which cpu: AMD or P-III?

[Flesh-G-]

Right now I am the NOT proud owner of a Celeron-466.
I want to buy a 1 gHz processor. Which one is best
to encode video in TMPG? AMD-thunderbird 1 gHz or Intel
Pentium-III 1 gHz?

[JacquesDeRipper]

I have an Intel PIII 1GHz with 256 PC133 RAM and two very ordinary Seagate U5 5400 rpm HDD's ( a 20GB and a 40GB).

TMPGEnc 12x Beta works very well on this system, as does Panasonic 2.51.

Making VCD's via FlaskMPEG 0.594 neither gets above 5.50 frames per second, but I reckon this is about average for any 1GHz system.


Jacques

[vitualis]

It's not an easy thing to compare the performance of a PIII vs an Athlon both at 1 GHz as encoding times depend on things apart from just your CPU. I don't think that anybody has posted on the forums a straight out comparison between a P3 and an Athlon.

IMHO, the Athlon may be a better choice as it is simply a better CPU compared to the P3 and for a better price.

However, you may want to hold off buying a new CPU for a while. At the moment, we are sort of in a transition between P3 and P4s, and AMD should be releasing the Athlon 4 soon.

TMPGEnc has optimisations for the P4, and although I haven't seen any comparisons, one would expect that this would have a big difference.

Regards.

[FilComArt]

vitualis is right!
The best processor is P4, but it is too expensive.
AMD Athlon with AMD760 chipset give a good results, because Athlon have a best FPU block in the industry, but most popular video editing, capturing and encoding programmes is optimised for Intel SSE instructions.
Today’s result Intel PIII may be a little beter?!

AMD prepared new processors known as Athlon4 witch has a new 3DNow! Professional instructions (Athlon MP has this new instructions too).
3Dnow! Pro instructions is similar Intel PII SSE instructions. With new instructions and best FPU block Athlon4 (Athlon MP) is the best processor.
_____________________
Sorry for my English.

[Sefy]

I'm not going to compare performance, cause that depends on applications and the rest of the system components, and you can find benchmarks showing P4 faster, and you can find Benchmarks showing a P3 beating the crap out of P4 when both are at the same clock level!, i'm going to compare upgradbility!

Pentium 3 = Dead End, last CPU is 1ghz, I don't think there is anything newer planned, you buy it, you'll need to buy a whole new system the next time, if you go with Intel, that would be the P4, which still doesn't show real bang-for-the-buck!

Pentium 4 = Potentioally a great CPU, but WAY over priced! and doesn't give you the performance you want regarding TODAY's applications, and as we know Intel, next CPU means another CPU socket type, meaning, replace everything again.

Duron/T-Bird = Starts at 600mhz and currently latest CPU is 1.4ghz, all P4 1.4/1.5/1.7 are always compared to a slower competing T-bird and usually the 1.2ghz T-Bird gives the P4 a run for the money! it is much cheaper, and AMD has commited on supporting their Socket A untill 2003 atleast, so you may replace a mainboard, but you can use the Same CPU, and AMD components are usually cheaper then Intel Counterparts.

Conclusions = Buy what you think is good for you and for what you plan on doing, and your money budget.

For the record, FlaskMPEG 0.594 AMD Optimized gave me on a Duron 850 12fps using LSX 3.5, and 8fps using Panasonic Plugin.

[ed_101]

hey
umm....this is not really that hard a decision.....if u have the cash get the PIII the intel processors take the cake in gaming performance also the PIII has extra extensions which REALLY benefit ripping if u use CCE and the 256kb full speed on-die L2 cache is a real bonus!
But then again for a few extra bux a P4 would be so sweet!
But if u do decide to go AMD(i wouldnt but hey we r all different)get a thunderbird!
Well c'ya
ed
p.s.Get the PIII u wont be sorry!

[tara]

I have a duel p3-1000 machne with 1024M of ram and a 20+40
ATA100 hard drives, I use tmgench and like it BUT it will not take full advantage of both cpus. the ram is pc133 and the system is NOT overclocked. the cost difference on the motherboard(Abit VP-6) is about 30.00 and the cost of the second cpu was 195.00

[vitualis]

<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 2001-07-05 10:08:59, Sefy wrote:
Pentium 3 = Dead End, last CPU is 1ghz, I don't think there is anything newer planned, you buy it, you'll need to buy a whole new system the next time, if you go with Intel, that would be the P4, which still doesn't show real bang-for-the-buck!

Pentium 4 = Potentioally a great CPU, but WAY over priced! and doesn't give you the performance you want regarding TODAY's applications, and as we know Intel, next CPU means another CPU socket type, meaning, replace everything again.

Duron/T-Bird = Starts at 600mhz and currently latest CPU is 1.4ghz, all P4 1.4/1.5/1.7 are always compared to a slower competing T-bird and usually the 1.2ghz T-Bird gives the P4 a run for the money! it is much cheaper, and AMD has commited on supporting their Socket A untill 2003 atleast, so you may replace a mainboard, but you can use the Same CPU, and AMD components are usually cheaper then Intel Counterparts.</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

I think we always have the same argument...

I agree with most of what Sefy has stated... but, although the P3 is at the end of the line, so is the AMD Thunderbird. The Athlon 4 has yet to be released for the desktop, however.

Although, AMD has stated that current mobos will be okay for the Athlon 4, this has yet to be proven. Furthermore, the Athlon 4 has a number of new features that MAY NOT be fully compatible with current mobos, or at least, will be crippled by one.

To be fair, the same thing may be true for existing P4 mobos for future P4s.

IMHO, the P4 class of chips are the way of the future. The still as yet unreleased Athlon4 (for desktops) is really more of a high clockrate P3. Unfortunately, as I alluded to in my first post, this means that current cheaper systems have a blunted upgrade path. I suggest that unless you need a new PC in the immediate future, wait for a while.

Regards.

[evanskeeee]

at the moment i am running a P3 1 gig with 512 megs of ram and it works perfectly for making back-ups of movies any format. The athlon is decent but no where near as stable as the p3 or p4 for running apps that involve tons of rendering. if you do get an athlon i suggest getting a motherboard that supports DDR RAM and fill up all the slots. but by the time you do that you could have spent your money on a p3. trust the intel p3 won't dissapoint you and if you feel like you need more buy a motherboard that holds 2 spu's and pop in another p3 1 gig.

[mik]

Id wait and get a 1.53ghz Athlon4 and a SIS735 motherboard upon release with 512mb of DDR ram... and then overclock the sucker... mmmmm... sweeet
lol

[FilComArt]

TO SEFY
Now in Japan you can buy a new PIII-S 1,26G.

But AMD will use Socket A for their processors up 2 years. That’s mean, that you will change 3 new processors (Polomino=Athlon4, Thoroughbred and Barton) on existing motherboard. This processors clocking will be up to 2,5Ghz.

[SatStorm]

Well, let tell my opinion on this one:

P3 = old stuff. Good, stable and chip for today, but no future...

P4 = Best solution. Good and stable. BUT: Expencive, and you need a total new machine. Also, intel never supports enough the future upgrades of a system. Most of the times you need new machine in every upgrade...

Duron = Cheapest solution. Does work and you can upgrade and upgrade and upgrade...

Athlon = Good and stable (not so much as P4, but stable). 95% of P4 power. VERY CHEAP. And you can upgrade, upgrade, upgrade....
Also, you can use all your older stuff..


So:

- You want 5% more? Go buy P4, and pay much for it!
- You don't have that money? Buy Athlon. In 6 months, you can sell it as second hand proccesor and buy a new, better one one.

That is the good point with AMD. You can upgrade with less cost. In 6 months, proccesors will be far beyond today. With AMD you can follow that. With Intel no...

[TheRookie]

This is just my opinion about this topic...

1. SatStorm is absolutely right about Intel strange upgrade policy.
2 On the other hand, I see no reason for following AMD path because of easier upgrades. I prefer stability. If you take a brief look at this forum, you'll find a lot of messages saying - this and this doesn't work with AMD CPUs.
3. If you want to upgrade you PC in let's say 1 year, you'll need to change the CPU AND the MB (newer CPUs probably will use another type of the bus and memory). So in order to get the most of your new CPU you'll need to buy the latest MB with all of new goodies on it.
4. I had both AMD and Intel CPUs, so I could compare.

My conclusion:
AMD is faster and cheap. Intel is stable and expensive.
So, it's up to you to decide whether spend less and (maybe) get into the troubles or spend more and get less problematic CPU. And upgradability? For me, this is nothing more than marketing hype. You'll have to totally change your PC in 2-3 years, so why should I care?

TheRookie

[ktnwin]

Talking about CPU benchmarking, there are numerous benchmarks out there.

However, the one that we are most interested (members of this forum) is software encoding time. For folks that have hardware encoder, it does not really matter.

It may be a good idea to use TMPGEnc software as CPU benchmark. Just make sure to encode the same AVI file into the exact same output format under same system environment (memory size, same hard drives, etc...)

Don't you agree?


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ktnwin on 2001-07-06 11:24:00 ]</font>

[tara]

we have a new p4 system at work and I am less than inpressed
It truely is bleeding edge,and the cost we have about 1900.00 for the system and my duel p-3 1000mhz can be bought
for about 1200.00 with some careful buying,mine cost 1600.00
due to a geforce 3 card

[Sefy]

like vitualis said, I also go into an argument, and i really don't think it is neccessery, each person has their own choices, but i would like to address a few of the points regarding the AMD CPU.

1) Stability = I've been having AMD since Duron 600 till my new Thunderbird 1ghz and i've had NO crashes, my system runs smooth, and runs ALL programs that I need! it may not do the same for others, but the same can be said on Intel CPU's, where I work, they use all Microsoft products and OS's and all the PC's are AMD Duron, and no problems so far.
2) Upgradbility = According to AMD themselfs, all latest CPU's should be usable on current Mainboards, so I am suspecting that all new features will only need to be enabled on BIOS updates, with Intel, any NEW cpu they make is a NEW socket/slot technology, and with a P4 ontop of that you also need a new computer case and diffrent ram (RDRAM) which is more expensive then any other RAM in the market! (512mb SDRAM PC133 =40$!!!)
3) Compatibility = Note the last 2 lines on Stability! and i've seen plenty if not even more people complain on P4 regarding Drivers and Hardware compabitility!

As always, the choice is upto each user, weather it's a money choice or one of those choices, but as long as people base AMD, i'll bash Intel, and god knows over 60% of the American people and the whole world agree with me, as Intel CPU profits DROPED and keeps on dropping every month!

[FilComArt]

Please read this article. It is not encoding, but near video benchmarks.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/cpu/photoshop-platform/

I choose AMD.

[suspect]

<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 2001-07-06 04:12:20, TheRookie wrote:
This is just my opinion about this topic...

1. SatStorm is absolutely right about Intel strange upgrade policy.
2 On the other hand, I see no reason for following AMD path because of easier upgrades. I prefer stability. If you take a brief look at this forum, you'll find a lot of messages saying - this and this doesn't work with AMD CPUs.
3. If you want to upgrade you PC in let's say 1 year, you'll need to change the CPU AND the MB (newer CPUs probably will use another type of the bus and memory). So in order to get the most of your new CPU you'll need to buy the latest MB with all of new goodies on it.
4. I had both AMD and Intel CPUs, so I could compare.

My conclusion:
AMD is faster and cheap. Intel is stable and expensive.
So, it's up to you to decide whether spend less and (maybe) get into the troubles or spend more and get less problematic CPU. </BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>


less problematic? yeah sure. Thats why compaq and dell had to remove their p4 desktops from the market last november for overheating problems (did you notice that the bluemen were still advertising Pentium 3s thru december?). AMD's have gotten a bad rap from morons installing heat sinks incorrectly causing overheating and instablity(use thermal putty dammit!!), and the earlier buggy VIA chipsets causeing incompatiblities with hardware (particularly a poorly engineered AGP bus). The older AMD chipsets had numerous problems with various pieces of video hardware including some nvidia geforce2 based cards and the Dazzle DVC II. The newer AMD chipsets are very stable, try the AMD760 for now, or wait unit nvidia releases the nForce this Fall. The SiS735 might have been a competitor if they had released it this summer, but by the time it's out, you might as well wait for the nForce.

Intel does have better pentium 3s based on the tulatin core, but since they have the potential to attract pentium 4 buyers dont expect to see them. Tom has an article about the new p3 core --http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q2/010612/index.html

[vitualis]

AMD's problems aren't all due to third parties... They wouldn't have heating problems (and meltdowns) of their CPUs if it included an integrated heat sensor (e.g., like Intel CPUs).

Regards.

_________________
Michael Tam

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: vitualis on 2001-07-09 21:16:22 ]</font>

[wildcatfan]

<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 2001-07-09 21:14:56, vitualis wrote:
AMD's problems aren't all due to third parties... They wouldn't have heating problems (and meltdowns) of their CPUs if it included an integrated heat sensor (e.g., like Intel CPUs).

Regards.

_________________
Michael Tam

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: vitualis on 2001-07-09 21:16:22 ]</font>
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>


Then again if people installed their sinks correctly they wouldn't have that problem either. (the new chip will have a thermal sensor however) Anyways whoever said that the p3 beats the athlon in GAMING performance was smoking some good stuff. The p4 only beats the athlon in SOME games.

Michael

[vitualis]

<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 2001-07-09 21:26:20, wildcatfan wrote:
Then again if people installed their sinks correctly they wouldn't have that problem either. (the new chip will have a thermal sensor however)...</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Of course.

However, I am of the impression that this is an important layer of protection missing (e.g., my fan may not work properly, the cable could be loose, the fan may be fitted improperly, etc.)

Although the Athlon4 will have a thermal sensor, unless I'm wrong, this is dependent on the mobo to function properly -- which means it won't work with existing mobos? This is unlike the Intel CPUs that will protect themselves and shut down if the temperature goes too high.

Regards.

[Sefy]

Actually if you enable the mainboard detection you can prevent CPU damage from overheating as most if not all mainboards today have that feature, I have mine enabled to beep me if i'm overheated, and to shut down incase i'm not around.

But i've heard of overheating problems with Intel CPU's as well, so whatever problems AMD have, Intel has it too, not to mention Compatibility for Intel P4 isn't all that great either.

[vitualis]

Sefy,

That may be true, but you very rarely hear of an Intel CPU killing itself due to a runaway heat problem -- this is because of the in-chip thermal protection.

I've heard multiple times of an Athlon cooking itself into thermal death (usually because of poorly fitted fan + overclocking).

Heat protection from the mobo is a little bit unreliable (if you consider all the different mobos available).

Regards.

[jmv2k1]

t-bird 1.2 and 512 megs of ram nuff said

[poopyhead]

amount of RAM's not as important as CPU speed....especially when win98 (cough..uh...winME) can't handle extra memory that well....might as well get 128 DDR rather than 256 SDR...but it still all comes down to CPU...and HDD speed is prolly pretty important too...

[Sefy]

Vitualis, as I person who worked in a PC store for 2 years and provided service for a 80 personal software company for over 7 years, I have not yet had a single AMD cook itself! i'm not saying it can't happen, but as you've said yourself, it's not all that CPU's fault, it's alot to do with how the person has installed the FAN and cooling devices, that same person can also accidently bend one of the pins on the CPU itself and cause damage, alot of things can happen but if you do it by the book and install it correctly, you will have no problems with CPU over heating and making an omlet out of itself

I agreed that "how people treat the CPU"

For most PIII user, they just want a stable system. They don't want to change, nor even touch anything on the CPU.

For Athlon user, they are more aggressive. They do not afraid to change, modify the CPU in order to get some more power or just want to see what will happen. Basic reason is ------ Athlon is cheap.

DawningViews

[tuan711]

If you are running NT or Win2K, might want to consider a dual CPU system. Some Dual CPU Motherboard is as cheap as the single CPU motherboard. Gigabyte has one for about $100. See http://www.tomshardware.com for more info on dual systems.
The price of two 1GHz P3 might be more than one 1GHz P4, but I think you can get two P3 800MHz for less especially if u can get them used from people that are upgrading.
If you know what you are doing, building a dual CPU system is the way to go. TMPGEnc is written to take advantage of 2 CPUs so it will help reduce your encoding time.

[Sefy]

I quite agree a Dual CPU system would be fantastic, but I wouldn't quite agree on two things, which they are:
1) As cheap as a Single CPU, one, you need a more expensive board, and two, well, you need to buy two CPU's, so that's already more expensive then a single CPU!, personally i'm waiting for a Dual AMD system, as I know i'm not gonna stop dead at 1ghz like a P3, so I got some more future into it.
2) Dual CPU systems will NOT give you TWICE the performance of a single CPU, they might give you 30 to 50% more on supported applications, some may give more, but never will you get twice faster then a single CPU system, you must have all your software components to support the Dual CPU feature or it will be like using a GeForce3 on a DOS version of Pac Man

[tuan711]

agrees Sefy, Dual CPU systems are not for everyone. For me, I found it cheaper and more fun to upgrade from a single P3 700MHz to a dual CPU system (I just buy another used P3 700MHz and mobo).

Just a fun experiment for those interested in results between a single P3 700MHz vs. a dual P3 700MHz encoding time:

AVI Clip: 5min16sec (9500 frames)

Encoder: TMPGEnc beta12
Template: Sefy's SxVCD for NTSC Enhanced (Mpeg2 352x240 CQ_VBR_100)

Total encoding time with:

One P3 700MHz CPU = 17min30sec or ~9.048fps (9500frames/1050sec)
Two P3 700MHz CPUs = 11min15sec or ~ 14.074fps (9500frames/675sec)

Compared 9fps to 14fps is about a %50 performance increase.


Not Bad since I found a post from another VCDHelp member reported that he upgrade from a P3 800MHz to a P4 1.4GHz and noticed only a 10% improvement.


Another advantge of a DUAL CPU system is that eventhough it might cost a little extra in the beginning, u won't have to upgrade it as often as a single CPU system.


Power to the duallies!!