermal protection?
Heck even milspec doesn't exceed 4 digit precision in many cases...
Of course, when I was a kid we weren't plotting intercept courses for asteroids in 2nd grade
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Am in the process of building an AMD 1.4 (spaceheater) box and will use a Swiftech 462 heatsink that bolts to the mobo. Which should pretty well eliminate the possibility of it falling off!
In light of the THG article, I may even replace the cpu fan frequently.
And then I will cease to worry about it
AMD works for me, and the price is right.
I have a P3 1ghz, and an AMD 1.4ghz.
On BOTH PC's I do not need to load chipset drivers. Windows and Linux handle them both just fine.
HOWEVER, they BOTH lack in system performance until you load the most up-to-date driver, be it from Intel, or VIA.
With both chipsets I noticed approximately a 33% performance gain (in gaming, 3d mind you) when loading a 3rd party chipset driver.
So in short, both chipsets are supported by the OS, but both chipsets perform much better on a 3rd party driver. This makes your statement even more void than I previously thought it to be.
If the fan stops working? Mine doesnt, I buy a quality fan, on both my Intel and AMD. OEM fans are a piece of sh!t.
I LAN party alot, my PC sees lots of road time and bumps and jars. Never once has my fan failed, or my heatsink fallen off.
I think since AMD is outperforming the 2.0ghz P4 these days, the heat issue is the only excuse that is left for the Intel fans to hang on.
This is an arguement that will never end, I urge users to try both AMD and Intel, buy QUALITY hardware on each, and then make the decision. If you do not have the $$$ to do that, see if a friend owns and AMD or and Intel. Ask them what they like, and do not like, contrast, compare. Nobody preaching is going to sway you to one side or another, go see for yourself, and make your OWN educated decision.
Thanks,
Neil
Not to mention that if Intel did come out with a better product, I would EXPECT him to switch sides.
Tom was an Intel freak back in the old days. His opinion was basically "If you want performance, buy a Pentium MMX. AMD's chips are nice, but not nice enough." When AMD got the Athlons out, he started recommending them. If Intel comes out with something that beats the Athlon, then I would hope he'd recommend Intel again.
Tom continues to to promote AMD because he thinks that they're better than the P4 (and I agree). Now a days the reasons are a little more complex though.
In the previous two generations of PC hardware, things were a lot simpler. Back when all CPU's were socket 7, Intel chipsets were vastly, vastly superior to the competition, and there was really no reason to use anything else, ever. Intel's CPU's didn't have a specific relibiliy advantage, but they were always a year ahead of AMD in the speed department. Then came Socket 1 vs Super 7. Intel's P2's wern't that far ahead of the K6-2, but the BX chipset was amazing, and it was worth getting a celery or P2 to use it.
Nowadays, there is no BX. IMO every chipset sucks now (I'm still using a BX myself, currently with a celery 850). Intel chipsets cripple themselves with rambus, and the competition is only in the last six months or so really reaching Intel Quality. Again IMO, an ideal situation would be an Athlon in an i815, but of course that's not possible.
If the nForce turns out to be all that and a bag of chips, we'll finally get some homogeny back. But for now we have a bunch of CPU's with no clear leader until you look at price, and a slew of chipsets that frankly make me want to cry.
I love how your bottom line is stability and how well tested the platform is...
but you overclock your PIV's to 200MHz above spec.
Yep, it seems to me that Intel CPUs handle bad power much better than AMD equivalents. It really doesn't matter when you get a decent power but cheap PCs are usually equipped with el cheapo power supplies - as well as with [almost] broken memory. Sometimes this gets AMD bad name for no reason.
Nor am I about to rewrite my code to take advantage of proprietary sse2 instructions to get that performance either.
AFAIK, Hammer supports SSE2 so you should at least start to think supporting it. As I see it SSE+SSE2 is going to kill x87. Athlons look really cheap though... perhaps I should upgrade my Duron 650?
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
A dead fan will trap heat in the space between heatsink fans and effectively turn the heatsink into a heater. It will heat up your chip.
This is actually a specific point of failure that notebook manufacturers try to avoid. Rather than placing a fan ontop of a heatsink, they try to induce airflow across a heatsink. Thus if it fails, at least you aren't heating up your part, you just aren't providing much airflow.
The socket for the CPU, whether on the adapter board or on the mainboard, will still have tabs for mounting a heatsink. The adapter could even, itself, be attached to the mainboard via the mainboard socket tabs.
Look at the design of PGA-to-slot adapters made to allow use of Socket 370 CPUs in mainboards designed for Slot 1 CPUs. You mounted the CPU on the board, the heatsink on the CPU, and the board in the slot. Worked fine. Look at the products to adapt CPUs from one family to another. These support voltage regulation and the use of a heatsink. (They are a stupid waste of money in almost all consumer PCs, but they point out the mechanical viability of such a solution.)
In fact, this would be a particularly easy one as there would need to be no significant offset between the two sockets. You only need to connect to four pins (3.3v, gnd, 2-pin thermal diode). The "output" could be a jumper to the two-pin power switch connector the motherboard. Problem solved.
hmm, well it IS in the data sheet: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white _papers_and_tech_docs/24309.pdf
I also design PCBs for a job and when I use a chip, I check the datasheet first...
Page 35!
I just want to say that the Thermal diode info was on the AMD site from BEFORE they sold any palominos... now it is just as if Tom has reinvented the wheel... If a mobo manufacturer does not read the datasheet (see the link a few messages up) of the chip they are designing for.... my god... and now AMD has to point the obvious out AGAIN...
I'm still running 2 dual PIIs, they are great. But Intel missmarkets there RAM speed, PC3200 @ 4 bits wide bus I belive. vs. PC133 @ 64 bits wide (on my Asus A7Pro) 12800 vs. 8512 for non DDR. Hmm which is faster now? After all the trouble I had supporting i810's and i815's I'll never get a i8xx chipset with the possable execption of the i840. The KT133 and my XP1500 work fine together @1Ghz. Intel has shot them selves in the foot with there new hub arch. The THG video showed that P4's are great, small form factor and throttelling, for a Palm.
I read the first article and was quite impressed by the P4's performance of just going on at a slower clockrate. I also found it quite informative, that an Athlon might not only fry itself, but also the motherboard or even start a fire. The point is quite valid, that the heatsink might fall off during transport (although i suppose one would hear the loose heatsink rattling in the case) and will take a little more care with present CPU/Mobo combinations.
Let's not forget, that the throttling technique got some critique when it became known, mainly because the user wouldn't know about it, and it seemed a cheap way for intel to resolve heat problems with the P4. Toms article showed, that the throttling is quite a good feature to have (it would be even better, if there was a way of notifying the user without counting clockticks). So the first thing i thought after reading Toms first article was: "will AMD something similar, and when?". Now the followup shows, that AMD is aware of the problem, and is willing to spend some effort to offer solutions.
While the Motherboard-solution is more like a quick hack useful enough for present boards and AMD-CPUs, i expect something built into the CPU next time (at least a sudden shutdown should be possible, altering clockspeed at runtime might be a different story, and probably takes some haggling about patented technology with intel).
In conclusion i think things are as they should be: the test has made AMD aware of the fact, that protecting the CPU from overheating is a feature customers want, and they set to work on it and offered a quick solution after a few weeks. Noone tried to ban the story from toms site and people actually got together and talked about the problem without shifting responsibility around.
I still think the Athlon has the better bang for the buck, but i won't mind shelling out a little more money for a mobo with overheat protection.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
VIA chipsets still do have stability problems. Particularly with AGP video cards - VIA's AGP implementations always have and still do stink in terms of reliability & compatibility compared to Intel's, or probably even AMD's.
Seems like VIA puts out new AGP drivers every week, and yet people still have problems trying to get their video cards to not lock up in games, etc.
All I've got to say is I tip my hat to both THG and AMD. THG for running the tests and showing the truth, and AMD for actually listening. Neither one of them seemd to have go into a media tissy over this which is one hell of a change after hearing about the likes of Microsoft And Intel. In case any AMD peoples are reading this post, I am even more firm than I was yesterday about how great AMD chips are, and that everyone and their mothers should buy an AMD, and say to hell with Intel on the desktop. Intel costs nearly 3 times as much, and it's performance often times is just a "bit" ahead of AMD or a "bit" behind. Which doesn't justify the extra 400 bucks to spend on a CPU. This CPU meltdown thing was the only thing so far that has waivered my opinions of AMD Athlons, but even with this critical problem, considering the price I bought the CPU for, even if mine eventually does fry, I'm sure not going to have to cry about it. Intel is for those that run x86 mission-critical servers, and those not in the know. AMD is for those hardcore l33t gamorz in the know. Anyway just blowing smoke now. GOOD JOB THG & AMD!!!
I don't see that as 'taking sides', however. As a hardware reviewer he has a responsibility to recommend what he sees is a better solution for his readers. He is doing this as an impartial reviewer, not as some closed-minded fanboy. I know he has been accused of this many times on these boards and I have yet to see any real evidence presented by anyone who makes this claim.
-- Jim
Since this whole incident is over the unlikely event that the heatsink falls off the chip, why not have a jumper on the motherboard tethered to the heatsink? That way when the heatsink falls, the jumper pops off, and the mobo responds.
I first thought the mobo could also set off an alarm but then figured the loud thunk and subsequent cracking produced by a 5 lb heatsink crashing and knocking out the PCI cards beneath it would bring enough attention the the problem. That and the screen suddenly going out as the video card gets annihilated by the falling behemoth.
"Mechanical problems demand mechanical solutions." - my mechanic bitching about modern cars
the toms hardware computer wasent set to shut down if a certain temp was reached and it went up in smoke. the amd video was, so the chip dident fry!
Daddy would you like some sausage?
The response to THG by AMD is unbelievable... almost funny. It's like saying, "Hey, that new car you just bought goes really fast, but you might want to know that if the muffler falls off, the car will die in under two seconds!" and then turn around and make an excuse like "But you can fix the problem by buying one of these handy temperature devices that isn't manufactured for resale by ANYONE to the general public!" AMD should be ashamed... and so should most Motherboard manufacturers!
Gravity!... It's not just a good idea... It's the Law!
The end users may not be allowed to open their PCs - company policy or warranty issues.
And even if Joe/Jane public opens the case, they won't know if things are correctly installed.
Link.