philscomputerlab wrote:
Not wanting to start anything, but how does this compare to a fast Athlon 64 / FX?
Depending on whether that P4 is a Prescott or Northwood, and what ODwilly wants to do with it, it will compare decently enough (as in, unless you're just into benchmarking, it isn't significant enough to start drama over imho 😊 ). Northwood should fare a little better (they do a little better per-clock most of the time), and run cooler while doing it. Just from my own testing, P4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition in an 865P with 6800U scores around 22k in 3D01; Athlon64 4000+ in a K8T800Pro with the same card scores around 26k. Neither of those is the absolute fastest for 478 or 939, but they're both "up there." S478 is also easily mated with an 800-series chipset, which have great 9x and 2k/XP support, which isn't as common for 939 systems. Personally I'd take the P4 for a Win9x box, but for XP the 939 system can be faster. It's also worth keeping in mind that while these systems were generally cost-competitive back in the day, P4 hardware is dirt cheap these days (especially if you don't want/need best-of-the-best), whereas 939 hardware can sometimes command silly prices. Basically, to answer your question: both can be awesome. 😀
If you want to read some comparisons with benchmark numbers, these are two that I've kept saved over the years:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2003/09/23/ath … _vs_pentium_4/1
https://techreport.com/review/7927/the-pentiu … -dfi-855gme-mgf
Both contain Athlon64 vs P4; the HardOCP article also has Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, and the TechReport article includes Pentium M.
kithylin wrote:
In general the P4's are really, really, really hot (And I mean the higher clocked Prescott P4 chips idling on desktop with an aftermarket air cooler @ 55c-60c without even doing anything hot), use a ton of power, and don't perform very well. Where as AMD's K8 chips run cool use a fraction of the power and had significantly higher performance.
Not trying to derail, but just wanted to add to this: Prescott can be absolute space-heaters (I know there was something posted on Vogons recently showing one of them running "business as usual" at >70* C), but Willamette, Northwood, and Gallatin aren't anywhere near as bad - they're generally very comparable to Athlon64 for TDPs and wall power draw (the P4 system I mentioned up above drew around 200W on a ~70% efficient Antec PSU for that test; the A64 drew around 170W on an 80-Plus Corsair PSU).
On the dual-cores - I'd take Pentium D all day over the original K8 duals, because the original K8 duals (Athlon64 X2 for Socket 939) have a timing bug that will cause problems with games, and AMD's "fixer" applet ("AMD Dual-Core Optimzer") does not solve the problem 100%. FWIR this was fixed for AM2 K8 chips, and is certainly fixed in K10 (I've never owned a K8 AM2, but I've played around with a few K10 systems over the years).
havli wrote:Asus PC-DL + 2x Xeon 2.4 GHz HT
Nice. I've got one of those (PC-DL Deluxe 1.05) in my XP Pro system - they're fantastic boards IMO. 😎
As far as "bought these retro hardware today" for me: I finally received my Abit AV8, which came with an Athlon64 3500+ (which was tested, and then put in a box - I've got faster chips 😈 ), and thus far it works great (it produced the 3D01 # for the above discussion even). The uGuru features are a lot more sophisticated than I remember from my AN7; it actually tracks total system power-on hours (mine is a little over 51,000), multiple temperature leads, all of the fans, etc and you can do nifty stuff with that data (you can re-assign fan ports to different temperature leads, change fan ramps, etc) as well as all the normal OCing stuff. Just out of the box quick'n'dirty testing I had it booting at 230x12 and 200x14 on my FX-55 with minimal voltage increase (from 1.5V up to 1.55V); with proper cooling, more than ten minutes of time invested, and so forth it should do quite fantastically. 😀
