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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?"
It depends on what OS you are using, if it is windows then you should just get whatever is cheaper because it can't HANDLE 64bit well yet (if ever). You need to make sure the OS you are going to use can handle 64bit. I like SuSE 9.0 Pro. 64bit edition $129 or free via ftp
Yesterday's posting described issues with current
AMD 64-bit linux distros. Can one just use
a 32 bit one for now, and wait a while for the
64 bit ones to mature?
If not, it doesn't sound reasonable (as in, what?!!?
Getting X to work is a challenge?)
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
Don't forget alternatives to buying an Athlon 64 that can increase speed and productivity. A Dual-Processor machine can be a real speed boost, and is more natively supported. Likewise, faster system busses, more ram, and going to a RAID setup can increase speed. At that kind of cost, why not put everything in a RAM based rocketdrive? Have you maxed your graphics cards? Do you have a cheap 8139 NIC that taxes your processor?
Let's not forget human-centric productivity increasers, like macro-scriptable keyboards, larger moniters, and deleting AIM. Have you considered DVORAK?
There are many thing cheaper than an Athlon64 that will increase productivity. An intern, for example. Only when the system is both financially sound and better than the alternatives should the transition be undertaken. Perhaps you are the system network maintainer for Google, but for most people the Athlon64 just isn't ripe yet.
The ______ Agenda
I personally bought the 3200+ two months ago, but I totally would have been happy with the 3000+.
Also check out Fedora Core 1 preview release of AMD64. Official test1 release should be coming soon because they fixed the last blocker bug in pango.
is the technology ready for end users?
I really dont get that question. How can a technology be ready or not ready? It is being shipped and it apparently performs to specs. Like you said it challenges P4 in terms of value, which might answer that question.
A certain number of vendors are making motherboards for it. When you have one or possibly two companies making chipsets, you might have an issue, but with a large number of chipsets and drivers getting mature, you might have the right timing for it.
One other benefit of buying a product early in its selling cycle is that youll have a current product for a longer period of time. Buy a P4 when its really cheap, and youll have a new chip from Intel in the next 6 months.
I am curious about your applications though. What is it for which a P4 2.4GHz doesnt suffice? My P3 550 is giving me good service through games, video and 3d model editing...
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
What most people forget is, REGARDLESS of the 64 capabilities of the chip, the athlon64 is HANDS DOWN the FASTEST consumer processor money can buy. While i'd question you upgrading a p2 2.4 ghz, if you are just determined to have the fastest chip money can buy then the athlon64 is it. (get the FX51 if that's the case). However, if you are a gamer looking for more speed, upgrading your graphics card would do alot more, as a 2.4 ghz p4 is more then fast enough to handle today's games.
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!
...to get whatever is one or two steps down from 'top end' and it always is. I find it excellent when there's someone willing to pay top dollar and subsidize my lower-cost choices. I bought a Pentium III 450 when the 650s and what-not were 'current.'
I have a number of 64 bit machines already, if I want to 'dabble' in 64-bitness. My Sun Ultra 1 boxes run NetBSD/Sparc64 and cost me $12.50 each at auction.
A Good Intro to NetBS
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)
Here is a quick summary of the AMD64 line. It comes directly from an AMD Engineer working on the AMD64 projects. His recommendation was to wait for the 2nd generation motherboard chipsets sporting the 939-pin sockets.
Current parts
The processor cores for Athlon64/AthlonFX/Opteron are currently all the same.
Opteron
940-pin Socket
Dual channel DDR registered/ECC required.
84X series are 1/2/4/8 way system certified.
24X series are 1/2 way system certified.
14X series are 1 way system certified ( same as AthlonFX51).
Athlon FX
940-pin Socket
The FX is simply a relabeled Opteron chip. This chip has pinout for dual channel DDR (needs to be registered/ECC and I believe buffered, yuck)
Athlon64
754-pin Socket
Opteron 14X but with single channel DDR Athlon64 comes in the 754 pin package now but only supports single channel DDR but can use unbuffered standard DDR.
Future parts
939 package Athlon64/FX is a new pinout to support dual channel unbuffered DDR, allows for 4 layer PCB motherboards (cheaper to make boards) and a faster HyperTransport external link.
Drill Hammer
512kB cache instead of the 1MB on current products. Packaging should be same as other chips (754/939).
Claw Hammer
256kB cache instead of the 1MB on current products. Packaging should be same as other chips (754/939).
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
Price are from pricewatch (excluding companies operated by bzboyz)
103.00 Antec Sonata Case
TruePower 380 Watt ATX12V power supply
193.97 ASUS SK8N NVDIA nForce 3 pro150 Chipset DDR RAM AGP8X 5xPCI Audio LAN 6USB2.0 ATX
722.00 Athlon64 FX51
27.00 Thermaltake A1838 CPU Heatsink/Fan for AMD Opteron / Athlon64
202.00 2@512 MB PC 3200 registered
35.00 1.44MB Floppy/6in1 Flash
246.00 2@Seagate ST3160023AS 160GB Serial ATA 7200rpm 8MB
200.00 Visontek ATI Radeon 9600 XT 256MB
58.50 Samsung SM-352BEB 52X24X52X16 CD-RW & DVD Combo Drive
206.00 Plextor PX-708A/SW-BL Dual Format 8X DVD
1179.00 VP201B Viewsonic Monitor
Add in thermal grease, round cables, etc and the price comes in below $3200.
Needless to say, I give AMD64 the thumbs up. If you can afford to go, you will help accelerate adoption.
Plus, don't forget that the Athlon64 is still a very fast 32bit processor. However, I'm not sure if the FX chip is worth the premium. I'll be building the system in January (after I get my xmas dough) and will then know.
The last high-end system I built was a dual ppro200. SMP in Linux was experimental (yet worked great for me) back then. Yet, this very old computer is still running and handling several domains' email. It has more than paid for itself. I hope this new system fares as well.
As an aside, if anyone sees something blatantly wrong with one of my part selections, please explain. I'm torn over going over to ATI. I haven't tried an ATI card since the early 90's and I hated them. However, from what I understand, ATI is the gamer's choice.
BTW, I have absolutely no need for the power this machine will provide. I just want to play and learn with 64bit OS's and still be able to run 32bit games with great graphics.
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.
It partially depends on whether you'll use a 64-bit OS.
For example, if you're waiting for a 64-bit version of XP, then you should not buy now. By the time XP-64 comes out, your current Athlon64 system will be underpowered compared against what will be available then. Thus the extra money you paid would have gone to waste.
And even if you have a 64 bit OS, what about software?! Unless you just have to have the latest and greatest, I'd wait until we have lots of 64 bit software and drivers to fully support the hardware.
However, if id releases a 64 bit version of Quake3 for Linux, I might have to change my opinion!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Open-source Radeon drivers do 3D-accelleration for all Radeon cards except 9500 and greater. That means that everything from the original to the 9200 is fully supported by open-source drivers. To get 3D accelleration on the 9500, 9600, 9700, and 9800, you have to use ATI's binary drivers (although the open drivers still work fine if all you need is 2D).
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.