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Tom's Hardware End of Year CPU Roundup
Wister285 writes "Tom's Hardware has just posted one of their now famous CPU comparisons. Aside from looking at all of the nice graphs, they also compare the speeds of overclocked processors with their factory rated counterparts. It looks like the AMD chips just don't overclock as well as the Intel ones do, but when run at their specified level AMD almost always has the best price/performance ratio. Hopefully the upcoming year will be as promising in the processor sector as 2003 was!"
I just wanted to say the same. Precisely, they should have said "x86" CPUs.
In my opinion, the PPC 970 was the surprise of the year. A shame not to mention it.
I don't need a signature.
Well, My xp2100+ (1.733Ghz) is currently running at close to 2250MHz (195fsb, 11.5x Multiplier), which is over a 500MHz OC.. I'd call that a pretty nice OC, as it's still only cooled by air. . .
Just because it's the same OS does not imply that it will be a direct comparison -- they are completely different archetectures and can never be directly compared; an indirect comparison is about the best you can do. Still what does it mean? Not a lot, since the archetectures are fundamentally different.
It would be a waste of THG's time when the whole idea was to compare x86 CPUs. Yeah it ignores the PPC -- why? x86 archetecture comparison is an apples to apples comparsion.
Karma whorin' since 1999
Who bothers to overclock a CPU anymore? With the falling prices of machines, you can almost replace it for the same cost. And 2 CPUs are always better than one, because you can run them in parallel.
>>startling errors, conclusions that defy reason, glaring omissions, and sensationalized reporting.
that's way over the top. you sound like a CNN reporter. can we say "over sensationalize"?
i think i'd just simply describe tom's as:
"not very good anymore"
Until you can buy 970s & boards without getting an Apple, it stays off the list.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I agree that overclocking isn't the panacaea that some computer geeks seem to believe, and I think the hardware sites are squeezing out their relevance every time they bring it up.
It must be a bragging rights thing because it doesn't take long for faster chip to be released, and you've run the risk of an unstable system and sometimes people spend more for cooling than they might have just getting the next chip up.
As for AMD vs. Intel OC-ability, the two companies may simply have different comfort margins in marking a chip.
So you are comparing a 2.3GHz Pentium and a 2.3GHz Athlon as if they had the same performance?
Right..
This must be the only site that does not mention the Athlon 64 in the conclusion. Therefore I can only draw one conclusion (if you remember that a Athlon 64 3000+ outperforms a similar priced P4) Tom's hardware is done for.
I've been following Tom's hardware for years on end, and I loved their articles on RAID and drive benchmarks. Nowadays the articles are mostly written by mediocre "editors" though, and they bear little resemblence to articles by Tom himself.
To be fair, sometimes they still have great reviews (printers, screens and harddisks mostly), but you will have to look for them between articles that should never have seen the light of day.
Linux users should avoid this Windows site at all cost.
Weird; I've always felt that AMD was the value leader, if you don't need Genuine Intel for some reason. I may be wrong, but could the difficulty of clocking AMD vs Intel be because AMD is already optimized so much nowdays? I don't have any recent experience with it, but that's what I always thought. Could someone explain to a geek who hasn't used them since the K6?
C|N>K
Anyone who knows about this stuff will tell you that Tom's is notoriously biased. It can be shocking. He has been caught out on numerous occasions - photoshopping pictures of cpus, reviewing certain components on crippled test rigs, swapping colours over on his graphs without telling the reader; you name it, he's done it. On his original A64 vs P4EE review he even benchmarked the A64 with three year old 100mhz SDRAM. Unfortunately, hardware newbies (including /. it seems) don't realise this and take what he writes as gospel. I've lost count of the number of innocents i've seen who have bought second-rate hardware on the basis of a THG review. At the moment he is pro-intel, and slightly pro-nvidia for graphics although this is less marked.
AMD's 1.4 GHz Opteron 240, thanks to being "obsolete" is now down to about $215 per chip. (Anyone who thinks Opterons are expensive, is on crack.) Throw a couple of these into a dual-socket-940 motherboard (about $360), and you will have something that can bite the head off of (and shit down the neck stump of) a high-end single P4 system. And costs about the same (not counting the P4EE, which costs more).
The Pentium 4 "Extreme Edition" is the ultimate ripoff for suckers. $1k for a processor? You can get four "obsolete" Opterons for the same price, which make the "extreme" chip look extremely slow. (Hm.. trying to find a quad-940 mb to look up the price, but I'm failing. I know they exist, and there's no way they cost over $600.)
Of course, you can play the same dirty tricks by building multi-P4 systems out of older "obsolete" versions of the P4 which are cheaper, too. But I think the Opteron still wins. The point I'm trying to make is: "day-old" chips are cheap, and if you build SMP systems out of them, they slay!!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Ummmm.... Tom's yet again incorrectly identified a CPU. IA-32 != IA-64 people, however backwards, IA-32 = x86-64... Of course knowing how perceptive people are on /. this has already been posed, right?
For it to be a "fact", it has to be true...
Not true.
People will make use of the CPU power that they have available. Since most people don't have terribly fast processors, they don't do more advanced, and hence, CPU-intensive tasks.
Back when DOS was in charge, very few needed 100MHz processors, but more, new, applications come along to make use of that extra power.
If CPU power was more abundant, you'd probably see people commonly converting all their DV streams from their camcorders to MPEG4 to save space. Since that is rather time-consuming, most people don't do it.
My main CPU-intensive purpose is video. Live, real-time encoding from a TV-card uses plenty of CPU power, and to be able to also playback at the same time, you probably want more than 2.5GHz. Then, to also be able to encode a DVD in the background, you probably want an even more powerful processor still. Since most people don't have such powerful processors, they don't bother to do these types of things on their computers, yet. When the power is there, you will see people using it.
Yes, well you could have said the same thing about early, graphical DOS games if you had a 100MHz computer at the time. These days, 100MHz isn't enough, and in the near future, 2.5GHz won't be enough for the new games.
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