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A couple of ?'s for you Athlon 64 users...

PostPosted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 3:19 am
by BurninMan921
Two things upfront:
1) Sorry for the long, rather rambling post...
2) Intel and AMD Fanboys: Beat it. Get lost. Don't wanna hear from 'ya. This ain't AMD vs. Intel. This is about SPEED & STABILITY. Also don't care about the FX-51 chip users. The fan-boys made all of the user "reviews" at newegg 100% useless. I hate how someone who didn't buy something can RATE IT! That's BS! Opps...back on topic:

OK, now that a good 64-Bit OS and plenty of apps are available, I'm starting to reconsider the whole A-64 thing. I like the the P4C's, but 64-bit power may just be nice. Or not.

Ok, now for the questions:
1. What mobo/chipset are you using? Any "issues"? I've heard some A64 boards have problems with more than one stick of memory is installed.
(I'm very cautious about any VIA chipset mobo's...I've had VERY bad luck with both Athlon & P4's with VIA chipset mobos. But they're ALOT cheaper than the nForce 3's).

2. How's the performance in the real world? Especially compared to P4C's of equalivent speeds (ONLY if you've used both!) Especially interested in real-world DivX encoding & DVD rip/copy (ie, DVDShrink) performance. My 2.4C does a 1HR video in about an hour with DivX 5.1.1 under MPEG Mediator (920K/s, 128K/s Lame MP3).

I hate benchmarks; they never truely show what a system can do. Case in point: P4's w/Hyperthreading. May not get done any faster with something, but you can do something CPU intensive and still USE the system. I know: I have a P4C. DuvX encoding while playing UT2K3, w/o slowdown? Check.

Hmm...think that about covers it...
Back to mobo shopping...but only from the big-name company's (Abit, Gigabyte, Asus...maybe AOpen-Anandtech had good things to say about the AK-86-L)...

PostPosted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 1:28 pm
by Boone
Ironically the best performing x86-64 motherboard is from VIA. I had a KT266a, and it was a POS for performance, but NVidia skimped by putting in 1/2 width hypertransport from CPU->IO Bridge, but VIA is full bandwidth in each direction.

I can't talk about Windows, but we use them at work in a Linux grid environment. In 32-bit code, the Opteron 240 is 35% faster in our integer-heavy benchmark than a P4 2.4C. The huge thing about x86-64 is that it has an integrated DDR controller, making memory latency ~1/2 of a P4. P4's have dual channel memory which leads to greater bandwidth, but over the "bursts" of data that we use it doesn't make a difference.

PostPosted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 3:49 pm
by BurninMan921
Interesting. I won't be using Windows, but the AMD-64 version of SuSE Linux.

The bad thing about the non-FX versions of the 64 is simply lack of dual-channel DDR support. But it still seems to a pretty good performer, except in audio/video encoding - if the benchmarks are to be believed..

Ah well, if everything else is faster, I can deal with slightly slower DivX encoding!

Nice to hear that the VIA's are actuall pretty good...the best looking mobo I've seen so far is a $150 Asus w/VIA chipset...

PostPosted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 3:55 am
by CDRecorder
I don't have experience with the Athlon64, but I will say that Abit motherboards are really stable, so I'd recommend an Abit board.

PostPosted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 12:59 pm
by BurninMan921
I've had 3 or 4 Abit's in the past...they are my #1 choice! Love 'em...even though I have an MSI now (great board, too).

PostPosted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 2:41 pm
by Boone
We use SuSE Linux 9.0 as well... good luck getting 64-bit nForce3 150 support in Linux. We had to disable the entire nforce chip in our "beta" system and add network card. Our non-beta systems are these, and they're fully supported out of the box:
http://www.newisys.com/products/2100.html

PostPosted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 3:27 pm
by BurninMan921
Thanks for the info. I'll probably just get that Asus mobo with the VIA chipset. Seems to be the best performer right now. I'll have to check and see what Abit has, though. Or maybe just wait for the new mobo/socket/chipsets to come out around April...