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Intel Viiv vs. AMD LIVE!
Searching4Sasquatch writes "Hot Hardware has tested two nearly identical HP systems in an effort to determine the best solution between Intel's Viiv and AMD's LIVE! campaigns. Priced around $999, these general purpose systems are tested straight out of the box with no tweaking or refinement to illustrate how "Joe Consumer" would fare in using one of these platforms."
It's all about the pre-loaded crap. I've wiped and re-installed systems without the pre-installed crap and they are at least 10% faster than factory builds.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I don't think these multimedia solutions are being marketed very well by either Intel or AMD. I have heard of Viiv for quite a while, but while I have seen the name in various places, I have only ever seen vague descriptions of its capabilities. As for LIVE!, it must be really new or really obscure - this is the first time I have seen that name. Perhaps the OEMs aren't getting the point across.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Or rather, Intel give it to them... at the moment they called their platform Viiv :-/
That must be the worst product name in history along with Nintendo's Wii (great console but what was smoking the guy who named it)
Ave Maria
Intel Viiv: A multimedia solution.
AMD LIVE!: A MULTIMEDIA SOLUTION WITH A BROKEN CAPS LOCK ROFL LOL!!!!1!!one!
And to get around the lameness filter (please ignore) - I fear hedgehogs. The little bastards are everywhere, just waiting to kill med as soon as I set foot outside of the basement that my mother locks me in every evening.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Works for me.
Perhaps it is because of refcontrol.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The AMD system was cheaper, performed better overall and had a more complex set of qualifications in order to receive the "AMD Live" certification. Yawn, this really was not a very interesting comparison. Anyway CableCards, DRM, and cheap cable company DVR's that have room to grow are going to be the death of HTPC's so I wouldn't go spending a bucket load of cash on one right now.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Is it just me or do AMD/MS get together and do marketing?
Windows XP / Athlon XP
Athlon 64 / Windows XP 64 (to be fair, Alpha/Itanium were 64 bit chips but Windows never sported the name....)
The newest thing now? Live mail and Live search from Microsoft. So what's AMD gonna call their stuff? AMD Live! That's right kids.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Exactly. Only the total opposite of what you just said.
Seriously, building your own system to your precise spec and under your complete control with OEM parts will get you a far superior system to anything you can waste your money on from some douchebag pre-built company. I keep checking them out in case things change, but in almost twenty years, I have still never found any cause to buy a pre-built system unless it was a laptop.
Except they're both Dual Core systems. It's the AMD Athlon 64 X2.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You mean one at a time? You can get single OEM parts everywhere. If you have a non-chain computer store in your town (like Enu, in Portland) you can usually get them there. Or via newegg. Or through outlets on pricewatch.
Not every part is going to be available as an OEM, but it's certainly possible to get drives, RAM, CPUs, video cards and audio cards. Not to mention, you simply don't get exactly what you want from a pre-built. I put my latest system into a rather awesome Cooler Master 832 chassis. Granted, it was pretty expensive, but at least I had the option instead of going with whatever plastic piece of crap Dell decided was good for me.
Now, if you are just looking for a simple home office PC for your mom to use for the web, MP3s, solitaire and spreadsheets, then going with a pre-built is potentially a good solution since that takes the trouble of having to provide support out of your hands. But for anything specific like server hardware or gaming rigs, I would be hard pressed to buy something prebuilt.
I have often considered a good Falcon Northwest rig, but as great as they are I just can't justify spending $5,000 for something I can build myself for around $3,000 or less.
They tested an HP Pavilion 1630n (AMD) versus an HP Pavilion 1640n (Intel). It's obvious to me that the Intel, therefore, is TEN better than the AMD.
The fact is the Intel platform exhibited rendering errors, and didn't even run some games. This is despite being on their recent G965 chipset. It also had poor image quality (although the nVidia chipset didn't do that much better, AMD do have the ATI chipsets which get very good scores in HQV) and Intel really should be chastised for selling a media brand with such abysmal performance. It was also $100 cheaper - you can get a fairly decent graphics card for that money, or a CPU upgrade to make up for the slightly faster C2D.
Both systems were using dual core chips.
It is a shame that they didn't use a noise meter at any time, or discuss power consumption, or mention the fact that their requirements for LIVE! had "Vista" whilst the HP system ran XP MCE.
I don't think anyone would want that computer near their home cinema system either.
The HP a1630n has one interesting feature that wasn't documented -- it has a hardware firewall due to the nVidia chipset on the built in Ethernet port, and it works pretty well, as I've not had any issues with it so far with gaming (MMOs, some RTS games) and other general use. I have read some people have had trouble with it, but so far, its been a great addition.
One side note. The AMD Live! device works with Windows XP MCE and Vista, but Windows XP Pro doesn't support it.
"shrewd buyer of pre-made systems to get a much better deal"
Take a look around for the cheapest-ass components you can find (the ones you wouldnt actually buy), and you'll find you get about the same price as Dell prebuilts. And they often appear to use those same cheap-ass components in their low-end systems (in fact, look at the low end pre-made systems and often you'll find they include components that arent even sold as parts anymore (motherboards without Gbit lan? Are they buying up RMA returns?)).
I dont really call that a good deal. A cheap deal perhaps, but you're not getting best price/performance, nor are you getting quality parts.
Then you start adding up the actual real benefits of building your own systems; standardized formats, easy upgrades, and if you keep architectures down, you can easily move parts around so upgrading your game machine lets your server inherit the CPU, your wifes desktop inherits the GFX card, etc, so every upgrade becomes a cascade improvement that pays several times the value invested. Further, once you have a few machines you no longer have to invest in new cases when you need a new PC. Then go even further, consolidate storage, and use diskless clients PXE booting off iSCSI (well, ok, some of us may be going a bit far, but you get the point...), and you can cut costs of a new desktop down to motherboard, CPU and RAM. At that point, it's not even a contest anymore.
If you buy a new PC every five years tho, I'd have to agree, you're probably better off getting a Dell and throwing it in the trash when you get the next one. But hey, this is Slashdot, and there may actually be a nerd or two here for whom the economics look a bit different.
Why would someone take two relatively low cost media center PC's then proceed to test them using benchmarks designed to test gaming PC's? There were really only two tests that even came close to addressing the purpose of these boxen; the burning speed test and the DVD quality test.
The methodology behind this review is horrible.
Yeah the cheapest PCs use the cheapest parts, of course. But I'm saying that for the most part you can get as good or better pricing at just about any point along the scale. I don't know what Dell do, maybe they cheap out every place they can, personally the pre-made systems I'm talking about are from the smaller companies.
I don't see how upgrading is any different for pre-built vs. self-built. Obviously you should check out the upgradeability of a system in either case, if you fail to do so it's your own fault, not the PC manufacturer's.
Whether you buy a whole PC and don't make any major upgrades - instead opting for a whole new system 6 years down the line, or continuously upgrade every component over and over, you still end up with the same amount of waste at the end. There's very little in a PC these days that doesn't need to be upgraded eventually. Cases don't, but then again if you want to sell or make use of your old equipment it's going to need a case anyway. The "cascade" happens as it does with component-upgrading, just in starts and stops instead of a more constant flow (plus there's no worrying about hardware compatability issues and architecture/format takes care of itself).
The pre-built being cheaper than self-built only applies when all/virtually all components need upgrading. Obviously if one component fails or for whatever reason becomes outdated before anything else then you just upgrade it. No point paying for a whole new system and making a lot of good hardware redundant unnecessarily. My point is that generally upgrades take place as additions (ie. DIMMs, HDDs), not replacements, so it's just as easy to add to a new system until the fundamental components become dated (ie. CPU/motherboard, GPU) and then buy a whole new system, moving over any relevant additional components at the same time. The the older PC is passed down or sold off. For example my two previous PCs are now Linux and BSD boxes. All PCs running off a single KVM of course - a few redundant keyboards and mice are perhaps the only excess of buying pre-built that I could've otherwise avoided.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.