What's with Tom's review!??

[Guest]

Ok I usually agree with the reviews this site does but the kickoff review of the 760MP seems... BAD. I mean when I look around at who would be using this sytem, I would think more the way anand did/does. I'm more of a power user who would be compiling programs while working on other applications, where was this bench? Tom's review tried to hit a few "real world" benches but even the results arn't consistant with what I've seen on other sites, Tom's seem slower. His P4 marks are as high as the rest but the AthlonMP are all lower. Why?

In his conclusion he says that this chipset isn't that great, and that the Intel is still better (paraphrased)!!! The AMD's are running at 1.2! What the heck here Tom!! Drop in a pair of 1.4's and see what happens!

I'm sorry, I must say that for the first time in a while, I reading a review at Tom's Hardware has left a really bad taste in my mouth. I feel like all the facts were not presented and that the summary was indeed rushed. From what I have seen around the net, thus far, this 760MP paired with AthlonMP cpus is by far the better solution for a power CAD or developer workstation. The system IS faster and it IS cheaper.

 

[igottaknife]

he used the Tyan board that only allows ECC DDR RAM. His ram I noticed is not CAS2 like the RAM he used for the K7 Master. There is ECC CAS2 DDR RAM available on pre-order at Mushkin. Maybe the other sites were using this RAM. And maybe you should read the article with a little more depth. Did you notice that there are only 1.2 MP's to made when they hit the market? If he had 1.7 MP's he would've used em.

Your Signature Sucks<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by igottaknife on 06/05/01 11:07 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Phelk]

Give Tom a break, he's in Taiwan with like a gazillion drifferent and cool things to look at ALL week. He has to balance looking at the stuff and reporting for us. I am sure once he gets back to the office we will get the normal quality of indepth reporting.

<font color=blue> The Revolution starts here... as soon as I finish my coffee </font color=blue>

 

[Guest]

My point was simply that his conclusion read "hard". As if he really did not approve of the 760mp. He stated that he felt it was no great feet in technology. Plainly stated, I disagree 100%. The 860mb is big bucks the Xeon P4 is 450+ bucks each! Add to that the price of RDRAM and what do you get...? A system that performs on par with the 760MP. Now let's add a few more factors. Like an upgrade path for the 760mp! Heck the P4 sockets are a dead end... no upgrades there once the new pin config hits. right? Although not "offical" you CAN run the 1.4Athlon in the Tyan board. So how far off do you think 1.4 AthlonMPs are? A month at most?

Look what I am saying is that almost every other review got better scores than Tom. He drew a hard conclusion at the end saying the P4 was "better". I want to know how he can say that when his results seem the "odd ball" AND we all know that AMD is GOING go offer faster CPUs that ARE drop ins AND the P4 pin config is going to be a "dead end"?

Just makes me mad to see a high end review, that usually I respect, draw "conclusions" that seem so wrong.

 

[Guest]

Apparently, AMD processors running at 1.2 GHz were chosen for the review because only 1 GHz and 1.2 GHz AthlonMP CPUs were released. AthlonMP is a server version of Athlon 4 (Palomino). Don't confuse them with Athlon's older Thunderbird core (which, indeed, runs up to 1.4 GHz).

Leo

 

[Kronos]

Tom is my Mentor!

I want to die like my Grandfather...in my sleep...not screaming in terror like his passengers.

 

[Guest]

Anandtech and THG used same RAM, you can see that in the test setup specifications.
Same motherboard, same RAM, same HD, same Graphics chip.
Maybe the BIOS wasn't the same, Tom say he used a beta bios.

The results are surprinsingly different.

3D studio Max: dual Xeon 4 1.7 Ghz compared to Dual AthlonMP 1.2 Ghz:

THG tests Athlon 27 % faster
Anandtech tests Athlon 12% faster

(Anandtech use newer version of 3DS-Max, which is more realistic.)

So maybe it's just the different applications tested that gives different results, and therefore different conclusions.

If you use a Database servers or 3DS-MAX, go for Athlon MP.
If you use Quake 3 or Flask Mpeg, go for Xeon 4.

I would have to agree that Toms conclusion is a bit strange, but based on what he tested, it's not.
Performance depends on the level of SSE2 optimization. If you don't have that, P4 and Xeon 4 are likely to be slowest.

It looks like Athlon definetely is the obvious choice for the typical dual processor customer.
The exception being mutimedia production, but that still depends on the SSE2 optimzed code!

---
Engage!

 

[Ncogneto]

That was bare none the absolute lamest article by Tom's Hardware to date. Windows 98 benchmarks in a SMP setup? Hello????? quake 3? who is going to buy this setup to play Quale 3?
You cannot doubt what Tom did to help the hardware community along, but now he's taking it all for granted. Van Smith left THG because of the changes he saw happening. Anandtech's review was a lot more balanced, and actually tried to give an idea of what the real world performance of the system would be like, not something that looks like it was cobbled together from other sites' benchmarks and company press releases.

Even if this was a review for an Intle system I would still feel the same way, the quality of the review itself is so incredibly shoddy it is down right scary.



A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[silverpig]

I guess you didn't actually read the entire review. If you did, you'd see why he included the Quake 3 benches in win98.

"I am supplying these benchmarks only to show you the performance difference between the Thunderbird and the Palomino core, since Windows 98 is not able to take advantage of dual processor operation. It's just to give you an idea how the future single-CPU Palomino will perform in comparison to the current Athlon with Thunderbird-core."

You might want to read a little before you start to rag on him so much.

I do, however, agree that the article wasn't up to his normal quality though, but as was already pointed out, it's probably because he's busy in Taiwan.

I actually liked that he included win98 benches in this review. It gave a nice preview of the Palomino.

Another computer wanted. Donations accepted. :^)

 

[Guest]

I think the biggest flawS with his review can be tied to the following statements from his summary.

The high cost of the Tyan K7 Thunder cannot be equalized by the relatively low costs of AthlonMP. <b>Right now dual AthlonMP systems are only interesting for server and workstation setups</b>, where the system price is not considered important. However, even though AthlonMP is significantly cheaper than its Intel Xeon counterpart, it doesn't make a large difference once you look at the price of a complete server or workstation system.

NO <deleted>! The purpose of the MP sytems are for AMD to break into the lucrative server and workstation markets. And to use the stability and success there to gain further inroads to buisness PC's in general. This isn't a consumer product.

Furthermore, the expected cost of this board falls right in line with that of an equivalently equipped i860 board (the only listing on pricewatch is for a tyan thunder i860 board with almost identical features $888), with the difference in price of memory (ddr half the price of rdram) and the chips it would run at least a few hundred less. Compared to a similarly equipped, but poorly performing P3 i840 dual board (tyan thunder board with very similar features 1 listed @ $430 and 1 @ $635), the difference in price including chips and memory would be next to nothing.

Well, I wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it

 

[Ncogneto]

Well, for starters it was not a article about the palimino, it was an article about the first Mp platform from AMD to date. This is something major. Other hardware sites had no problem being at Computex ( anandtech, Aces, etc) and doing a much better review, so where does this leave Tom's Hardware guide? I do not buy into the fact that being at computex was a reason for such a poor review. He had this board before computex to review he just could not release the info before that date. A review of a SMP solution deserves a review in which applications in which it is designed for are used not Quake 3 in Win 98. Tom's hardware guide used to be one of the best review sites on the web, lately it is becoming rather watered down. Include the palimino scores in the review of the palimino not the review of the Athlon SMP.
we were not talking about another release of The gforceX in which the only major diference is a slightly faster processor and memory clock, we are talking about a completely new platform here, it deserved better, whether we liked the conclusions or not.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Ncogneto]

I agree on some points, cost is not the real issue here. A couple of hundred here or there will not make or break a good server. Stability and performance are key. Your not going to find these systems at your local best buy coupled with a 400 dollar rebate to MSN.

But come on people, look at the review! Is this the same Tom Pabst that took intel to task with the p3 1.13 and won? Something is going on here, this is not the first case, however it is one of the more obvious ones. Has anyone noticed a decline of the quality of reviews of late?



A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!