Intel Vs AMD, dun dun dun

[Dilbert135]

My friend is looking for the best cpu for his $ and he doesn't know which way to go. There's a Pentium D and there's an AMD Athlon. His price range is ~320 bucks. Anyone have any suggestions?

[rallynavvie]

Depends on what he plans on doing with the computer.

This belongs in the computer forum, BTW.

[ROF]

At less than $320 you can't go wrong with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800 Manchester . It's nearest competition is the Pentium D840 at twice the price and 1/5 the speed.

[lordsmurf]

$320 should buy plenty of machine

Motherboard is more important that CPU, and it should be noted Intel generally has a better motherboard selection. Stay away from the cheap VIA crap, put money on a good board. Just don't be a nerd about it, and buy the "whiz bang" model.

For work, I say Intel.
For video games and goofing off, AMD.

[ROF]

Agree completely with the smurf. Once you decide on a good processor you can then begin your search for a motherboard to support your socket of choice. Gigabyte and Biostar both manufacture good moderate priced motherboard pairings for the CPU listed above.

[pchan]

Stay away from the cheap VIA crap, put money on a good board. Just don't be a nerd about it, and buy the "whiz bang" model.

Agree 100%. For firewire card, stay away from VIA chipset as well. For video encoding, Intel cpu and chipset is advisable. If you are an AMD fans, then select nForce chipset mobo.

[rallynavvie]

I wouldn't really jump right on to dual-core processors. IIRC they suffer from the same problems as SMP workstations do: you're at the mercy of SMP-aware applications in order to get the most out of your system. You can get faster clock speeds from a single core processor for cheaper and for most users this will be faster than the dual-core system.

On the plus side the misplaced popularity in dual-core processors may cause more software companies to author their software to take advantage of more than one processor.

[ronnylov]

If you look at videohelp video encoding benchmarks you'll see that dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 is the performance winner. I'll agree with ROF, get the X2 3800+. You might also consider an socket 939 AMD Opteron 165 if you want to overclock. It is cheaper than X2 3800+, 200 MHz slower at default speed but double cache memory. It will probably be able to overclock to 4800+ speed or more.

[laurenlex]

One more vote for the AMD x2 3800+

[Helltrain]

OK, call me naive, but is there really any advantage right now to buying a 64 bit processor. As I understand it, right now you need to have XP64 and software that will support the 64 bit bandwidth and not run in 32 bit compatibility mode. Is there much software out there that even supports this yet? Sorry, but I haven't really done the research.

[ROF]

Right now there isn't alot of software to help you achieve the outstanding results of the 64 bit computing environment. Next year and the year after next will be a completely different story. Most people buy a PC to last them 4 or 5 years before they buy another. Better to future proof yourself now so when it comes time for you to consider buying another computer you will have a worthy machine to pass along to a relative or have a decent older machine which will continue to support your current environment at that time.

Nobody hopefully buys a computer thinking about what it will do for them today. if they do, they are buying a Walmart special, a Dell Sale, or other name brand PC pre-built system.

[Helltrain]

That's A good point, I guess I was thinking of my own situation. I recently upgraded my system to a better processor. I was contemplating whether to do this or to do a complete upgrade and replace the motherboard. In my case I couldn't see the point in going to 64bit bacause I already have a descent system, but if I were building a new pc I would go with the best platform available.

[ROF]

That's a good way to look at it helltrain. That also leads to good advice. Don't overspend your budget on the prcoessor chip and then skimp on the mainboard. You may want to downgrade your processing power and buy a better board that will support your desired chip or better in the future. The way CPU prices drop you will find that come two years down the road, you may be able to double your processing speed without the expense of a new motherboard if you buy wisely today and that chip you wanted today is dirt cheap tomorrow.

[rallynavvie]

I don't think there's a way to "future-proof" your computer with a chip that has 64-bit instructions. I'm still thinking that when we move to a completely 64-bit operating system that the processors available will no longer carry 32-bit support as extensive as the current Intel and AMD 64-bit processors go. In fact we may see incompatabilities with the current run of new technology when that transition finally takes. I'm still guessing it's at least a couple years out. That being said having a 64-bit proc really doesn't get you anything so don't look at that as a reason to buy one, look at all the rest of its performance.

And the benchmark at the top of this forum uses an SMP-aware application so a dual-core processor will perform better. However it will not perform better in non-SMP applications, which are pretty much the majority of consumer applications. In those cases you're better off spending the cash on a single chip.

lordsmurf had it right on at the bottom of his post.

[ROF]

Agreed, but buying dual core will achieve better results in todays realm while dual core 64 bit will help in the future which is why I stick by my recommendation for the pricing by the original poster.

[guns1inger]

Dual-procs are way behind in gaming and anything not using both CPUs as the each individual core are pretty low in comprison to the high end single-core CPUs. That said, for encoding, 3d work etc, Dual core or dual CPU is always a winner. Also, the long instruction pipeline in the intel design is much more efficient than the short pipeline in the risc design of AMD when it comes to processing large datasets like video and audio.

On a band for buck, AMD left Intel behind a couple of years back, and they haven't caught up. But for some dedicated areas, like the ones this board is built around, Intel still holds the prize. Hell, I have had AMD for the last 4 years, and it was great. But when the last one finally died a few nights back, I replaced with Intel. I have no complaints.

On the otherhand, if you spend 80% or more of your time playing games, and leave the free time for encoding, go AMD and spend the extra cash on a better gfx card instead.

[ronnylov]

How come AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core has the best results in the video benchmarks in this forum if it really is slower than Intel CPU's when processing video and audio? I think the dual core AMD Athlon64 X2 is at least as good as the Intel Pentium D dual core alternative.

I have chosen AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ dual core CPU for a price-worthy video encoding performance and paired it with an old cheap gfx card, an old Geforce2MX. I have also overclocked the CPU from 2000 MHz to 2400 MHz without any problems. I have spent more money on a fast CPU and a lot of memory (2 GB) and saved on less important stuff for video work like the graphics card. I am more than happy.

I know there is a similar Intel dual core CPU (Pentium D) but the power consumption is much higher on the Intel Pentium D which means higher noise level from fast spinning cooling fans and I like using a quiet computer.

[lordsmurf]

Benchmarks are often misleading. Too much theory, not enough real-world application.

[ROF]

Benchmarks are often misleading. Too much theory, not enough real-world application.

This is too true. Discussions of CPUs often lead back to benchmarks. While benchmarks are OK there are so many differences between other parts of the benchmarked systems being compared that benchmarking is virtually useless. The true benchmark is not only how the system performs for you today, but how it performs after performing it's 1st thousand tasks for you, 1st ten thousand tasks, and so on.

[rhegedus]

The only benchmarks I'm interested in are DV to mpeg1 or mpeg2.

[guns1inger]

Our local computer magazine (APC - Australian Personal Computer) did a big shootout between the latest single and dual core Intel and AMD CPUs. Although they used benchmarking tools for some tests, the key tests all used real applications and data. The single core Intel P4 Extreme and the dual core (when using appropriate applications) were well ahead of AMD when processing large video files (Divx encoding was used for the main tests). AMD were definately the overall winner as far as general performance, gaming and office apps were concerned, but Intel held the cup for video and audio processing.

[ranchhand]

I've never seen an Intel anything that outperformed an AMD, clocks being equal, and I have been building for several years. Maximum PC magazine consistently rates AMD over Intel, and they stress the bejabbers out of them both. I have been converting analog video to digital and converting to mpeg and burning to DVD. I don't even have the time to go for a beer before it's done (the burning takes a little longer, of course) and I only have a AMD Barton xp2700/2.2GHz running at 333 FSB.
I just built a unit for a graphics student in college, AMD Barton xp3000/2.5GHz, 1 Gig ram at 400FSB. I have seen her working with PhotoshopCS open with two separate 100 mb files open, with Quark Expess desktop publishing program open, bouncing back and forth between Photoshop and Quark Express, prepping graphics and inserting then in Quark with virtually no waiting, no lag. That's performance, my friends.

[studtrooper]

400FSB!?! Are you sure you wern't referring to 200fsb/400mhz?

[ronnylov]

TMPGEnc is a real world application and the benchmark I was refering to was using TMPGEnc. But I can't find any results from Pentium D in that thread so it would be interesting to see if it's better or not in this particular test. Anyone with a Pentium D that can do the benchmark? See the sticky threads in this forum. I will do the benchmark myself with my AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and post the results at default speed and overclocked. I suggest you all do the benchmark if you haven't yet because this is interesting for this topic I think.

Many benchmarks use real world applications. But not so many use relevant video benchmarks. I have seen some Pinnacle studio 9 tests on Tom's Hardware but with strange settings. Why re-encode MPEG1 to MPEG2 DVD format when you can make a DVD directly from MPEG1? Anyway the following chart is what they came up with when testing the X2 3800+:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/200508011/athlon_64_x2_3800-09.html

The AMD Athlon 64 4600+ outperformed the Pentium D 840 on all the tests. The 4600+ was almost as good as 4800+ on all the tests, only a very small difference. The X2 3800+ lost aginst the dual core Intel Pentium D 840 but still outperforms the single core Intel Pentium4 660 and also the single core AMD Athlon 64 FX-57.

The most similar priced Intel Pentium D here in Sweden is Pentium D 830 which is almost the same price as the X2 3800+. It would be interesting to see how X2 3800+ compares to PentiumD 830.
But the Pentium D 830 was not included on the charts of Tom's hardware.

Anandtech have not made the same tests, but here the X2 3800+ is better then PentiumD 830.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2484&p=9

And here they say that AMD is the overall winner too:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2484&p=5

But I have got the feeling that Tom's hardware makes benchmarks that favours Intel and that Anandtech make benchmarks that favours AMD.

The thing that finally made me choose AMD was the power consumption:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q3/athlon64-x2-3800/index.x?pg=13

Maybe getting a Pentium D 820 and overclock it to Pentium D 840 level is a better deal than X2 3800+ but then you probably need water cooling to avoid huge noise levels if you are overclocking a Pentium D. I have overclocked my X2 3800+ to 4600+ level an at least it should be faster than a non-overclocked Intel Pentium D 840 and I run my fans at low speed with aircooled CPU.

My conclusion is that dual core or dual CPU is what you should get if you want high video encoding performance and Intel or AMD is more a matter of taste. However it is easier to build a quiet computer with an AMD CPU because they have much lower power consumption.

[ROF]

400FSB!?! Are you sure you wern't referring to 200fsb/400mhz?

There are 2 barton cores at XP 3000. A 333Mhz FSB and 400mhz FSB. There is no 200.

[rallynavvie]

I think he was referring to the bus speed before any multipliers.

[ranchhand]

PC3200 RAM=DDR400 / Shuttle AN35N mainboard@400FSB, Barton xp300@400FSB. Sorry for any confusion, I am at work an don't have a lot of time.

[rkr1958]

Also, speed isn't everything (it's not the only thing either) ... heat can be a major factor ... who cares if you can run fast if your machine keeps overheating and locking up or you need a fan that sounds like a jet engine to keep your CPU cool.