Finally upgraded my puter

[nO-One]

managed to get my greedy little hands on some better hardware yesterday.

P4 3.0Ghz Prescott
MSI 865PE Neo2 Platinum Edition.
512 pc3200 Kingston ram.

Not a full upgrade but my puter feels better, now I just have to get me a beefier vid card to replace my aging GF2 GTS.

P4 3.0Ghz Prescott

Should have got the Northwood, runs faster, runs cooler, and sells for cheaper.

Other than that congrats man!

About the same price actually (the opposite is true for Newegg for the retail box).  People are hoping a new chipset from Intel will help take advantage of the 1mb Cache the Prescotts have.  Otherwise don\'t see why Intel would push Prescotts at all.

So you went Intel to AMD, then back to Intel?  What made you go back, usually people swear by AMD once they have em?  I have to say though Intel really provides the best performance in the ~$200 range.

[nO-One]

well I\'ll most likely go AMD as soon as their K8 line matures and they phase out the K7 line.

And I got this package somewhat cheap, the only AMD solution I could\'ve gotten wouldn\'t have given me the same performance.

About the same price actually

well yes and no. Depends where you look. One thing is for certain the Northwood can be found cheaper, than the precott.

Otherwise don\'t see why Intel would push Prescotts at all.

What choice do they have my friend; they have to release something to compete in the market. PRESHOT is nothing special, just a little SSE3 support added (which the 939 AMD64 will have) increase in cache size (remember Intel has always need more cache then AMD to compete) and the fact that it runs much much hotter, use more power 100W. Why do you think Intel has pushed the BTX form factor so soon. There damn PRESHOT\'s run to hot so they forced the industry to adhere to there standards. Amd will not adopt BTX for quite some time, as it\'s not needed.

well I\'ll most likely go AMD as soon as their K8 line matures

939 Newcastle is not much different from the 754 variant. Smaller Core .09nm, increase from 800HT to 1000HT and dual channel (which by the way Dual channel has little benefit in 90% of the applications you use) Other than Higher clock frequency and probably better over cloackabilty not much has changed, but what will change is the amount of money left over in your bank if you go 939. Trust me 754 is the way to go unless your are willing to wait till Q1 2005 where as the 939 will be affordable, due to mass production(good yeilds per waffer etc..)

To further  illustrate my point, here is a  comparison to a 939\'s perforamce VS the 754, take a look at this!



As you can the difference in speed between the +3800 and +3400 754 is really nothing staggering. So if anyone is in the market for a new AMD chip, go with the established 754.

Now the 939 starts at $499, they will only be produced from 3500+ so if you want slower/cheaper AMD64 go with 754 which by the way will be brought down further in price once the 939 fully hit\'s the market.

[nO-One]

well got me a vid card, Radeon 9600XT, almost got a 9800XT, had it in my hands but the salesman noticed his mistake just seconds before I left....damnit.

Still, happy with the card.

Originally posted by NVIDIA256
better over cloackabilty

overcloack!!111  haha, sorry I just miss Jeff K

As for the term "PRESHOT" you\'re not gonna like me saying this but that sounds stupid.  And can you expain to me this statement:

remember Intel has always need more cache then AMD to compete

The 3.0C has 512kb of cache, same as AMD\'s direct competitor, the 3800+.  Not trying to argue at all, just wondering where that statement comes from.

Easy my friend, if you remember the inception of the Athlon and Pentium 4 you would have noticed that Intel most of the time has always had more Cache on there chip. You mention the 3.0c yet fail to realize that it\'s a 4th generation Pentium 4 that was targeted towards the end cycle Barton’s(512kb) not the 64\'s. The AMD64 is a completely different chip/next gen architecture, that is more efficient than it’s previous brother so your comparing apples to Oranges When Intel back in the beginning of P4(willmate/northwood) had more cache, the Athlon was still able to beat it with its 256kb on die Cache while Intel had 512kb.

Also in order for Intel to try and Compete with the AMD64\'s they released that piece of Junk call the "Emergency Edition" with the 2mb of L3 cache, which essentially is nothing more than a Zeon P4 processor with more cache. Hence Intel has always needed more Cache to stay competitive with AMD.

Another example is the Prescott(which is the competitor to 939 AMD64,which comes with 1mb L2 cache, while AMD has opted to use 512kb(half of Prescott, just like the original P4 vs Althon). So again we see AMD cutting back on the cache for better yields, while Intel cannot afford to do so, otherwise there Prescott will suffer in performance.

I\'m not on one camp or the other, I\'d quickly go AMD if it offered a better price/performance ratio in what I was looking for but it doesn\'t.  Most people only look at the gaming benchmarks but I also do a crapload of mutlimedia encoding.

I still don\'t see why you say Intel "needs" 1-2mb of cache.  According to TH benchmarks the Northwood and the Prescott\'s score about the same.  It seems it\'s just a marketing gimmick.

Since you seem to use terms such as PRESHOT and Emergency Edition you leave me with a blistering impression that you\'re an AMD fanboy.  I won\'t argue that for gaming AMD is your best bet if you\'re on a budget, but if you have a job take a look at some reviews and buy whatever fits your application.  1NT3L 4 L1F3 MUTHA($(&$@#&!!!

Informative link I found...

Now, regarding cache failures... Let\'s not forget the cache is ON-DIE. It\'s not a separate cache chip or die that is integrated within the processor package. Cache takes up a lot of space. That\'s why the Barton die is bigger than the Thoroughbred\'s die.

When a die is bigger, the yield naturally drops even though the defect density for the fab remains constant. The yield drops because of the larger die size. The larger the die, the more likely it is for contaminants to damage it. And due to its size, the Barton\'s large on-die cache is more susceptible to getting damaged by such contaminants.

As a new core with a larger die, the Barton will naturally have a lower yield than the Thoroughbred. Many of these will be due to damage to the L2 cache. So, what would be the logical thing for AMD to do?

Throw away the chips?

Nah... They are smarter than that. All they need to do is disable half the L2 cache (naturally the defective half!) and they will have a bunch of working processors! Of course, this doesn\'t mean they can get all their defective chips running. But it does allow them to recover a large portion of their "defective" chips.

And don\'t forget... Selling microprocessors is always about selling perception. If the market requires more Thortons, AMD is not going to say, "Sorry, we don\'t have any more defective Bartons to turn into Thortons." They will just disable half the cache of good dies to make them into Thortons.

If you think that\'s a waste of money, well, that\'s because you perceive the cost of the processor to be extraordinarily high just because it\'s a working Barton core. Well, no. It\'s all about marketing and perception.

If AMD gets to sell you one of their new cores as a Barton (at a higher cost), it would make them very happy. But they are just as happy to sell you a Thorton using the same core (or a defective one) at a lower profit to them. At the end of the day, profit is profit.

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=42&var2=0

According to TH benchmarks the Northwood and the Prescott\'s score about the same. It seems it\'s just a marketing gimmick.

LOL, dude word of advice never come into a pc discusiion and use THG as a resource. Ask any informative person on the net, they will tell you THG is INTEL/NVIDIA biased.

THG is the #1 Biased, sellout website on the net.

Since you seem to use terms such as PRESHOT and Emergency Edition you leave me with a blistering impression that you\'re an AMD fanboy.

I currently own an Intel 3.06GHz Northwood with 1GB PC-RDRAM 1066, how about them apples. So fanboy not.
You see I do not pledge elegance to any company, YES I currently favor AMD, they have had the best CPU\'s for the last 4 years, Instead INTEL has been lagging behind, and charging there customers a premium. Not to mention all the revision fascios with the P4, don\'t get me started. Do I need to also mention the whole Rambus SCAM with the P4. Intel=M$

(by the way the only reason why I own the P4 with the RAMBUS 1066 is becuase I was offered it at half-price from my company(which bought a server based computer, therefore not needing there other one) At the time I purchased it Rambus 1066 was the fastest ram out there, although it was never supported offically, so I had to buy a Tweak 850E motherboard from ASUS the P4-t533c)

Right now Intel does offer competitively priced CPU\'s for the P4 line, but that\'s only because AMD put the smack down on INTEL. The day Intel comes out with a new innovative chip, that is priced accordingly to its competitor then you can SIGN me up.

Another thing Intel does not like to innovate, they rather slowly release useless technology to us in order to milk every dollar out of us. AMD introduced the X86/64 hybrid extension, to which Intel\'s respond was, "64 bit is useless, and will not be need for another 4-5 years". Now its funny how fast Intel changed there minds about that, when they witnessed the success of the OPTERON, and now the consumer 64 754/940. Intel had to reverse engineer the Opteron, in order to start working on there 64 bit extension which should show up in Intel\'s new GEN CPU.

ah... They are smarter than that. All they need to do is disable half the L2 cache (naturally the defective half!) and they will have a bunch of working processors! Of course, this doesn\'t mean they can get all their defective chips running. But it does allow them to recover a large portion of their "defective" chips.

ATI does the same thing, for instance there fab try’s to create as many X800XT chips as possible-16 pipelines, the cores with defective pipelines are disabled, and the core is then binned/ labled as an X800PRO-12 pipelines.

This my friend is called smart business minimizing production costs is an essential key to maintaining good profit margins. Just look at NVIDIA they apprently are having problems at there IBM fab witht the NV40, yeilds are not as good as expected, had NVIDIA binned the non fully working cores. (which I think they are doing for the 6800 non Ultra(rumor has it that\'s it\'s 8 piplines-don\'t hold me to it), but even so there GT is 16 pipes, so they have alot work cut out for them, they have to produce Ultra\'s and GT with 16 fully functioning pipes. Hopefully NVIDIA will hurdle this speed bump soo taht we consumers can get our hands on one.

Remember for NVIDIA, there NV40 is much harder to produce/yields not as good as ATI\'s, due to the fact that the core has 220million transistors=more defects per wafer.

LOL, dude word of advice never come into a pc discusiion and use THG as a resource. Ask any informative person on the net, they will tell you THG is INTEL/NVIDIA biased.

THG is the #1 Biased, sellout website on the net.

Right.. and this article was Intel vs. Intel.  TH actually preferred the Northwood.  Since you say the Prescott is more expensive they are telling consumers to buy the lesser priced and older chip of the two.  Not really something Intel would have liked to hear.

Northwood is and remains the faster processor in common applications, even if the difference can be virtually ignored in application.

I guess they\'re biased if you say so.  What sites aren\'t biased?  I also like Anandtech, Ars, and Bit Tech.

Hope there\'s no bad blood here.  I enjoy a good CPU discussion every once in a while, just so we all get updated on what\'s out there.

Bro no bad blood at all, I hope you were not under the impression that this was some sort of hot touchy debate.:fro:

Right.. and this article was Intel vs. Intel.

What i\'m saying is THG has no credabilty, since they sold out. I haven\'t visted TOMS for over 2 years.  As for Anandtech he\'s OK-hasn\'t sold out yet. Surprisnly Hard_OCP is starting to improve ever since that Nvidia sellout KYLE(he is no longer ever since NVIDIA burned him) decided to start going legit. Kyle was never a total sellout, but he did have his share of shenanigans.

Since you say the Prescott is more expensive they are telling consumers to buy the lesser priced and older chip of the two. Not really something Intel would have liked to hear.

I don\'t see the problem here, just because THG is MEGA INTEL BIASED, doesn’t mean that they worship INTEL head over feet.  Tom has been an Intel advocate for many years, and will probably continue to do so. Look my friend Just ask around the NET about THG, 90% of the informative people will tell you THG is the Worst PC site for objective, balanced reviews. They always steer the reviews in favor to Intel, just ask anyone! So WORD of advice, when you go to any PC forum, don\'t ever use THG as a source--NEVER-NEVER

Also some of the people at TOMS have no Idea what there doing. I saw this review on PSU there once, and they literally crowned the lesser product king, while declaring the top dog, medium grade. Then again after inspecting the review you could see they ran all the wrong tests, under misleading conditions. That\'s Toms for ya. they are the most unethical journalistic website. Sure once in a while they do a good review, but that becomes over shadowed by all the bought-out shabby reviews. THG is getting free\' stuff for putting out good reviews on half-arced products. THG the corporate hardware community, they are the M$ of there genre. Believing the lies and propaganda from THG is no different then taking M$ word for anything in the PC industry.

TOM Pabst(founder of THG) used to command quite a bit of respect, until he and some of his staff gravitated towards Intel’s pocket book, as well as may other companies, MONEY corrupts

What i\'m saying is THG has no creadabilty

Stop that

[§ôµÏG®ïñD]

Yea, THG is a pretty bad site. I don\'t bother reading their reviews anymore.