Any reason not to buy a P4 these days?

[thop]

Well i admit that ever since i got my K7 500 some years back i never even thought about buying Intel again. However a friend asked me to build a nice rig for him, and my first thought was some nice A64 machine. But he absolutely wants PCI-E and he wants the rig before HL2 comes out (now). And AMD PCI-E boards are expected around christmas (or so i heard), so i've been thinking is there any reason not to buy a P4 3,4 Ghz and some Intel board (like Asus P4P800 i865PE) instead. I haven't been following what Intel does for the last few years so i have no idea really. Price doesn't really matter (but cheaper = better), he just wants it to be fast

 

[jvd]

just the fact that u can still get higher performance for less money with amd . Thats about it . YOu will still get a good rig from a p4

 

[Fox5]

Intel cpus run hotter(the lower heat of the athlon 64s and the cool n' quiet functionality is very important to me, I hate a cpu that heats up the room when I'm only doing word processing...nice to have the fan speed down too) and don't support 64 bit in case your friend still has the same computer when and if the 64 bit switch happens.

Outside of that, I believe amd processors are cheaper than their intel equivilants right now, and offer gaming performance equal to about 2 speed grades higher from intel.

BTW, are amd pci-e boards really going to take until christmas? I thought companies were already producing and shipping them and they would be out by the end of the month.

 

[John Reynolds]

MSI and ASUS are both purportedly ramping up nForce 4 motherboards very quickly for a November launch. For those who don't mind buying early revision boards.

 

[hovz]

reasons not to get it? cuz they are ass slow in virtually every gaming situation when compared to the athlon 64? id say its like the 5800 v a 9800 pro.

 

[Fox5]

reasons not to get it? cuz they are ass slow in virtually every gaming situation when compared to the athlon 64? id say its like the 5800 v a 9800 pro.

And on the lower end(not low end, but the lower prescotts and northwoods) you spend an extra $100 to get the same performance as athlon 64s and on the high end....well on the high end you can't unless you want to overclock. But if money is no object then the performance difference doesn't really matter.

 

[ben6]

PCI Express motherboards will be out in time for Xmas for sure. Heck there's systems selling now with them on the AMD platform.

 

[Druga Runda]

reasons not to get it? cuz they are ass slow in virtually every gaming situation when compared to the athlon 64? id say its like the 5800 v a 9800 pro.

And on the lower end(not low end, but the lower prescotts and northwoods) you spend an extra $100 to get the same performance as athlon 64s and on the high end....well on the high end you can't unless you want to overclock. But if money is no object then the performance difference doesn't really matter.

Oh come on an A3200+ is equal to PIV3.4EE in DIII and the other games similar, what is that 200$ vs 1000$ processor about equal... the rest of PIV lineup has no chance in general, perhaps some 3.4 ghz PIV are as fast on average as A64 3000+ in some games, but even than they are allegedly not as smooth... PIV for games, no way. For encoding on the other hand, it's a clear choice, however what does he want to do, sounds like gaming to me.

if I was him I'd rather gamble on an early revision Nforce4

* i personally have an early revision Nforce3 and no problems so far

 

[thop]

For encoding on the other hand, it's a clear choice, however what does he want to do, sounds like gaming to me.

He doesn't really know what else to do with that thing besides gaming and browsing the web. I didn't know the P4 is so slow in games, the last news that stuck in my head about Intel and gaming is that Q3 likes Intel processors

I guess it'll be a A64+ then. I'm not even sure PCI-E is necessary, he wants to keep his 9800pro for now and upgrade in about 6-9 months. I think he's gonna dump that 9800pro sooner than he thinks anyway.

 

[CosmoKramer]

But he absolutely wants PCI-E and he wants the rig before HL2 comes out (now). And AMD PCI-E boards are expected around christmas (or so i heard), so i've been thinking is there any reason not to buy a P4 3,4 Ghz and some Intel board (like Asus P4P800 i865PE) instead.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure that the i865 boards are AGP. You need a 915/925 motherboard for PCI-Express.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Intel cpus run hotter(the lower heat of the athlon 64s and the cool n' quiet functionality is very important to me, I hate a cpu that heats up the room when I'm only doing word processing...nice to have the fan speed down too) and don't support 64 bit in case your friend still has the same computer when and if the 64 bit switch happens.

While I don't have any heat figures around, I should thing that Prescott's are the biggest one to blame here - the 130nm products aren't as bad. The test platform that I have for PCIe uses a 3.4GHz P4EE and the one thing that staggers me about Intel's systems is the excellent heat regulation and fan control - whilst you are doing basic desktop stuff, with low noise PSU its hard to notice that the thing is even on.

I see this thread is an excellent example of why the 3D IHV's try to make a top end glory board. It seems that everyone is hooking on to one aspect, gaming performance, and not paying any consideration to anything else.

HyperThreading is something to consider for Intel systems - I've yet to see anyone do any performance analysis on the effect of that if you have apps running in the background. DDR2 is a bit of a pain in the arse for the 925 platform at the moment, but things like Azalia Audio on 915/925 are pretty nice features. And, if you are doing much multimedia work, then Intel has a clear advantage here.

 

[hovz]

well gaming is the most sensitive to performance. your much more likely to notice the 10 to 50 fps increase in average fps as opposed to your video encoding a few seconds faster.

 

[Dave Baumann]

well gaming is the most sensitive to performance. your much more likely to notice the 10 to 50 fps increase in average fps as opposed to your video encoding a few seconds faster.

In my testing experience, you are most likely to see a 10-15 FPS performance differential when you're above 60FPS anyway; and this is in the few games that are predomanently CPU limited rather than graphics. Get anything less than a very high end graphics card and that differenial will be further decreased since their will be more titles / resolutions where your graphics will be primary limiter.

 

[hovz]

well gaming is the most sensitive to performance. your much more likely to notice the 10 to 50 fps increase in average fps as opposed to your video encoding a few seconds faster.

In my testing experience, you are most likely to see a 10-15 FPS performance differential when you're above 60FPS anyway; and this is in the few games that are predomanently CPU limited rather than graphics. Get anything less than a very high end graphics card and that differenial will be further decreased since their will be more titles / resolutions where your graphics will be primary limiter.

well i play alot of ut2004 onslaught, and that is extremely cpu limited. i have a p4 and im pretty sure the athlon 64 would improve my aim alot because it wouldnt constantly drop to sub 30 fps. thats just 1 situation off the top of my head. need for spee dunderground is also pretty cpu limited.

 

[thop]

He got an Athlon 1600+ and some old SIS735 board with SDRAM right now. It really wouldn't make any sense to get a new graphics card before he upgrades the rest of his system. And i think with the new system the 9800pro will play HL2 at 1024x768 smoothly.

 

[mczak]

HyperThreading is something to consider for Intel systems - I've yet to see anyone do any performance analysis on the effect of that if you have apps running in the background.

Anandtech, http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2261&p=10 and techreport, http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2004q4/pentium4-xe-3.46/index.x?pg=11 both run a wmv 9 encode in the background when using the worldbench mozilla benchmark. It clearly improves the P4 scores against the A64 scores, though the results do not show everything (it doesn't show how fast the background process run, which would imho be quite interesting!).

And, if you are doing much multimedia work, then Intel has a clear advantage here.

Not necessarily in all cases. xvid encoding for instance seems to be slightly faster on A64 systems. If I'd have to guess, I'd say it's because there are less hand-tuned code optimizations in xvid than in divx (that's just a guess though - but the P4 performs very well with fully-vectorized SSE2 code, which you can likely only achieve with hand-optimization, and it might not be always possible at all, but generally doesn't perform so well with less optimized code).

mczak

 

[Sxotty]

Intel is pretty much a waste until they get a new processor based on their mobile part out. The gambled on stupidity of the common man ... and they won , until those tricky evil AMD guys realized they could just name their processor something that didn't have to do directly with their Mhz number. Really though I had a p42.6ghz back in the day and it wasn't bad, but at the moment they are in a doldrum