Chalnoth said:What, gaming? That's the most processing-intensive thing that most people ever make use of! The A64 is no slouch in any other area, and manages to come ahead in a number of non-gaming benchmarks
All in all, looking at that massive CPU charts article, if I compare the Athlon 64 4000+ to the Pentium4 660 (3.6GHz) with only non-gaming, non-synthetic benchmarks, I get 6 wins for the A64, and 6 for the P4. That's not so bad for a product that comes out way ahead in games at about the same price.
Like I said, the P4 is hardly a bad performer. The cpu in gaming isn't that big of an importance, especially now as higher resolutions become the norm and games become more GPU oriented. Most forward looking games use the cpu primarily for physics as well as sound. Sure a 4000+ will outperform my P4 in games by maybe 5-10 fps depending on the settings and game but my P4 is already more than a year old as I mentioned and it's actually a Northwood, which as you may know runs cooler and faster than the Prescotts. My P4 at 3.4 GHz outperforms the P4D 3.6 GHz, runs just as cool as the 4000+, is on par with it and was relatively cheap. I have yet to find a game that has a problem running on my system as a result of the cpu.
I'll admit that the A64 is better than the Prescott, but compared to a comparitively clocked Northwood not so much and AMDs closest competitor to the Pentium M is the Turion, which doesn't quite match up in performance or battery life not to mention the core duo, which AMD currently has nothing to counter. In the past the Pentium 3 was faster than the Thunderbird and the P4B/C was faster than the Athlon XP.
Intel needs to get back in the game and quick though for the prices have really been going up on the AMD side as well. I want Intel to undercut AMD massively on prices and then perhaps I will try them agian, but with their ridiculous motherboard changes constantly it is really difficult to get excited about the Intel platform for me.
Intel has already started undercutting AMD, the X2s cost quite a bit more than the Pentium Ds asside from the EE but than you also have the likes of the X2 4800+ going for over a grand. Intel's motherboard's are fairly expensive yes, but you can find plenty of good third party motherboards for decent prices; I got mine for about $100.
So what "cherry picked" benchmarks did you choose to claim your P4 was on par with an fx 53?
Btw you paid less, that is not the case anymore (or ever considering I don't trust you).
Oh and for 64 bit applications amd is faster in most of them as well.
Automatic 15~% boost for recompiling an app with 64 bit binaries.
Sandra, PCMark, compression tests, if you would like to make suggestions or compare results be my guest. x86-64 is a hack that provides very little to no performance improvement in general. 15% is best case scenario.
ANova the AMD64 platform is better for a number of reasons.. one of them being powerdraw and heat. AMD concentrated on lowering power output and heat disappation and Intel concentrated on MHz.
We know how that turned out and Conroe, although good, will be crippled by its aging platform (GTL+ bus vs Hypertransport).
This is true for the prescott only. The Pentium M runs slightly faster and runs cooler/draws less power than the Turion and the Core Duo runs laps around it. Your assessment on the Conroe is a bit premature as well, especially considering how well the "aging platform" compares to AMD's new platform. The Conroe is also a heavily modified version.
Last edited by a moderator: