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"Budget" Chips go Head-to-Head
StewedSquirrel writes "Anandtech has published an article taking a look at the low-end of the CPU market today. It takes Intel's newest Celeron processors against the AthlonXP and Duron with a Pentium 4 1.8GHz thrown in for comparison. All of these processors will cost you under $120, but the article shows that the old Duron (at barely $40) can out-perform Intel chips costing nearly 3x as much. In addition, it shows that the performance of the Athlon XP is head and shoulders above the Celeron processors, while costing roughly the same."
I love my shiny new AthlonXP 2500+. $90 for retail packaging, scoring well above my old P3-500, with plenty of room to overclock.
-bZj
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The lower end of the Intel chips has always been worse at everything PC related then AMD. AMD is the budget king, that is a known fact for some time now.
Waste of time by Anandtech imho
This is something everyone who has built systems and read any reviews in the past few years knows. The duron isn't really that great of a deal but the 1700+ and the 2500+ axp chips are unreal. Both perform exceptionally well, overclock like a dream, and unless compared to c varient (800mhz fsb) p4's absolutely rape everything performance wise.
Shadus
Athlon MP wasn't tremendously successful penetrating the server market, but Opteron appears to be making serious headway!
IBM has the e325, and Sun is about to introduce Opteron servers in a big way. Opteron thorougly rips Intel's x86 server offerings, especially in 2P and 4P configurations, and is extremely competitive with Itanium at a lower price (and with no software recompiles required).
Opteron should also do really well in the workstation and high-end PC markets.
This is all great for AMD, since Opteron is a high-margin part that kills Intel's high-margin x86 parts. The design wins with major OEMs just keep on coming...
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The ads are random. I got a load of whoosing intel ads.
I think it was mentioned before but is worth repeating.
Not only are AMD great value for money, but you can upgrade them later quite cheaply too.
I have an 850MHz PIII laptop, and it is quite close to the point where the packaging changed for the +1GHz chips. So I can't upgrade what is essentially a perfectly good laptop.
I find this greatly annoying, and will be buying AMD next time round.
Anandtech is a big site, they have ads from every major computer brand known to mankind (almost).
If you watch closely or reload the page you will see Intel ads. On the left side of one of the pages there is a "Intel; Click here to get more performance" ad
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I think that concern has been answered by the nForce series of MB chipsets. I've built several nForce2 based systems, and they are rock solid. There is a single unified driver from NVIDIA for sound, network, I/O and so on. If you use an NVIDIA graphics card (my preferred brand for various reasons) one vendor is supplying all your drivers. That is a very nice level of accountability, and better than almost all Intel systems.
There was an article not too long ago about how happy a major corp. was with HP nForce based business systems. The unified driver architecture was a big win for them.
From what I hear, Opteron is also extremely stable. I hope to find out for myself before too long... =)
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Many thanks Anand - this article will be a great help to many small system builders being beaten to death by Dell; many (such as myself) cannot compete with Dell on budget Intel kit of the same spec.
Having an article like this to show potential customers will mean I can provide better performing systems at competitive prices using AMD.
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
Athlon64. It runs slower when it's idle, saving alot of power.
Well, all CPU's are completely silent, it's the fans that make noise
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At work, I use a similar system, with a cheap no-name heatsink. I got back from Japan this week to discover that the second CPU in three months had burned out. In the store room, we have a load of machines that have burned out in the same way. AMD chips get hot, and will burn themselves out less than a minute after the fan dies, so if you want to protect your investment then spend a little extra on a good quality heatsink and fan - it'll probably still work out being cheaper than an Intel equivalent.
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I used to work at bestbuy. The salesmen are only taught how to sell the service plans. anything else they're told to read the box. so all they have to go buy is the bigger the number the better.... i dont know if other retail outlets are like this, but i assume its close.
wud
This is nonsense. The Prescott will dissipate over 100 Watts. The current crop of P4s are up around 90 W. Those high clockspeeds directly translate into high power consumption.
There is no real-world thermal issue with AMD CPUs. They even have Intel-like thermal protection these days...
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If you want a low power system, definately check out the EPIA systems from VIA.
A less expensive option is the VIA C3. These cpu's are socket 370 compatible. You can find these for under $50. See pricewatch. Max power on these is about 18 watts.
Josh
I'm not sure it's possible to kill those chips. I got a 350MHz one when they were new, and ran it at 420MHz (105x4) for a couple of years, using the heatsink from my old P133. It is still going (with the same heatsink) in a friend's machine, although now running at its rated clock speed.
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There are fans and there are fans. Try to find a CPU fan/heatsink with a large diameter fan, they won't need to spin as fast and are therefore much quieter. I have found Arctic Cooling's Copper Silent and Slim Silent Pro are whisper quiet, especially compared to my older Zalman "Rolls-Royce Spey" CP-5000 fans. A case with room for 12cm case fans instead of the 8cm ones also helps.
Oh, and if you can step down a notch or two for the gfx board, there are passive cooling solutions out there that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. My gaming rig has a Ti 4200 with a passive Zalman cooler superglued to it - works perfectly.
My main workstation is a dual Athlon 2000+ MSI board with a pair of AC fans, two 12cm case fans plus a Seagate Barracuda drive and it's barely audible.
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I don't know what you mean by "burnout", but if you're overclocking that may be the cause, stick to motherboards that support it. Check out OVERCLOCKERS.COM or the chaintech line for some nice toys.
If you're actually cooking these things then you'll probably have the same problem with BOTH INTEL and AMD. INTEL certified cpu fans and power supplies tend to be beefier and move more air than the cheeper ones sold for AMD, but that's because you can usually cook eggs on pentiums. I try to keep systems I assemble to a case temperature of 75-90 degrees after 1 hour runtime. It seems to help all the systems but I've found pentiums tend to perform better when you add 2-3 fans to help. That one power supply fan just doesn't cut it.
Watch your airflow in the case also, the airflow should move over your chip location and not leave "dead air". An extra exhaust fan behind the chip pulling air out as well as a intake fan pulling air in the front should help. If you're using the new ULTRA ATA drives you might want to add drive coolers also. If the case is too jammed up with cables (like servers) try the new rounded cables, they really cut the case temp down.
You can check your runtime temp usually in the bios.
Good luck guy, hope the next chip you roast is idaho and not silicon.
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Have you considered barbones or SFF (small form factor) PCs? Much cheaper than laptops, and with most of the advantages. Try googling for Shuttle XPC for instance. You get a chassi and motherbord, together with heat pipe cooling of the processor, all very cheap.
I just got a Shuttle SN45G, with a AMD Barton 2500+ and I'm very pleased. Small, stylish, quiet. I recommend Seagate 7200.2 harddrives, they are also low power, low heat.Be careful with graphics cards though, it is very risky to buy a top of the line card. Sometimes they draw so much power the computer won't even start (I speak from bitter experience after trying to put an All-in-wonder 9800SE into the Shuttle. The card wants 300W power supply units, that Shuttle model ships with 200W as standard. Serves me right for not reading the specs before buying it). Also the graphics card cooling can be so big it won't fit into the very cramped chassi, it might have noisy cooling (GeForce FX anyone?) or it gives so much heat it gives the chassi problems disappating it.
www.sfftech.com is a good site to read about barebone PCs.
Cheers,
Lars
But the best thing about AMD is that a modern Socket A mobo will still take pretty much any SoA chip and most older mobos will take chips that weren't even thought of at the time. Compare that to the Intel alternative, where upgrading is a painfully expensive business. Any coincidence that Intel sell a lot of mobo chipsets? Never.
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I see AMD advertisements on the web all the time, but they don't seem to have much of the "big name maker" market. Why not? Is Intel so intreched that their value doesn't even matter any more?
Some companies, like HP, Alienware and MicronPC, use AMD processors in about half of their line.
Dell, however, gets a HUGE discount from Intel as long as they only use Intel processors. So much so that it's cheaper than using AMD processors, plus they get all the benefits of Intel's very recognizable slogan and television commercials, whereas AMD has only recently begun to take out magazine ads, and is rarely seen on television.
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You can get a good nforce2-400 board without onboard video for about $80. You can get a retail AthlonXP Barton 333mhz fsb 2500+ cpu (with fan) for $90. You can get a Radeon 9100 video card for about $60. Throw in some good quality 2x256 ddr 3200 ram for dual-channel goodness for less than $100 and you have the guts of a machine that'll run all but the very latest and most cpu-intensive games with total ease.
I figure the whole thing with 120gb hard drive, burner, dvd, case, monitor, etc. will run about $800. Imho it's the best deal on the market right now, price/performance wise.
BTW, the VIA EPIA boards are based on the VIA C3 and the VIA Eden (an underclocked C3). Another advantage of the VIA CPUs is that they're multiplier unlocked, so you can easily overclock. If you can find a Nehemia Eden, and it's cheaper than a 1GHz Nehemia C3, crank that multiplier up through the roof.
Brand name & AMD is going to be tough. Good luck. I would recommend something like this if you can wait for it to be available again, or something like this if you have the money and want the quality.
Note: Macs are quality. I have a Dell and I have a Mac. Dells are fast, and they are cheap, but its basically just a motherboard and some components shoved into a cheap plastic case. This isn't a bad thing, it's just a choice.
I don't understand the hate for Intel at Slashdot. Due to the nature of my work, I have worked at several large tech companies including both AMD and Intel and I have to say that Intel as a company is head and shoulders above any other place I have worked. They treat their employees with more benefits and more respect than any other place I have worked or any other place I've heard of. They admit when they have made mistakes in the past and they try to practice good business ethics.
.5% faster.
AMD on the other hand is a different story. Their standards are much lower on the quality product they produce. They treat their employees a lot worse. They look for shortcuts at every turn to try and save a few cents.
It's unfortunate that a company which has probably contributed more good to the tech industry than any other single corporation gets bashed here.
Let's face it, for years AMD has been riding the coattails of an industry which Intel single-handedly created. If anyone should be bashed, it should be them regardless of which budget processor can render frames
Much as I like Intel's Pentium M processor, AMD actually doesn't do that bad here. The Pentium M running at 1.6GHz consumes somewhere around 25W of power. AMD's AthlonXP-M chips for the "thin and light" market consume a maximum of about 25W at ~1.4 or 1.5GHz as well (unfortunately AMD does a piss-poor job of documeting their mobile processors, so a bit of guesswork is required). The Pentium M is a slightly faster processor, but the difference shouldn't be huge.
The AthlonXP-M "Desktop replacement" chips consume more power with no improvement in performance (except being available at higher clock speeds), so they don't do all that well, but then agian, their compeititon is the P4-M. Here AMD actually has the low-powered solution, as the P4-M chips quite the power hogs.
FWIW Tom's Hardware did a comparison of two nearly identical notebooks, one with a Pentium-M and the other with an AthlonXP-M.
It's clear to me the amd64 is by far the best VALUE, bar none. Clearly it is unfair to benchmark a 64bit chip with 32bit applications, but still it comes out on top. Unix is normally 64bit and in true 64bit mode it really runs circles arround the the dual G5 despite all the marketing machine (and lies) of Apple. No chip has more attention from developers today than the amd64.
The amd64 is only for Unix users that can bootstrap a compiler and know how to use it. This is changing rapidly and there is atleast one distribution that will work -- FreeBSD-5.2. (Should be a distro by Christmas.) Still if all you want to do is run binaries, get an ecconomy processor! I don't see Microsoft coming out with a 64bit system anytime soon. So for those lusers it may not be all that 'futureproof'.
Love my amd64 -- and Unix. You get out what you put in, to be polite about it. Three months ago, when it was purchased it seemed like a computer hobbiest's curriousity item, but things move fast and it is the best buy.