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Is it a Good Time to Get an Athlon64?
City_Idiot asks: "I'm looking to upgrade my current P4 2.4Ghz and i'm giving serious thought to a Athlon64 3200+. The tests look good, and it gives a 3Ghz P4 a good run for its money but is the technology ready for end users?"
Yes, it's a good time, as a fool and his money are soon parted. WTF are you doing that a 2.4 GHz machine won't keep up? A little extra info, please? OS, apps, etc.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Prices come down on earlier models which are just as good as the new ones.
Save some money, buy the last generation chips instead of the latest and greatest.
I have been pwned because my
Wow, you're considering upgrading from your 2.4 P4. I just upgraded TO a 2.4 P4. *sigh*
Anyways, my question is, what do you do that requires THAT much horsepower? If you're web surfing, writing emails and writing letters in Word, then I'd recommend that you not upgrade to anything and that your P4 should be more than adequate. Details are important here. For instance, you want to work on porting XXXXXXX to run natively at 64 bits. Then of course its a good time to upgrade, and it probably makes sense for what you're doing. Or perhaps you want to frag some people when HL2 comes out. Then I'd say "probably not worth it" or ask "What kind of video card do you have?"
We can't give you a recommendation off the top of our head without any details.
Here's a simple analysis to determine if now is the time:
Figure that between now and summer, the price of an Athlon64 system with a given set of specs (RAM, HD, video card, etc.) will go down about US$500.
So, ask yourself this - is $500 over the next six months worth it?
If you are making money with this machine - you are a consultant, or do freelance work that earns money, will the roughly 40% speed improvement make you back that $500 in six months?
If you are a hobbist, will the "fun" of being one of the first people on the block with an Athlon64 be worth $500 over the next six months?
Me, I am looking at the Atlon 2000+ I'm typing this on, with the Radeon 7500, and saying "I'll wait". But that's me.
www.eFax.com are spammers
You think that Intel chips will be running 5 to 7ghz 9 months to a year from now? Look at their roadmaps...
Personally, I'd go with AMD over Intel any day.
Performance/price ratio is almost 2:1 in favor of AMD EXCEPT at the very top of the line where it gets closer (with AMD still winning by a nice margin).
Intel is only better if you have a really fat wallet.
Yeah, I know; websites tend to compared a Athlon 3200+ with a Pentium 4 3.2ghz and conclude that the P4 is better.
But they get the CPUs for free! If you actually compared, say, an Athlon 2800+ from AMD with something SIMILARLY priced from Intel you'll see that AMD is clearly the winner.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
If you have a P4 2.4ghz, just overclock it to 3ghz. It will probably work. Don't waste so much money on a tiny upgrade.
Repeal the DMCA!
Like everyone else here is saying, why would you pay top $$ for a most recent processor when you could rather upgrage your fast P4 2.4 GHz box with other items that really affect the performance like extra fast SCSI or Serial ATA hard drive, more and faster RAM, faster graphics card etc.... Unless you do something that is very CPU cycle intensive (like graphics editing/encoding etc)....
Sig
-- Compare war time president's military record (www.awolbush.com) with Wesley Clark's (Wesley Clark's Army Career)
I wouldn't imagine that changing from an Intel P4 to an Athlon 64 could cost more than about $1500, even if you went for the FX version and needed to buy new registered memory + motherboard. How long can you pay for an intern with that much money:)?
Alphanos
I just built my system a couple of months ago:
and as far as I am concerned, it Screams
(note that I am not a hardcode gamer, nor doing and rendering; just surfing the web, watching dvds, using openoffice, and the occasional build)
Why? $60 for the processor; I'll upgrade to a 3200 when they drop beloy $75 or so...
I build the whole thing for < $700
But, AMD's are well known to run extremely hot
Load of crap.
Intel chips dissipate more heat than AMD does now.
And as for core temperature -- it doesn't matter. Different chips are designed to run at different temperatures. Yeah, they all have (more or less) the same maximum temp, but depending on how you do design you can have different operational temps.
Which, if you add it up, actually amounts to the same price as a Intel processor!
You're dropping $100 on fans? You're seriously overspending. Even if you do, for some ungodly reason, decide that you need to replace the retail fan (which isn't needed unless you're going to overclock or want a quieter HSF), a really nice Zalman or Thermaltake HSF is under $40. Panaflo system fans are under $10 (except the 92 or 120 mm).
AMD are also notorious for their short lived processors that die prematurely due to the excessive overclocking that AMD fanatics live by.
Wow... you overclock the CPU, you shorten the lifespan! Amazing thing that -- running it out of spec is bad. With prices of CPUs nowadays overclocking is for the fanboys that don't have any more of a life than bragging about how fast their system is. Once upon a time (back in the Celeron 300A days) you could get substantial speed boosts by overclocking. Now it's in the single digit percentile range -- if that.
for those of you that want your PC to last longer than a couple of months then Intel is the way to go.
Wow. Really? I guess my AMD Athlon 750 didn't really last me nearly 3 years then. My wife's Athlon 1.33 is, lets see, two years old or more now? My Athlon XP 2.2 should've died long ago, since it's 13 months old. And my file server with an Athlon 1.4 (admittedly, I really should've gone for a Via Eden here, but I was doing a ton of CD ripping initially) is 10 months old.
I guess they'll all fail immediately, since you've said they only last a few months.
Oh, and that must really be hell for AMD too. I mean, look at all those retail boxed processors with 3 year warrantees that they apparantly have to replace every few months.
To repeat what others have said requires education; to challenge it requires brains.
Let us know when you get either one.