Athlon 64 Memory Support -- THG Review

[lifeguard1999]

THG Review

Unfortunatelty the article suffers from poor editing. One example is:

"The most important difference between the Athlon64 and its big brother Athlon64 is the memory interface."

Uh, right. That second "Athlon64" should be "Athlon64 FX".

Despite poor editing, THG at least asks a good question. How good is the memory supprt for the Athlon64 boards. As it turns out, some do better than others. But it leads me to this question that has been bouncing around inside of my head. Why buy an Athlon 64 / Athlon 64 FX when most motherboards do not have enough memory slots to exceed 4GB? What else does 64-bit gain you? I grant that the CPUs themselves are good 32-bit CPUs.

 

[mechBgon]

What else does 64-bit gain you?

Well, 30% faster media encoding comes to mind Lookie here, the penguin-heads did some testing! Granted, that's just one app, but it gives you ideas. ~15% performance gains in gaming are also predicted by some folks. Ace's hardware found that gZIP compression speed doubled under 64-bit. Don't write it off as just another marketing gimmick quite yet

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Besides Mech's points, you answered your own question, they're good for 32bit too 64bit played no role in my decision to get a A64 3000+, I wanted to get more framerates and upgrade my board&CPU at the same time, and since my vid card is already pretty fast I don't want to upgrade that again till the next gen of cards hit. I considered my wants and needs and it was a good pick for me because I don't need the multitasking capabilities of P4C thanks to having several systems I can divide work amongst, and I'm strictly using DVDshrink now so encoding time isn't a factor, I don't do photoshop, or 3D rendering stuff. I game, use DVDshrink *a lot!* rip some MP3, and general usage stuff. The only big advantage the P4C had for me was DC projects and because of that I may build a P4C or Prescott later this year to compliment my A64 :beer:

 

[Palek]

Athlon 64's also have SSE2 extensions like the Pentium 4, and since SSE2 is finding support in more and more applications these days, Athlon 64 users will see nice performance gains from that. Just look at how badly the A64 beats AXP clock for clock in Content Creation (media compression etc. that benefits most from SSE2) apps.