Someone with ALOT of Hardware questions. Any answers/opinion

[Douglesh]

i have a fair few computer hardware questions that i have gathered up over some time

Why is intel P3 more expensive than AMD Athlon XP / P4, especially the tualatin range?

What is Tualatin?

Can i run dual Duron CPU's off the Tyan tiger board, since duron is also a socket A CPU?

Are there any Mainboards out there, that support socket A CPU as well as RDRam?

Are there any main boards out there that support P3 chips as well as RDRam?

What are the advantages/features that make Tualatin chips worth their price (expensive!)

Would dual Duron 1.0Ghz offer superior performance to a single athlon XP 1700?

Are there any boards that support DDR2700(300Mhz) out there?

Is the performance of RDRam superior to that of DDR266/300?


All of these questions are bugging me, and it would seem there are some out there who could answer! anyone who can help, please do!

[Douglesh]

oh one more important question for anyone who can say (i guess sefy can give me a good answer here)

Is the performance of P3 superior to P4, if so, is it comparable to AMD Athlon XP performance? are there any benchmarks P3 -> P4?

[Sefy]

I'll try to answer all your questions here, one by one

1) Intel is phasing out the P3, so they raised it's price so people won't buy it and switch to P4.
2) Tualatin is the Code name of the Core of the P3, I believe it's the one that uses the 133mhz bus.
3) Officialy, no, Unofficialy yes, you can run Dual Duron CPU's on the Tyan Tiger mainboard.
4&5) There are no mainboards for AMD or P3 with RDRAM support
6) Nothing, it gives better performance then the P4 on the same speed, and sometimes even higher speeds, not worth the money because it's dead end architecture.
7) I don't think so, it's possible, they both use the same features, but the XP has a larger cache size which may give it more performance in some tests.
I think so, but i'm not 100% sure yet, i've heard VIA released a compatible VIA333 chipset.
9) TECHNICLY it is superior in bandwidth, but in real life it barely reaches in performance with today's applications.
10) P3 1ghz beats the P4 at 1ghz, you can check Benchmarks on Tom's Hardware.

I hope this helps you out!

[disturbed1]

There is a P3 board that supports RDRAM, it has the 820 chipset. Last I checked, you could get one for ~$30. It's a slot 1 with 133 bus support.

I'd stick with a newer Socket A board, or a P4 board (socket 428 ), everything else is dead.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: disturbed1 on 2001-12-18 03:44:20 ]</font>

[Douglesh]

thanks sefy. I found a couple of P3 boards that support DDR, but there are only 2! yeh, P3 seems dead architechture, and not such a good price. SO,, what would be a better option for me, i have ruled out having an intel chip in my next PC, i have a choice from 2 systems now. They are:

System 1

CPU - AMD Athlon XP 1700
Mainboard - ABit KR7A
HDD - 40gig Quantum Fireball 7200RPM
Ram - 512mb DDR266

System 2

CPU'S - 2xAMD Duron Morgan 1Ghz
Mainboard - Tyan AMD760MP DDR
HDD - 40gig Quantum Fireball 7200RPM
Ram - 512mb DDR266


The 2nd system costs about $200 (AU Dollars) more than the first one. Is it more beneficial to run 2 Duron processors, or stay with the one athlon XP? Apart from TMPGEnc, how many other applications support multithreading?

[Kdiddy]

Ok Ill take a shot at some of these that I have an opinion on in the order asked.

1) Tualation is new tech, sorta like when Xeon first came out, always expensive. I would suspect that P3s are still somewhat expensive because the P4s so far havent lived up to the hyped. Thus the P3 demand is still high.

2) Cmon man, you are smart, you know you could have typed "intel tualatin" in google and gotten this answer.

3) I know that Tyan makes a dual socket A board, most people I know are putting XP chips on them, but dont see why you couldnt do durons. Board is hella expensive though.
For that money you might as well put dual XPs and not durons

4) Dont think so, not sure....anyways, DDR IMO is performs better than RDram in both performance & cost.

5) Very few I think. The RDram was geared more for use with the P4 not P3. Don't quote me on that.

6) In home based enviroment, I would say close to no advantages. Server based workplace may be a different story.

7) Hmmm good, off hand, I would say no. But again, if you are going to drop that kinda cash on a dual socket A board, Id go with the dual XP/MP chips.

Very few at the moment at reasonable prices.

9) IMO, no.

10) The going opinion is that at BOTH cost based & performance based comparisons. That the athlon XPs are perfoming than the P4 & P3 counterparts.(as I hold the match to great AMD/INTEL flame war). A thread that is not too old is filled with opinions on how they perform. And since you are here, you can see what people think about their performance in the encoding arena. Do a search, you will see.

[Douglesh]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-12-18 03:39:46, disturbed1 wrote:
There is a P3 board that supports RDRAM, it has the 820 chipset. Last I checked, you could get one for ~$30. It's a slot 1 with 133 bus support.

I'd stick with a newer Socket A board, or a P4 board (socket 428 ), everything else is dead.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: disturbed1 on 2001-12-18 03:44:20 ]</font>
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

I thought so, because i saw an ad on a site advertising a p3 Coppermine 933mhz with 128mb RDRam on the side, as for the P4, you said socket 428. Im confused, did you mean 423 or 478? fortunately, there is no socket 428 (intels made it confusing enough already).

So i guess i stick with the Athlon XP 1700?

Sefy, how about thunderbirds, can the Tyan run dual thunderbird chips, and would they offer superior performance to the single XP1700?

[Douglesh]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
2) Cmon man, you are smart, you know you could have typed "intel tualatin" in google and gotten this answer.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

heh, yah i found all the answers after searching at altavista. I just use this forum as the first place to ask a question, be it stupid or not.

[Douglesh]

kdiddy, i live in australia, i guess on the whole CPU parts here are quite expensive. If i was to run a single athlon XP 1700 with an Abit KR7A board, that would cost $710

However if i wanted to run Dual Duron morgans on that tyan board, it would cost me $952

Thats an extra 260. However if i want to run dual Athlon MP's, then the price gets blown out badly, Dual MP's plus the tyan board, costs $1592

I am quite willing to pay the extra 260 if the performance is that much better, i am wondering only one more thing now before i start purchasing. Can i run dual Thunderbird on the Tyan, and will dual thunderbird 1Ghz be better than athlon XP 1700?

[Kdiddy]

hmmm tough call, right now, I think are very few apps on the market for home use, that REALLY take advantage of dual CPUs outside of TMPG....I personally dont think the you will notice the 200 bucks worth of improvement. I dont know if you use or how often these other apps, of course the Im not counting the OS....a side note, I wouldnt do Abit...Im quite happy with my XP 1500 on an ECS board, cut my TMPG time in half over my tbird 800 w/ Asus board...low price, very stable, SIS chipset...if not it, then Id go back to Asus...Im never doing Abit again.

[disturbed1]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-12-18 03:51:39, Douglesh wrote:

Im confused, did you mean 423 or 478? fortunately, there is no socket 428 (intels made it confusing enough already).

</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Oops. 478.

Via has a chipset that uses both sockects and supports DDR, and Ultra ATA/133 http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2826165,00.html

[StudeBarc]

Yo Douglesh,
Being a fellow Oz-person I hear you on the pricing issues. I contemplated the dual proc MB's for a while and decided no, only because to get the performance i tend with kdiddy and Dual XP's. I recently upgraded from 1gig T'bird to XP 1600 on ASUSA7v266e MB. Work's really well. Had trouble with an ABIT KG7 and took it back to go bak to ASUS. Good mobo's ASUS. For my 2 bob's worth the XP1700 was about 70 bucks more than the 1600 and the economics prevented that. I am EXTREMELY ('scuse the shouting) happy with the 1600 as it runs at 1.53g by pushing the FSB to 146mhz and maintaining a 10.5X multiplier. That sort of means I have an XP1800 or so? BTW encoding wise I have picked up approx 40% over the 1gig Athlon (these chips are on the way out too!!). Re the KR7 I think that supports ATA133, try to get an ATA133 HD rather than the old fireball (ATA100). Maxtor Vipers are ATA133. Any way do what ya gotta, but AMD XP is extermely nice for me.
Regards
Studebarc

[Sefy]

Sorry for the late reply, ok, here are two choices i'm giving you, either wait for nForce board chipset like MSI which offers amazing features, and will save you a bundle of money considering it has onboard AC3 Sound and GeForce2MX, or get the dual board, but only buy a single CPU, why ? cause you can always buy another CPU if you really need one, a Dual Board will give you much more future upgrade, even if AMD stopps XP at lets say 2000, then you can put 2 x 2000 and get to 4000!

Wouldn't that be cost effective ?

[Douglesh]

Kdiddy, why shouldnt i do abit? disregarding the dual socket a board, i have sighted 3 decent sounding boards

Abit KR7A
Asus A7V266E(A)
Microstar KT7266

I thought the abit would be a good choice because it has 4 Dimm expansion slots, whereas the other two boards only have 3. The Asus board has the functionality of overclocking from BIOS though, which is damn good. Of those three boards, which would be the best to use with an athlon XP 1700 chip?

[Douglesh]

I cant find any boards that support ATA133, or DDR2700, and i kinda want both! DDR2700 comes close to matching RDRam in bandwidth performance.

Anyone know any boards that support either

DDR2700
ATA133

or both?? they dont seem to be very widespread right now!

[Douglesh]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
Im quite happy with my XP 1500 on an ECS board
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

ECS, what model? is it K7S5AS462? what are the features?

[Kdiddy]

I loved Abit b4..but that was until my 2 year old board died, which may have been partly more my fault, it was that was under constant push & prodding for test purposes...I just didnt like Abit's support, plus I had conflicts with onboard ATA support, Abit wouldnt claim support nor would Highpoint, they would put it off on each other...Some of my other friends have had issues with them as well... This has not been the case for my Asus boards & support...and hopefully wont be the case with my ECS board...I have the K7S5A, check it & others out here, http://www.ecsusa.com/, not bad for a $52 board...and tomshardware spoke very highly of the SIS chipset, but some say the via chipset is better....Also, I ont want sell this board to you as the best thing since slice bread, I can link you to a forum where hundreds of other people love this board, but there are just as many that have issues with it...but to me its the chance you take with anything you buy....of the 3 you named, my order of preference would be Asus, Microstar, Abit, if money is not a controlling factor...as was the case for me.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kdiddy on 2001-12-18 23:04:38 ]</font>

[Shabubu]

I think it was the intel 850 chipset that supported P3 and Rambus, no one bought it cause of the price of Rambus at the time, hence the popularity of the 815... They brought rambus back for the P4.

[StudeBarc]

Yo Douglesh,
Re the ABIT boards, I like kdiddy had a few problems with a KG7 board and went back to ASUS. I have found this company to produce rock solid mobos and they back it up with support and a good website. I use the A7v266e with VIA KT266a chipset and find it to be really solid. Shame about the 3 DDR slots only though. If you want the ABIT board go for the KR7-RAID unit. This HAS ATA133 support. Re the DDR2700 hmmm no thoughts on that one yet..
Gamedude (Brissie) have KR7-RAID boards at 369 I think.
Regards
Studebarc

[Sefy]

I think Asus support depends on your location, here in Israel i've had lousy support from them, and loads of problems and compatibility with cards, especialy in Windows2000 installation

Ever since my K6-500 i've used EPoX based boards, which were the best one i've seen in stability and great performance as well! the most important part to me in a system is stability and the ability to upgrade, like buying my current 8KTA3 board and with a BIOS update I can put Athlon XP and MP on it.

Right now i'm waiting for them to release either a nForce based board or a Dual Processor board, till then, I don't need any more upgrades. EPoX deliver good price/performance.
the 8KHA (DDR) is being sold for around 85$ and it has gotten loads of good reviews.

[Greg12]

i always wanted to have Dual CPU's so i could put TMPG or something running on the first CPU and use the second for normal computer operations

[Douglesh]

yeh, i was thinking douglesh. I cant find any boards that support DDR2700, yet i can find stores that sell DDR2700. As for ATA133, i guess i can say im satisfied with ATA100