Pentium4 650 (3.4gig) a good choice??

[oddfellow]

I'm gonna get myself a new processor and mobo. I'm thinking about going for a P4 650 (3.4gig / 2mb L2) since it's gonna be faster for encoding video than an A64.
It won't be a huge upgrade in games since I currently have an XP3200+, but like I said, the main reason for going pentium4 is to speed up video encoding, which seems to take an age on the XP.

Anyway, I'm wondering if the P4 650 is a good choice, or are there better penti out there?? (I know pretty much nothing about the P4)



Incidentally, the mobo I'll most likely go for is the Abit AS8-V i865PE.

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

i need to do the same thing...just a holdover 8xAGP, intel/amd 32 bit i guess. is there one that will accept my 1G of rdram (pc800) or are they all gone?

i don't want to spend several grand till vista/64/dx10 comes out i guess...now. also crossfire will have time to mature.

how much does the 650 cost? you going pci-e or agp?

 

[oddfellow]

The 845PE is AGP / DDR400.

Like you, I want a kinda stop gap AGP mobo and this one seems like a good choice. Also it'll mean I can keep my 2 gig of PC3200.

As far as I am aware, RDRAM mobo's are pretty much non existant now. I could very well be wrong though.

 

[Moloch]

A p4 will obliterate an AXP in games.
With the northwood core, intel really kicked amd's ass untill they got the A64 out.

 

[KimB]

Just a couple of things to think about:
1. AMD is still a lot higher-performing for the cost, and you can double your video encoding performance by going dual-core (tested this with XMPEG not long ago).
2. The Athlon XP 3200+ is significantly slower than its performance rating, and an Athlon 64 3200+ would be significantly faster. So expect a larger performance boost going to an A64/P4 than the performance rating suggests.
3. The 3GHz+ P4's are HOT. You'll be spending quite a bit more money in the long run on a P4 than you would on an A64 due to this.
4. You could just bite the bullet now and go PCIe, and just buy a relatively cheap PCIe video card, like the 6600 GT. This card is enough to run most of today's games at 1280x960 with 2x FSAA (many games I run at this res at 4x FSAA).
5. On pricewatch, I'm currently seeing an Athlon 64 3800+ for a little bit less than the P4 650.

 

[Richard]

3. The 3GHz+ P4's are HOT. You'll be spending quite a bit more money in the long run on a P4 than you would on an A64 due to this.

Just wanted to mention this is only true for the prescott P4s. My P4 3.2 Northwood is cool as a cat and wastes less power too. Indirectly, you don't need a monster of a heatsink so it's also reasonably quiet.

 

[Moloch]

Just a couple of things to think about:
1. AMD is still a lot higher-performing for the cost, and you can double your video encoding performance by going dual-core (tested this with XMPEG not long ago).
2. The Athlon XP 3200+ is significantly slower than its performance rating, and an Athlon 64 3200+ would be significantly faster. So expect a larger performance boost going to an A64/P4 than the performance rating suggests.
3. The 3GHz+ P4's are HOT. You'll be spending quite a bit more money in the long run on a P4 than you would on an A64 due to this.
4. You could just bite the bullet now and go PCIe, and just buy a relatively cheap PCIe video card, like the 6600 GT. This card is enough to run most of today's games at 1280x960 with 2x FSAA (many games I run at this res at 4x FSAA).
5. On pricewatch, I'm currently seeing an Athlon 64 3800+ for a little bit less than the P4 650.

ON heat: my brother in law has a P4 520 and even at 3.2 ghz he's constantly battling heat with the stock hsf.
He has some pretty nice antec case too but he has to underclock it to get it stable.
I think I might let him use some of my artic silver cermaque see if that helps as I'm totally puzzles why a stock hsf would have it overheat- over 70C and his home has AC.

 

[KimB]

Oh, and one last thing:
A good upgrade would be to a PCIe motherboard, 6600 GT, and A64 3000+ (yes, this should be faster than the XP 3200+). This would be upgradeable later to a dual-core processor, has PCIe, and would have a similar cost to the AGP P4 650 system.

 

[oddfellow]

I was under the impression the 2mb L2, P4 6XX series were based on the Galatin core and are MUCH cooler than Prescott

 

[oddfellow]

Oh, and one last thing:
A good upgrade would be to a PCIe motherboard, 6600 GT, ........

Umm, I'm not about to exchange my new X800XL for a 6600GT, and I'm not that interested in "upgrading" to PCIE just for the sake of it. I'll simply be wasting all the money I spent on the XL.
I'll migrate to PCIE when I do a major vid card upgrade.

Also, you're missing the point about video editing/encoding. A A64 3000+ would be SLOWER than my XP3200+

 

[Moloch]

Umm, I'm not about to exchange my new X800XL for a 6600GT, and I'm not that interested in "upgrading" to PCIE just for the sake of it. I'll simply be wasting all the money I spent on the XL.
I'll migrate to PCIE when I do a major vid card upgrade.

Also, you're missing the point about video editing/encoding. A A64 3000+ would be SLOWER than my XP3200+

Where did you see that?

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

but amd doesn't do ddr2 right? and probably never will on AGP?

so what's the trade off between better ram and intel/amd?

i've pretty much found that the only (warehoused) mboards that run my rdram (expensive) only have 533 FSB. so can't run a much better cpu than i have (p4 1.4).

sooo. i guess i can at least use my 9700pro...and get enough pci units to add a PPU around the holidays...and bump up to 2G ram and 8x AGP (which will probably 'eat' my 3 year old 9700pro!)

 

[Moloch]

but amd doesn't do ddr2 right? and probably never will on AGP?

so what's the trade off between better ram and intel/amd?

i've pretty much found that the only (warehoused) mboards that run my rdram (expensive) only have 533 FSB. so can't run a much better cpu than i have (p4 1.4).

sooo. i guess i can at least use my 9700pro...and get enough pci units to add a PPU around the holidays...and bump up to 2G ram and 8x AGP (which will probably 'eat' my 3 year old 9700pro!)

DDr2 isn't substancially better than ddr1.
The amd memory subsystem is substantially better than intel with amd having an onboard memory controllor.

 

[oddfellow]

Where did you see that?

Check out Tom's funky interactive CPU chart thingy

HERE

It's not massively slower, but it IS slower. I wanna improve on encoding times by a lot, not match them.

 

[Moloch]

Check out Tom's funky interactive CPU chart thingy

HERE

It's not massively slower, but it IS slower. I wanna improve on encoding times by a lot, not match them.

According to that a 3200 newcastle A64 is faster.
The A64 does the xvid encode in 3 minutes 9 seconds and the Axp does the same task in 3 minutes 25 seconds.
Oh and the 3000+ A64 newcastle is 1 second faster :wink
You gotta keep in mind there are different cores with the A64 as there are with the Axp.
Keep in mind you can overclock A64s alot- you can get 4000+ guaranteed pretty much.. 2.7 ghz or more isn't unheard of on air.
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1255&redirect=yes

 

[KimB]

Also, you're missing the point about video editing/encoding. A A64 3000+ would be SLOWER than my XP3200+

I doubt that very much, not if you turn the quality options up. First of all, the Athlon64 has much better memory bandwidth and latency. Secondly, the A64 supports SSE/2/3.

And regardless, even if you just go AGP, the A64 system runs cooler, is cheaper for similar performance, and is more upgradeable. I just don't see a reason to go Intel.

Oh, and you could always go with a board that supports both, check this out:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2524

 

[oddfellow]

Depending on which core/chipset you're looking at of course.

But even so, the P4 IS massively faster.

I've never owned an Intel chipset/cpu, I'm an AMD man myself, but this isn't about favourites, it's about doing a job, and it seems the P4 will do the job better than the Athlon64.

SO, going back to my original question; is the P4 650 a good choice??

 

[Moloch]

Depending on which core/chipset you're looking at of course.

But even so, the P4 IS massively faster.

I've never owned an Intel chipset/cpu, I'm an AMD man myself, but this isn't about favourites, it's about doing a job, and it seems the P4 will do the job better than the Athlon64.

SO, going back to my original question; is the P4 650 a good choice??

I edited my post.
You want an venice core A64.. or san diego because san diego has more cache.
P4s are also massively expensive.
Since you outa be overclocking your A64 cpu, you should compares a 4000+ to the 660- you will be atleast that fast.

 

[ANova]

I was under the impression the 2mb L2, P4 6XX series were based on the Galatin core and are MUCH cooler than Prescott

The Galatin core was the last P3 core. The P4 6xx uses an updated Prescott core, they're basically like the 5xx series only they feature EM64T, speedstep and 2 MB of cache instead of 1.

 

[oddfellow]

The Galatin core was the last P3 core. The P4 6xx uses an updated Prescott core, they're basically like the 5xx series only they feature EM64T, speedstep and 2 MB of cache instead of 1.

Pretty sure you're thinking of the Taulatin core there.

The Galatin core is a Xeon core as far as I'm aware. Again, I was under the impression the 6XX core was based on this rather than Prescott. I could be, and probably are wrong though.