Should I wait for dual-core AMDs?

[absinthe]

Well, it's time for a new system again. I've been reading some of the threads in this subforum with interest. For my last machine (getting on 2-and-a-half-years old now!) I went with an AMD product for the first time. Boy, am I glad I did! It's been a great machine. Back then, I was a gamer (Warcraft III), and I was able to play full throttle with every setting cranked.

Now things have changed and I do mostly video encoding ... tons of it in fact, Xvid and Mpeg1/2. I'd say a 2-hour movie takes about 8 hours to do a 2-pass encode on this Athlon 1600 XP.

Also, multitasking is now my key word. While I'm encoding video, I'll also want to have 3 or 4 pages open in a tabbed web browser, check e-mail, keep MS word open, and burn a CD or DVD.

So I'd almost changed my mind and decided to go with a P4 with hyperthreading, but from what I'm reading the AMD dual-cores (whenever they get here) are gonna smoke those.

I can't stress it enough: I HATE clicking on something and having to wait. If I never see another hourglass, it'll be too soon. For once I'm going to have enough wallet to build most anything I could reasonably want, but it's going to be 6 or 8 weeks from now before I can buy anyway.

Can we expect dual-core availability in the next couple of months? If it was a little bit longer than that, I think I'd be willing to wait it out. But if we're talking summertime, I don't know if I can hold out ...

What to do, what to do ... ?

 

[Vette73]

Well the first Desktop Dual core CPU;s are SUPPOSED to be socket 939. So getting a good socket 939 board MIGHT allow you to upgrade in the future.

 

[zakee00]

Originally posted by: Marlin1975
Well the first Desktop Dual core CPU;s are SUPPOSED to be socket 939. So getting a good socket 939 board MIGHT allow you to upgrade in the future.

yeah
either get a s939 system now with an A64, then upgrade to dualcore later (IF they turn out to work with s939 which they almost positivly will) or wait until ~Q4 this year for dualcores to come out.
It would probably be cheaper to get an A64 now, and use it until dualcore prices come down rather then buy a dualcore when they are brand new.
Nick

 

[kini62]

Yeah you could get an Athlon 64 now, but then you'd be in the same boat your in now as far as video encoding and multi-tasking. The system below isn't much faster at encoding than the XP2400 it replaced. It also isn't much better at multi-tasking either. I didn't want to wait. This system went back and now I'm getting a Dell XPS P4 3.6 with an ATI X850XT PE for the same money. I needed a system to what I want it to do- now, not 6 months down the road.

That said, currently the socket 939 seems to have the best upgrade path. Although Intel says there dual cores will use Socket 775, but a different chip set. Don't know if you can change or upgrade the chipset on a MB or not. It might be the same with AMD, it might be socket 939, but require a different chipset.

 

[Duvie]

Originally posted by: kini62
Yeah you could get an Athlon 64 now, but then you'd be in the same boat your in now as far as video encoding and multi-tasking. The system below isn't much faster at encoding than the XP2400 it replaced. It also isn't much better at multi-tasking either. I didn't want to wait. This system went back and now I'm getting a Dell XPS P4 3.6 with an ATI X850XT PE for the same money. I needed a system to what I want it to do- now, not 6 months down the road.

That said, currently the socket 939 seems to have the best upgrade path. Although Intel says there dual cores will use Socket 775, but a different chip set. Don't know if you can change or upgrade the chipset on a MB or not. It might be the same with AMD, it might be socket 939, but require a different chipset.

You must have seomthing messed up then...No way should a xp2400+ be about the samea sa 3500+ in encoding...look at any review around and that doesn't happen...Either you are using an extremely poor program, one that is not optimized fro SSE2 (which A64 has), or dont know what you are doing....


I agree this one I have isn't as fast as my p4 at 3.5ghz in encoding but it is close in some apps and I have ran a barton 3200+ and it wasn't near my 3.5ghz.....so lets keep a real world perspective here.....

I am admitting one of the more vocal ppl for still getting p4s for users wanting to do these apps and multitasking, but I cant allow you to spread false misconceptions...

 

[Jeff7181]

I would at least wait for the next core revision of the Athlon-64 that uses Strained Silicon and has SSE3.

 

[Lyfer]

Might as well wait for 20ghz Athlons while your at. If you have the $$$$ buy now. Everything gets outdated every week. (it sucks but live with it)

 

[headbox]

As long as you upgrade often, you can resell your parts on eBay before they become too obsolete to be worth anything. If you buy near the high-end, but not the "enthusiast" ultra-expensive stuff, you can have a really nice computer that can still hold it's value in 6-12 months.

 

[Vee]

Originally posted by: absinthe
Well, it's time for a new system again. I've been reading some of the threads in this subforum with interest. For my last machine (getting on 2-and-a-half-years old now!) I went with an AMD product for the first time. Boy, am I glad I did! It's been a great machine. Back then, I was a gamer (Warcraft III), and I was able to play full throttle with every setting cranked.

Now things have changed and I do mostly video encoding ... tons of it in fact, Xvid and Mpeg1/2. I'd say a 2-hour movie takes about 8 hours to do a 2-pass encode on this Athlon 1600 XP.

Also, multitasking is now my key word. While I'm encoding video, I'll also want to have 3 or 4 pages open in a tabbed web browser, check e-mail, keep MS word open, and burn a CD or DVD.

So I'd almost changed my mind and decided to go with a P4 with hyperthreading, but from what I'm reading the AMD dual-cores (whenever they get here) are gonna smoke those.

I can't stress it enough: I HATE clicking on something and having to wait. If I never see another hourglass, it'll be too soon. For once I'm going to have enough wallet to build most anything I could reasonably want, but it's going to be 6 or 8 weeks from now before I can buy anyway.

Can we expect dual-core availability in the next couple of months? If it was a little bit longer than that, I think I'd be willing to wait it out. But if we're talking summertime, I don't know if I can hold out ...

What to do, what to do ... ?

?Wait for dual core? Hey, those dualcores are going to be socket 940 Opterons. We will get dualcore A64 too. But the Opteron and some 'FX', (Possibly also on 940? but hopefully 939), are the only ones I can see sheduled for 2005. My guess is that, if you're going to wait until dualcore comes at value for money prices, you're going to have to wait for pretty long.

What is almost official, hinted at least, is that there will be one DDR version of dualcore AMD64, before it switches to DDR2. It's also now official that there will be dual core for socket 939. So there is some possibility that you may actually be able to insert a dual core into a current socket 939 mb.
Intel have considerable plans for 5x1 and 6x0 singlecore series of P4s. And 6x0 are going to be quite expensive. So I don't really see Intel making their dualcore desktop CPU very affordable. Meaning, AMD will not be under terrible pressure to supply consumer class dualcore CPUs any time soon.

I don't really see why you want to burn DVD and video encode simultaneously.
Otherwise there is nothing about most of your multitasking needs that a single core CPU doesn't handle well. Basically you need lots of ram. That's all. If your background task runs at too high priority (many Windows programmers obviously being retards at multithreading) you may need to manually lower its base pri in the taskmanager, to keep responsiveness snappy (I suppose you don't want to really do that with DVD burning, but I haven't tried it so I can't say for sure.)

...Yes this waiting game... Maybe you should wait for some desktop derivative of the Intel "Whitefield" quad core CPU? should be out 2010 -11.

 

[darknodin]

if you have the money... buy G5s... lots of them and link them together!

 

[miketheidiot]

Originally posted by: Vee

Originally posted by: absinthe
Well, it's time for a new system again. I've been reading some of the threads in this subforum with interest. For my last machine (getting on 2-and-a-half-years old now!) I went with an AMD product for the first time. Boy, am I glad I did! It's been a great machine. Back then, I was a gamer (Warcraft III), and I was able to play full throttle with every setting cranked.

Now things have changed and I do mostly video encoding ... tons of it in fact, Xvid and Mpeg1/2. I'd say a 2-hour movie takes about 8 hours to do a 2-pass encode on this Athlon 1600 XP.

Also, multitasking is now my key word. While I'm encoding video, I'll also want to have 3 or 4 pages open in a tabbed web browser, check e-mail, keep MS word open, and burn a CD or DVD.

So I'd almost changed my mind and decided to go with a P4 with hyperthreading, but from what I'm reading the AMD dual-cores (whenever they get here) are gonna smoke those.

I can't stress it enough: I HATE clicking on something and having to wait. If I never see another hourglass, it'll be too soon. For once I'm going to have enough wallet to build most anything I could reasonably want, but it's going to be 6 or 8 weeks from now before I can buy anyway.

Can we expect dual-core availability in the next couple of months? If it was a little bit longer than that, I think I'd be willing to wait it out. But if we're talking summertime, I don't know if I can hold out ...

What to do, what to do ... ?

?Wait for dual core? Hey, those dualcores are going to be socket 940 Opterons. We will get dualcore A64 too. But the Opteron and some 'FX', (Possibly also on 940? but hopefully 939), are the only ones I can see sheduled for 2005. My guess is that, if you're going to wait until dualcore comes at value for money prices, you're going to have to wait for pretty long.

What is almost official, hinted at least, is that there will be one DDR version of dualcore AMD64, before it switches to DDR2. It's also now official that there will be dual core for socket 939. So there is some possibility that you may actually be able to insert a dual core into a current socket 939 mb.
Intel have considerable plans for 5x1 and 6x0 singlecore series of P4s. And 6x0 are going to be quite expensive. So I don't really see Intel making their dualcore desktop CPU very affordable. Meaning, AMD will not be under terrible pressure to supply consumer class dualcore CPUs any time soon.

I don't really see why you want to burn DVD and video encode simultaneously.
Otherwise there is nothing about most of your multitasking needs that a single core CPU doesn't handle well. Basically you need lots of ram. That's all. If your background task runs at too high priority (many Windows programmers obviously being retards at multithreading) you may need to manually lower its base pri in the taskmanager, to keep responsiveness snappy (I suppose you don't want to really do that with DVD burning, but I haven't tried it so I can't say for sure.)

...Yes this waiting game... Maybe you should wait for some desktop derivative of the Intel "Whitefield" quad core CPU? should be out 2010 -11.

the dual 2.8 will be $270 or so.

it appears to me that dual 939 will be FX only, and will have a FX price

Looks like intel might get my $$$ this fall

 

[Vee]

Originally posted by: miketheidiot
the dual 2.8 will be $270 or so.

- Wow! - Really? :Q

Edit: Then AMD is under pressure to supply consumer dual cores.

 

[flyswatter]

Originally posted by: Duvie

Originally posted by: kini62
Yeah you could get an Athlon 64 now, but then you'd be in the same boat your in now as far as video encoding and multi-tasking. The system below isn't much faster at encoding than the XP2400 it replaced. It also isn't much better at multi-tasking either. I didn't want to wait. This system went back and now I'm getting a Dell XPS P4 3.6 with an ATI X850XT PE for the same money. I needed a system to what I want it to do- now, not 6 months down the road.

That said, currently the socket 939 seems to have the best upgrade path. Although Intel says there dual cores will use Socket 775, but a different chip set. Don't know if you can change or upgrade the chipset on a MB or not. It might be the same with AMD, it might be socket 939, but require a different chipset.

You must have seomthing messed up then...No way should a xp2400+ be about the samea sa 3500+ in encoding...look at any review around and that doesn't happen...Either you are using an extremely poor program, one that is not optimized fro SSE2 (which A64 has), or dont know what you are doing....


I agree this one I have isn't as fast as my p4 at 3.5ghz in encoding but it is close in some apps and I have ran a barton 3200+ and it wasn't near my 3.5ghz.....so lets keep a real world perspective here.....

I am admitting one of the more vocal ppl for still getting p4s for users wanting to do these apps and multitasking, but I cant allow you to spread false misconceptions...

It all depends what software you are using to encode. Some are optimized for Intel. I know my OC'd Athlon 64 (939) 2.6GHZ destroys my P4 3.2E on some encoding software while the 3.2E beats my A64 on others. Hyperthreading is all hype and a marketing ploy from intel.

 

[absinthe]

Originally posted by: Vee
I don't really see why you want to burn DVD and video encode simultaneously.
Otherwise there is nothing about most of your multitasking needs that a single core CPU doesn't handle well. Basically you need lots of ram. That's all.

Well, because encoding video takes a long time on an Athlon 1600. In a 10-hour period, it's highly likely I will want to burn something. I have two hard drives full of DVD images, SVCD, and DivX files that I occasionally burn to rewritable discs and watch. I mean, eventually I want to get it all on disc, but that's a matter of me getting organized.

Anyway, 8 to 10 hours is a long time for a computer to be unavailable.

Regarding RAM, I do plan to lay down a chunk on some good RAM for this build ... I'm thinking about 2 GB Crucial. Do you really think that would make as much difference as a dual-core CPU?? I'm only going to buy that much RAM if I suspect I can keep using it in my next build (i.e., a possible dual-core upgrade?). Right now I've only got a 256 MB stick of PC2700 DDR. What's the hot RAM nowadays?

RAM is frustrating. I don't think I've ever used the same RAM in 2 different computers. I'd be willing to buy 2 GB (I'll definitely be buying 1 GB) if I know for sure that I can reuse. Ya know, even buying a whole new mobo and processor isn't that expensive, but when you have to throw a pile of RAM on top of that, you end up with a big-$$$ ticket pretty quick.

BTW, I plan to keep my current machine for a video encoding workhorse. It doesn't so much bother me that it takes so long to encode ... it's the fact that I can't do much else during that time.

-abs

 

[piroroadkill]

You have the following real choices, the first being the best (but most expensive):

Get a dual Socket 940 board and a pair of high end Opteron's.

Get a Socket 939 board and a cheap Athlon and wait for Toledo, if it will support current boards.

Get a highish end Northwood, overclock the hell out of it and enable HyperThreading.

Edit: You ONLY HAVE 256MB OF RAM?

There's your problem already. Before you even think about new computers, make your current one usuable by giving it at least 768MB.

 

[gobucks]

there won't be AFFORDABLE 939 dual cores this year. 940 gets the first dual cores, followed by 939, but you'd better believe that the FX line is getting dual core first, along with maybe the top 2 A64 models, and then it will filter down to the slower speed grades. So do you want to wait at least a year to be able to get a $150-300 dual core? I'd grab a 3000+, on an nforce4, and run that baby till you can grab a dual core for like $200. Plus, you can overclock that 3000+ like a champ (see my sig, and there's other people that have theirs even higher). AMD has said that all that 939 mobos need for dual core is a BIOS upgrade, and in fact the A8N-SLI can support Dual Cores now (AMD uses this board to show off its current dual core 939s), so you're not wasting your money, and the A64 3000+ is only $155, so it's not like youre wasting money, and you don't have to wait all that time with no new PC, which is worth a lot more than $155 in my opinion.

 

[absinthe]

gobucks,

The scenario you describe sounds promising. Basically, I want to buy the very best thing I can afford now which I will be able to use later (i.e. reuse mobo and RAM, at least). This is the reason I haven't bought any more RAM for my current machine. I'm currently using PC2700 and I'm afraid I won't be able to reuse it in my next machine. I'd be willing to lay down dough for a good 2 GB of Ballistix if I thought I could use it when the dual-cores come out.

By the way, could you or someone explain to me exactly what the "FX" line (of AMDs) is? I've been seeing them at Newegg but I don't understand why they cost so much more.

thx,

-abs

 

[keith123uk]

First of all, what is dual core? is it dual processor?

Would this ASUS A8V Deluxe support it? If not, as I'm going to get a new system, I will tell them I want the A8N-SLI board instead, as someone already mention it supports the dual core, right?

Edit - How much is the price difference from the 2 boards?

 

[REMF]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I would at least wait for the next core revision of the Athlon-64 that uses Strained Silicon and has SSE3.

best suggestion.

by the time a lot of software comes out supporting dual-core the first releases will be out of date, the revision E A64 (single cores) due out in a month or two (?) would be a great choice however.

 

[absinthe]

Originally posted by: REMF

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
I would at least wait for the next core revision of the Athlon-64 that uses Strained Silicon and has SSE3.

best suggestion.

by the time a lot of software comes out supporting dual-core the first releases will be out of date, the revision E A64 (single cores) due out in a month or two (?) would be a great choice however.

Can I ask where you good folks get this "coming soon" info? Is it anandtech? (I usually only go straight to the forums here). How will I recognize these revision E chips when they're available, say at Newegg for instance?

-abs

 

[Avalon]

Originally posted by: miketheidiot
Looks like intel might get my $$$ this fall

You're going to drop hundred of dollars on a dual core prescott just because Intel MAY have a cheaper dual core solution out before AMD?
You do realize that dual core is going to be SLOWER than single core off the bat, unless you are doing some heavy multitasking, in which case I don't know why you don't have an opteron/xeon setup already. There's no point.

Absinthe - the FX series is AMD's premium line of processors, just like Intel's Extreme Editions. What the FX tends to offer is the highest clockspeed out of all AMD's chips, features 1MB of L2 cache, and comes fully multiplier unlocked. They are only worth buying if you have a lot of free change lying around the house.

As far as the street date for E core winchesters with strained silicon...you'll know them when you see them. They will have a different model number. A socket 939 Newcastle is ADA3500AXBOX. The 90nm Winchester version is ADA3500BIBOX. The new one will be slightly different.

 

[BDSM]

I have a non overclocked northwood 3.2 ghz with 2 GB of ram. it multitasks great!. I can without effort play a game while having dc++ running (uses loads of resources since I have a really fast connection), burning a cd and doing some encoding. Ya need lots of ram though to make it happen.

I would never have been able to do this on a single core setup without ht.

 

[jabronidan89]

I would wait for Venice to come out, but I just don't feel like waiting for 2 months. I have my case and hard drive sitting here, and I will be ordering everything else next week, when the DFI board becomes available on Monarch through their Combo deal (i want the free HL2 and FarCry, )

 

[Aenslead]

correct me if I am mistaken, but isn't the hard drive system FAR MORE IMPORTAN than CPU power?

I recomend you get a nice SATA II RAID setup, upgrade your RAM and buy a 3200+ A64 system. No need for dualcore whatsoever (unless the app is heavily optimized for multithreading), and that P4 HT helps, well... it does... a bit... but over all, A64 still feels far smoother.

 

[absinthe]

Originally posted by: Aenslead
correct me if I am mistaken, but isn't the hard drive system FAR MORE IMPORTAN than CPU power?

I recomend you get a nice SATA II RAID setup, upgrade your RAM and buy a 3200+ A64 system. No need for dualcore whatsoever (unless the app is heavily optimized for multithreading), and that P4 HT helps, well... it does... a bit... but over all, A64 still feels far smoother.

I do plan to get a mobo with SATA and add a SATA hard drive, at the least. This purchase is probably 6 to 8 weeks away at the least. Do you think the Venice core chips will be available by then?

Can you make a recommendation on RAM that I can make last, i.e., RAM that I can use the next time I upgrade. I'll have the 'buckage' to get maybe two 1 GB sticks, but I don't want to spend that much if it's going to be disposed of in a year. I honestly don't know much about RAM. I've always just used the Crucial website to find what I need.

So ... so far I'm thinking: a 939 mobo (maybe the DFI Lan Party?), with an AMD 64 (maybe the Venice when it becomes available), and 2 GB RAM.

(edit: Do you think 2 GB of RAM is overkill?)

-abs