[hougtimo]

Hi,

My mum has just bought a new buisness PC, which I have some questions regarding the processor.

specs:

Athlon 64 (i forget wich model number)
1GB DDR2 RAM
939 Asus NF4 Board
256 mb ATI raedon (PCI-e)
160gb S-ata hdd.

It is a very nice machine, but... I was suprised to discover that the processor has a clock speed of 1900mhz. Now I know that AMD model numbers do not correspond to the clock speed (as i run an athlon XP) but, it was quite a high-end processor we went for (something like a 3800 i think). Now my athlon XP runs at the same clock speed as the 64, (in every other respect my machine is relaively the same, regarding vid card, ram (although its ddr400) etc..., but there is a HUGE difference in speed between mine and my mum's. Mum's also out strips (by MILES...) OUR p4 3.2 GHZ machine with a gig of ram also. Now do the athlon 64s actually run quicker than system properties / everest / tuneup utilities suggest? or is it simply the difference in speed between 64 bit and 32 bit? (it is running XP Pro 32 bit).

thanks

HougTimo

[Vitalix]

The Athlon 64s run much faster than the Athlon XPs. I have an Athlon64 3800 X2, and that frequency is only 2.0GHz stock.

[ripken204]

and amd's dont use ddr2

[hougtimo]

ripken204, on Jan 9 2006, 08:57 PM, said:

and amd's dont use ddr2

WTF! Yes they do lol, I was in PC world this morning looking at an Athlon 64 X2 with DDR2 Ram 0_o

[ripken204]

?? the AM2 socket is the new socket coming out in a few months, which is the only amd socket that supports ddr2, so i have no clue what you're talking about. pcworld must have made a big screw up somewhere.

[hougtimo]

It clearly states on their notice boards that their athlon 64 gaming systems (of course i wouldnt use it for gaming) have DDR2 RAM 0_o

[ripken204]

wow, there is no way that they have socket AM2 as there is no one making them b/c amd is still testing them. i would go and have a talk with them, lol.

[LLXX]

The clock speed is not the only determining factor of speed. How many instructions it can execute per clock (or how many clocks it takes to execute an instruction) makes a big difference. AMDs have lower clocks/instruction and higher instructions/clock. The newer ones are similarly better than the older models.

[suryad]

I think you are mistkaen hougtimo...doubt the AM2 is released already.

[boggen]

besides the cpu itself being faster. other things also come into play.

ram speeds. (examaple pc 2700 to pc 4400 or 133 to 266mhz comparsion)
motherboard chipset, or front bus speed in relation ship to cpu and ram improvements
video card connection types (agp to pci-E)
hard drive (pata or ata compared to new sata)

in laman terms. over all improvements in technology within the computer can have dramatic speed improvements comparing older technolgy. make it hardware baser, software base, driver base, firmwares.

[boooggy]

houg can u provide any link?....
i also know that ddr2 support for amd it will be launched in few months....

[Vitalix]

Agreed. I heard socket M is going to use DDR3, the nextgen, and skipping DDR2 alltogether (essentially what Intel did to AMD with DDR2, even though DDR2 still performs crappier than DDR b/c of the horriffic 5-9-9-18 timings or whatever tr@mp looseness they have, IMHO).

[ripken204]

well for amd the ram doesnt matter that much, there have been tests done and the only thing that rly matters is how fast the cpu is. the test for the ram was high bandwith and loose timings vs low bandwith and tight timings. both gave vry similar results.

[atomizer]

i was always an Intel fan - till i switched to an AMD x86-64

[Mekrel]

a 3800 should be running faster than 1.9Ghz.

A 3800 venice is 200*12 = 2.4Ghz respective.

The speed difference has nothing to do with 64bit extensions, the extra registers etc will not even be in use if your running a 32bit operating system on the machine.

The difference is the architecture of the chip, the A64 chips with their on-die memory controller gives a massive boost.

PCI-E offers no advantages speed wise to AGP when talking about graphics cards because the AGP bus has not yet been saturated. PCI-E for me comes into play when you need a high bandwidth bus for high bandwidth components, such as a high speed raid array/ SCSI setup to work at its best which PCI will choke.

[atomizer]

Mekrel, on Jan 11 2006, 09:10 AM, said:

a 3800 should be running faster than 1.9Ghz.

cool and quiet enabled perhaps?

mine usually runs ~1/2 its speed (1 GHz) when it's not loaded.

[Vitalix]

Mekrel, on Jan 11 2006, 09:10 AM, said:

PCI-E offers no advantages speed wise to AGP when talking about graphics cards because the AGP bus has not yet been saturated.

Funny you should mention this b/c I've noticed lots of 'enthusiast' people start selling their SLI boards (which are 8x in dual mode) for the 16x dual SLI speeds for the graphics cards (Such as the ASUS A8N32-SLI).
I find that mind boggling. Even in dual mode at 8x on PCIE, the vid cards are maybe at 10% their bandwidth limit, yet they MUST have the 16x on each SLI slot!

This post has been edited by Vitalix: 11 January 2006 - 03:19 PM

[suryad]

Well enthusiasts are not known to be logical but I am sure that with current gen grphx cards out we have surpassed 8x agp.

[ripken204]

which enthusiasts are you talking about? i would not call them enthusiasts, i would call them dumb. the real enthusiasts want a high overclock. considering that the 7800gtx doesnt even use 8x(but is it close), why would they need 16x? i would just wait until i wanted to get a card that can even run over 8x, which may be a while.

[suryad]

A matter of opinion ripken. Oclocking makes no sense in that you are actually killing your hardware. That is why workstation mobos dont have oclocknig features. That does not mean a person with a dual opteron 280 setup and 8 gigs of ram and quadro 4500s in sli mode and a 30 inch lcd is not an enthusiast despite the fact that he doesnt oclock.