AMD 64 3700 or AMD 3800 X2?

[lopri]

I'm grateful for everyone's advice and at the moment I'm leaning towards the 3800 X2. Does anyone know how overclockable they are?

One final thing for thermal paste I have a choice of either Thermaltake T-Grease 2 or Akasa AK-450, does anyone know which is better?

Ordinarily I would buy some Arctic Silver thermal paste, but unfortunately that option is not available to me...

In my opinion you have 2 options.

1. Get a 3800+'
2. Keep the 3000+.

It seems almost pointless to upgrade from 3000+ to 3700+. Especially if you're looking into gaming. FiringSquad did some CPU/GPU scaling test in gamimg some time ago, and I believe the result showed almost no difference between CPUs as long as they are 3000+ and higher. (Especially for >=3200+) What matters is the GPU.

As far as thermal past goes, I think AS is waaaaaaay overrated. Any kind of thermal paste will do. (If you have any left-over just use it.) In the past, I've even seen forum people arguing over 99% alcohol vs 80% alcohol to clean the CPU/HSF surface, and I couldn't help but laugh. I use CK One for mine and my X2 temps are just great at stock voltage. (Idle 32C Load 45C)

lop

 

[Humus]

I'm a bit undecided whether it would be better to go the X2 route or stick with a single core CPU for the meanwhile. I'm aware that I might not see that much benefit from an X2 CPU at the moment (I've got a AMD 64 3000 currently), but do you think I would start to see more benefits as time goes on?

I suggest you go with the dual-core. The really good thing about it is that the system becomes much more responsive in general. As I guess happens for most of us, sometimes an app just takes a lot of CPU. But the system doesn't feel any slower because of that, unlike what happens on a single-core system when an app decides to take all CPU.
Also, I'd say it's more futureproof. It may not be that big of an advantage in games right now, but I think more games and more are going to take advantage of it.

 

[Tahir2]

Another vote for the Dual Core X2 - unless it means you are going to starve for a week or something.

 

[Moloch]

Could you elaborate on this? Like, how it's better and how it's cheaper.

he's greatly exaggerating
I can see any reason ot to get a 3800 + X2 if you afford it.
SMP smoothness++

 

[bystander]

Thanks everyone for your advice.

I finally bought a 3800 X2, and my PC now runs nice and speedy . I did manage to overclock it to 2.2GHz, although I still think I can reach higher speeds but I believe I'm being held back by my memory (I've just got some standard Crucial RAM nothing special), as the CPU temp under load is about 45C.

 

[KimB]

I finally bought a 3800 X2, and my PC now runs nice and speedy . I did manage to overclock it to 2.2GHz, although I still think I can reach higher speeds but I believe I'm being held back by my memory (I've just got some standard Crucial RAM nothing special), as the CPU temp under load is about 45C.

Memory shouldn't be holding you back at all. Just drop the RAM multiplier. Make sure you're also dropping the hypertransport multiplier, and aren't overclocking your PCI bus.

One great tool for overclocking is the nVidia nTune, as it allows you to look at all of the clocks in your system at a glance.

 

[Mintmaster]

Games are going multithreaded now, and the X2 often has an advantage:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/28cpu-games.html

Nice roundup of many CPUs, but I really wonder why people do CPU tests without lowering the resolution real low. Sure, that's not how we're gonna play, but it doesn't take a genious to take the lower number of our video card's FPS and CPU's FPS. The real point of these tests is to see how our CPU might perform in the future.

The value of the FEAR benchmarks and especially the COD2 benchmarks are greatly dimished by their decision to run at 1024x768.

 

[KimB]

Yeah, but a 10% improvement is far away from what we should be getting out of these cores from games coming out next year.

Of course, beyond just making good use of multicore, to get a big performance improvement the game would have to be highly CPU-limited, so you'd probably have to test on a slower dual-core processor, as the game would also be designed to run well on a single-core processor.

 

[IgnorancePersonified]

That was a good article. These are all timedemo's I think so there maybe a bigger advantage in real game situations.

The Opteron 165 looks pretty good.

 

[RussSchultz]

Are opterons still multiplier unlocked? Or have they started locking the multipliers on these?

EDIT: MY bad. It was the FX series of processors that was not locked.

 

[bystander]

Memory shouldn't be holding you back at all. Just drop the RAM multiplier. Make sure you're also dropping the hypertransport multiplier, and aren't overclocking your PCI bus.

One great tool for overclocking is the nVidia nTune, as it allows you to look at all of the clocks in your system at a glance.

I don't think my BIOS on my motherboard (an AsRock Dual939-Sata) has quite the flexibility to adjust the RAM multiplier or the hypertransport multiplier. It does have the option to set the PCIE bus speed asynchronously with the FSB speed.

Does the nVidia nTune software work on non-nViidia based motherboards? If does then I'll probably give it a try.

 

[KimB]

Does the nVidia nTune software work on non-nViidia based motherboards? If does then I'll probably give it a try.

No, it's nForce only. Sorry, guess I just assumed.

Edit: Just took a glance at the manual online, and you can indeed set the memory clock. Just set it to 166Mhz.

Oh, and the hypertransport multiplier is under the "CPU - NB Link Speed". Set it to 800Mhz (this is 4x multiplier). You might want to set the SB-NB to the same speed (these are the hypertransport busses between the CPU and the north bridge, and between the north bridge and the south bridge).

 

[Moloch]

Games are going multithreaded now, and the X2 often has an advantage:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/28cpu-games.html

Nice roundup of many CPUs, but I really wonder why people do CPU tests without lowering the resolution real low. Sure, that's not how we're gonna play, but it doesn't take a genious to take the lower number of our video card's FPS and CPU's FPS. The real point of these tests is to see how our CPU might perform in the future.

The value of the FEAR benchmarks and especially the COD2 benchmarks are greatly dimished by their decision to run at 1024x768.

Perhaps they should use resolutions and settings gamers actually play at...
Even a P4 compares to an A64 well if one were to load the graphics card with fsaa and high res.

 

[bystander]

No, it's nForce only. Sorry, guess I just assumed.

Edit: Just took a glance at the manual online, and you can indeed set the memory clock. Just set it to 166Mhz.

Oh, and the hypertransport multiplier is under the "CPU - NB Link Speed". Set it to 800Mhz (this is 4x multiplier). You might want to set the SB-NB to the same speed (these are the hypertransport busses between the CPU and the north bridge, and between the north bridge and the south bridge).

Thanks for your help Chalnoth. I've change my motherboard in the same way you stated and I can now reach 2.35Ghz. Setting it to 2.4Ghz seems to cause it crash unexpectedly in Windows unfortunately.

I think its related to the memory timings, the memory I've got is rated for 3.0-3-3-8 @ 200MHz, and I think the motherboard is using 2.5-3-3-7 at the moment (because the memory clock is set at 166MHz). I tried changing the settings to match the RAM but it still seems a little unstable.

 

[KimB]

Oh, by the way, you can also download SiSoft Sandra to get information on the clockspeeds of your system, to ensure that you aren't overclocking anything you don't want to.