PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Intel vs AMD S1E2 - nForce2 joins the fight […]
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Intel vs AMD S1E2 - nForce2 joins the fight

Welcome to episode 2 of Intel vs AMD.

In the previous video, two iconic processors squared off against each other: Intel'sPentium 4 3.2 GHz and AMD's Athlon XP 3200+. Intel won the fight, but the war continues.

I received a lot of comments to use a nForce2 chipset motherboard instead of one with a VIA KT600, so that's what this video is about.

I am also using fast CL2 memory from Corsair in dual channel configuration.

Motherboard is the Abit NFS-7 and I am using the same graphics card from the previous video: Nvidia's GeForce 6600 GT.

With the power of nForce, can the XP 3200+ beat the Pentium 4? I have benchmarked 3DMark 2001 SE, AquaMark 3, Codecreatures Pro, Doom 3, Serious Sam Second Encounter and F.E.A.R.

Enjoy this video!

I bet you had a lot of fun with that opening animation. What did you use for it?

Enjoyed 😀

Kodai wrote:

I love the little AMD and Intel logo space fight scene! BTW, I noticed in the video's comments section that you were thinking about RDRAM tests. If you do that, don't forget to test things other than games. Try some Office apps as well as media stuff like video and music apps. There are some things that RDRAM does better than SDRAM and most 1st gen DDR, but not many, and games on the X86 is one of the things it does poorly. It was the ram of choice for many consoles like the SNES, and when a system is designed to use it correctly, it does offer great performance in games. The PC ain't one of those systems, 🤣.

I will stick to games, I understand that some find comparing DivX or Excel interesting, but not me I'm afraid 😊

@ clueless1

I programmed a mini game for the animations. Got lots of more ideas to take it further too 😀

Just going of memory, I believe there was an average 10% speed drop (lower FPS) for most games on the P4 with RDRAM when compared to DDR RAM based mobo's when they came out. I never compared the two as I used RDRAM in office rigs, and DDR in personal/entertainment rigs. I can say I hated RDRAM and The law offices of Rambus, Rambus, and Rambus and even got drafted to give a deposition about them.

RAMBUS generally had a bad latency penalty associated with their technology. For P4, this didn't really matter. If you were lucky, your prefetch miss would also be a branch miss-prediction and the pipeline would be stalled for a while anyway.

ScummVM Roland MT-32 General MIDI Tutorial

Want to play Monkey Island or Space Quest, but find DOSBox confusing and building a retro PC too hard?

Then check out ScummVM. They just released a new version with some nice upgrades. It has built-in Roland MT-32 and General MIDI support through SoundFonts and is really easy to use.

I will show you how to set everything up, using games from GOG such as Space Quest, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Sam and Max Hit the Road.

Haha. I just did exactly this over the weekend, with a little help from yourself. Thanks for all your work!

clueless1 wrote:

Haha. I just did exactly this over the weekend, with a little help from yourself. Thanks for all your work!

For a short while I thought, heck why build a retro PC, this works so well? 😊

But only for a short while 🤣

External BIOS flashing with Genius G540 flasher programmer

Ever wondered what happens when you turn off the power while flashing the BIOS?

We will find out in this video!

Many older motherboards have removable BIOS chips, which can be flashed with a flasher or programmer.

In this video I am reviewing and demonstrating the Genius G540 flasher programmer.

Intel vs AMD S1E3 - P4 vs XP 3200+ GeForce 6800 GT and 875 chipset

Welcome to episode 3 of Intel vs AMD!

Thanks to the nForce2 chipset and fast dual channel memory, the Athlon XP 3200+ got pretty close to the Pentium 4.

Viewers asked me to use a faster graphics card and also check out the Intel 875 chipset compared to the 865 chipset I used before.

So in this video we will see what the results look like with the 6800 GT and the 875 chipset.

Motherboards used in this video include the Gigabyte GA-7VT600, Abit NF7-S, AOpen MX4SG-4DN and Intel D875PBZ.

Processors used are the Athlon XP 3200+, Pentium 4 3.0 and 3.2 GHz with hyper threading.

I am using two sticks of 1 GB Corsair memory at 3-3-3-8 timings. The memory supports 2-3-3-6 timings, but requires a higher voltage of 2.75 V, and because not all motherboards support higher memory voltage I leave them at the default settings to make sure they are consistent.

The graphics card is a MSI 6800 GT and I am using a different graphics driver this time: ForceWare 93.71, which is faster and doesn't cause the crash in 3DMark2003 nature test on the Athlon XP.

I expanded the range of benchmarks, now we also have X2 The Threat, Comanche 4 and Far Cry. I removed F.E.A.R. as it was too much dependent on the graphics card, I will be using it again when we move to PCIe systems. The other benchmarks are 3DMark2001 SE, 3DMark03, AquaMark 3, Codecreatures Pro, Serious Sam Second Encounter and Doom 3.

Will the 6800 GT change the outcome and is the 875 chipset worth getting?

Also, make sure you watch the end for a teaser about the next episode!

Enjoy this video!

What was your PAT setting on the i875 ?
Was PAT also enabled on the i865 ? (some BIOSes do this unofficially)

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_acc … tion_technology

I looked into this quite a bit, the Intel board has an extremely conservative BIOS. There is nothing you can configure regarding PAT.

I do have a D865PERL that I wanted to use, but it suddenly stopped working, so I used the AOpen board.

Regarding the 865 chipset, apparently only some early chipset revisions could do this. I doubt the AOpen does so, they also make quite conservative boards.

Now I do have another 875 board from Gigabyte, that one has a "Turbo mode" that you need to activate for PAT. The board was a tiny bit faster than the Intel, but not by much. I rather have something conservative that works reliably and the Intel board took all the CPU, including Prescott and Gallatin.

PAT and other enhancements make a difference, look at my s478 Gallatin 3.4 score in Doom 3 with the Asus P4C800 Deluxe 2.0. 😀

The Asus BIOS has two chipset latency options, one is called "Performance Mode" and can be set to standard or turbo, the other "Performance Acceleration Mode" and can be set to auto or enabled. With the settings set to turbo and enabled in combination with 2-2-2-5 memory timings the Asus P4C800 is faster than any other i875P or i865PE Socket-478 board I have benched with some margin and not only in Doom 3. PAT only works at stock* FSB which makes overclocking hardly worth while with a 3.4 Ghz CPU.

If you want to show the Socket-478 Pentium 4 from its best side get an Asus P4C800 motherboard!

*You can get around this with SoftFSB.

Skyscraper wrote:

PAT and other enhancements make a difference, look at my s478 Gallatin 3.4 score in Doom 3 with the Asus P4C800 Deluxe 2.0. :) […]
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PAT and other enhancements make a difference, look at my s478 Gallatin 3.4 score in Doom 3 with the Asus P4C800 Deluxe 2.0. 😀

The Asus BIOS has two chipset latency options, one is called "Performance Mode" and can be set to standard or turbo, the other "Performance Acceleration Mode" and can be set to auto or enabled. With the settings set to turbo and enabled in combination with 2-2-2-5 memory timings the Asus P4C800 is faster than any other i875P or i865PE Socket-478 board I have benched with some margin and not only in Doom 3. PAT only works at stock* FSB which makes overclocking hardly worth while with a 3.4 Ghz CPU.

If you want to show the Socket-478 Pentium 4 from its best side get an Asus P4C800 motherboard!

*You can get around this with SoftFSB.

Thanks! That explains a bit more the over 10 fps performance difference I got on my ASUS P4C800-E. I need to set those settings correctly and rebench.

But I agree, ASUS P4C800-E and Abit IC7-Max3 was the boards to get for S478. I'm really satisfied with my S478 system paired with a Radeon HD3850 AGP. I can play games up to 2010-2011 with no issues (some games may require medium settings for acceptable performance). I tested with Bioshock, Batman Asylum and Bulletstorm which all ran fine.

vetz wrote:

Thanks! That explains a bit more the over 10 fps performance difference I got on my ASUS P4C800-E. I need to set those settings correctly and rebench.

But I agree, ASUS P4C800-E and Abit IC7-Max3 was the boards to get for S478. I'm really satisfied with my S478 system paired with a Radeon HD3850 AGP. I can play games up to 2010-2011 with no issues (some games may require medium settings for acceptable performance). I tested with Bioshock, Batman Asylum and Bulletstorm which all ran fine.

The 13% difference to my score with the Gallatin should at least shrink to less than 10% but the Gallatins L3 cache makes it impossible for the Prescott to catch up without a hefty overclock.

As you found out without PAT even a 4.08 Ghz overclock only brings the result up to the level of the Gallatin 3.4 at stock with all enhancements active, the "Emergency Edition" really did deliver. With less of a video card bottleneck chipset latency and L3 cache perhaps would make less of a differnece and core speed could win out.

Skyscraper wrote:

The 13% difference to my score with the Gallatin should at least shrink to less than 10% but the Gallatins L3 cache makes it impossible for the Prescott to catch up without a hefty overclock.

As you found out without PAT even a 4.08 Ghz overclock only brings the result up to the level of the Gallatin 3.4 at stock with all enhancements active, the "Emergency Edition" really did deliver. With less of a video card bottleneck chipset latency and L3 cache perhaps would make less of a differnece and core speed could win out.

We'll see how much it shrinks, but it won't do all of the difference as you say. I knew from 2004 reviews that the Gallatin is quicker in much of the benchmarks, but I was hoping the better overclock abilities of the Prescott would make it on top. Also getting a Prescott is a hell of a lot cheaper than a 3.4ghz EE. I have been looking at the 3.2ghz EE (costs about 40 USD), but I've read people not even managing 3.4ghz overclock on those, which would make me sad.

vetz wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

The 13% difference to my score with the Gallatin should at least shrink to less than 10% but the Gallatins L3 cache makes it impossible for the Prescott to catch up without a hefty overclock.

As you found out without PAT even a 4.08 Ghz overclock only brings the result up to the level of the Gallatin 3.4 at stock with all enhancements active, the "Emergency Edition" really did deliver. With less of a video card bottleneck chipset latency and L3 cache perhaps would make less of a differnece and core speed could win out.

We'll see how much it shrinks, but it won't do all of the difference as you say. I knew from 2004 reviews that the Gallatin is quicker in much of the benchmarks, but I was hoping the better overclock abilities of the Prescott would make it on top. Also getting a Prescott is a hell of a lot cheaper than a 3.4ghz EE. I have been looking at the 3.2ghz EE (costs about 40 USD), but I've read people not even managing 3.4ghz overclock on those, which would make me sad.

I agree that the Prescott (E0 and G1 but not C0 or D0 stepping) is the much better choice when overclocking, I found the 3.4 EE for 250SEK (~26 Euro) on Tradera a couple of years ago and for that price I had to pick it up.

Skyscraper wrote:

If you want to show the Socket-478 Pentium 4 from its best side get an Asus P4C800 motherboard!

*You can get around this with SoftFSB.

I will talk about this in my next video. Asus had the most optimised BIOS and the P4C800 was significantly, even unusually, faster than any other board. And guess what board reviewers used during the Athlon 64 reviews? Conspiracy? 🤣

Later, as CPUs had the memory controller built-in, the choice of board didn't matter that much.

Skyscraper wrote:

I agree that the Prescott (E0 and G1 but not C0 or D0 stepping) is the much better choice when overclocking, I found the 3.4 EE for 250SEK (~26 Euro) on Tradera a couple of years ago and for that price I had to pick it up.

Why haven't you made an entry with overclocked 3.4 EE on the P4C800-E? Also, nice deal, I'd pick it up in a heartbeat as well at that price!

I paid quite a bit more for the EE chips, but they will hold the value well and just get more desirable over time 😀 These extreme chips will always be sought after.

vetz wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I agree that the Prescott (E0 and G1 but not C0 or D0 stepping) is the much better choice when overclocking, I found the 3.4 EE for 250SEK (~26 Euro) on Tradera a couple of years ago and for that price I had to pick it up.

Why haven't you made an entry with overclocked 3.4 EE on the P4C800-E? Also, nice deal, I'd pick it up in a heartbeat as well at that price!

I benched with a Zalman CNPS7000C air cooler which only let the P4EE run at ~3750 MHz or so. Without PAT the result was hardly better than the stock result so I posted the overclocked result for the good old 533 mhz FSB 845E single channel Asus P4B533-E instead, it seemed a more impressive score all things considered.

The Gallatin P4EE will return @4GHz with water sometime in the future. If you think the Prescott is a power hog you have not experienced an overclocked Gallatin! 😉

A small note, my P4C800 is not the -E version but the 2.0 revision of the original one, also have the 1.0 revision somewhere I think. This only matters for overclocking which I think the -E version does better. Im on the lookout for a P4C800-E as I have used the 2.0 to the point where it's impossible to remove the cooler without the CPU tagging along for the ride.