Last message on previous page:

Exactly, that's why AMD X2 5000+ is a preferable name.

Granny: "Excuse me, but what does that mean?"
Salesman: "AMD is the company, X2 means it has two processors, like two computers on a chip, and 5000+ is the chip name. Higher is better."

The K62-450 I got the month it arrived (on an ASUS motherboard) is still going strong. I gave it to an elderly couple who just use it for card games and bible programs (what a combination). I don't think I've ever had a CPU fail on me.

I've had motherboards fail after a few years, had SDRAM and DDR fail but not a CPU. I think you were just very unlucky.

Unlike the old old days, we all keep stuff running in the background. I've had Azureus downloading unlicensed anime while I played Oblivion at medium settings on my P4 2.8 Northwood. Then, when PC Cillin kicked in for a daily scan, it slowed to a crawl. A dual core would help there, even when the game's minimally multithreaded or not multithreaded at all.

As is, the Core 2 Duos are closer to the Dothans than Netburst, so it's more a matter that I'd like to see Intel "more work per clock cycle" vs. Intel "higher clock speeds with less work". I know how it goes with AMD vs. Intel, but I'm just curious how a Core 2 Duo 1.86 stacks up against a 2.8 Northwood or a P4 630 Prescott.

In other words, at what Core 2 Duo clock speed is it worth it to upgrade from what I have? I'm also considering an Athlon X2 3800+ but if I go AM2, I'm curious about the upcoming X2 3600+. There's also the upcoming 1.6 gigahertz Core 2 Duo. No way I'll buy a Netburst dual core, I don't see that as enough of an improvement over what I have.

Could happen, but I just bought a fair bit of INTC at $17.82. Before all the web sites started gushing about Conroe, Wall St. analyst reports were very much in "show me" mode about the new product cycle. It looks to me as if Intel has regained the upper hand for the moment and that is not priced in to the stock. After the stinko earnings reports (which was within the range of company guidance, by the way) people focused on the inventory build which was reminiscent of the beginning of 2004 when stale product was backed up in the supply chain. What people didn't get after the INTC analyst call last week is that the inventory is now at the top of the pipe and is related to the new product cycle. This is a good thing as it means that it is easily cleared and, more importatnly, means these guys are more prepared to get Conroe chips out to the hungry consumers faster than they have been in the past.

INTC is as a multi-year low, not quite where it was in 2002 but, relative to the S&P, lower than it has been since 1997. Take that and the view that a couple positives are underappreciated and I think I have a sporting bet. My mistake was not making it a spread trade by buying AMD puts at the same time, since AMD has completely cratered.

BTW, I've built two systems. Mine with Intel becuase I thought the hyper-threading made it a better multi-tasker and my son's with AMD because he told me "It's better for games." We're both happy with our machines and, yes, this buzz about Conroe is making me itchy to pry open my case again.

It's truely suprising that intel finally decided to toss out the old design book of "When you make something with big numbers on it, creative marketing and monopolize the industry. who needs real performance" But the fact of the matter is when it comes down to it AMD has always had the better design in the long run. When AMD designed the 462 chip (socket A) they had guys from Alpha working on it. All they really had to do was take the Alpha chips, put a bigger cache on it, and up the speed. It took them 6 months to create something that was only meant to fund the development of the Opteron chips but ended up slaughtering everything that intel could churn out while the socket A design changed very little over it's lifetime. Yes i know, that is a topic of great debate over the years, but lets be honest Intel was struggling to keep up with performance despite running twice the clock speed, twice the L2 cache and eventually DDR2 memory.
Intel lied cheated and threatened its way to keep it's leadership once people started realizing that intel just wasn't making anything spectacular enough to merit the prices. They managed to mangle their first attempt at 64 bit chips, they mangled even worse the 64bit dual cores with higher clocks, larger cache, DDR2 and 65nm design while amd is still using 90nm chips.
Bottom line, my 165 opteron that i got for $280, is running at 3.3ghz on air, with my ram cranked up to 730mhz 2.5-3-3-8. AMD will be coming out with it's 65nm AM2 chips in short order, and they recently announced the merger with ATI, i'm sure that after intel actually doing some real work and making something worth buying AMD will go all out to remind everyone that intel still has to look over thier shoulder.

Actually it's funny you should mention Oblivion, because supposedly it's able to take advantage of multi-threading (though 20% performance boost isn't impressive). Still I hear you on the Azureus+anime bit, before I got Oblivion when it first came out, I made a concious effort to start new torrents on my laptop so I would get single-player gaming speed plus network/CPU-hogging video downloads.

I love it when people say stuff like this. The leader, Intel, had a hard time when it's bargain-brand alternative AMD made the Athlon 64. They revved the clock speed, used a newer RAM type, 64 bit stuff, and still they couldn't beat little 'ol AMD with its 90 nm processors. People who are excited about general processor speed or maximum performance should be pondering the potential for when AMD does make it to 65 nm, by which point you'll be able to slap one or two dual or quad core processors (which Tom's reports might not take more power than dual core!) in with DDR2. Possibly there will be some benefits from the merger with ATi, although I'd expect if we see any significant ones it wouldn't be for a few years. The fact that AMD is able to confront Intel like this is quite impressive and really speaks to their hardware design people as opposed to their marketing people (because really, if you don't know much about the processors, would you go with some brand you hadn't heard of, or the Pentium thing you've heard advertised for years?).

So, I think AMD still has a decent hand to play in the upcoming year or two. If applications become more and more multi-threaded (especially the high end ones like video encoding, image rendering, and eventually gaming) then a larger number of lower-power cores is better than a lower number of higher-power cores due to the innate multitasking capabilities. At the same time I'm hoping that AMD R&D guys will be sitting down soon and doing a total redesign for a 3-5 years in the future, in case they hit a stumbling block like Intel did with Netburst. Until then I'll just have to be content with AMD's (still) superior price/performance and whatever benefits 4x4 and 8x8 will be offering.

i forgot to even mention Oblivion, thanks for the reminder. I see articles about how hardware intensive oblivion is, and how nothing around can take it head on. In fact i believe toms wrote an article on it, but i've read so many at this point it doesn't matter. Now i agree it is some of the most intense visuals i've come across.
When i had my AMD mobile OCed to 3ghz with a x850 on my DFI LP NF2 Rev B (even shortened that name still rivals AMD cpu names) running 265 FSB 1:1, i waited out oblivion because i figured that my rig wouldn' be able to handle it. But a few months ago when i got all the hardware to build up my 64 dually rig i decided to grab oblivion to see what the performance difference was between the mobile and the 165 dual core i planned on OCing the hell out of. Taking everything up to max in 1280x1024 on the Mobile rig i didn't drop below 20fps to often, not what i like to see but it was playabe. I had to wait a bit to get my x1800xt but oblivion was to be the first test for it. So i load it up on my 64 dualcore rig, have the cpu running at 3.3ghz and the x1800xt which i grabbed for $199 (can't beat that for 512GDD3) and i started it out light at 1280x1024 HDR lighting everything else jacked up to the max, not suprisingly never drops below 95FPS outdoors. 1600x1200, goes down to 87fps. Now i'm impressed at this, i start looking around at other forums see what people are getting with their overclocks, and i find the "Chuck fix" to have HDR and AA enabled at the same time. After i get it loaded i just put the resolution to the max my monitor can display...which i didn't know it could prior to this experiment of 2560x1920. I honestly expected it to be something like 2-3fps. But it never dropped below 35. At all..played it for 3 hours. Gorgeous. Now, i knew this had to be the CPU picking up the slack, so i dropped it to stock clock of 200x9. That made my rig unhappy. Wouldn't get over 12fps even indoors.
Show me an intel chip that can do that. Infact here's somethin simple, all you intel fans who don't believe, Get sandra 7 Take any of the single core CPUs that use DDR2. Bench them at stock clock and compare them to a barton 3200. Not gonna be that big a differance consider 50-100% the clock speed faster on the intel. Now...underclock to match the 2.1ghz of the barton 3200. Hell, drop the speed by 25% on the intel. See how those benches compare. my 3ghz mobile barton chip had better performance then any of intels 32bit chips, and a fair amount of their 64bit chips.
I don't know why everyone is so impressed with the fact that intel finally did some WORK for the first time in this century. AMD as i said before spent 6months designing something that let them fund their research for the better part of a decade. Then they kept making simple design improvements. Their 754 socket chips are not that impressive compared to 939. But you know what? It funded their research, cheap to manufacture didn't take alot of work and then they came back and said "oh yeah, intel did what? Well here's what we've got, now who's this intel you were talking about?" That's what the AM2 socket that's out now is i would guess. A way to get paid and test the market.
I'm sure intel will always be around for people that don't know much about computers, and just want something to check their email with. People that don't know any better. But in the long haul AMD from the start has had years ahead of anything that intel has done.

That was a very silly Tom's article, I don't know if they were trying to be serious or not. They were like, "No matter what rig you have, Oblivion will bring it to its knees begging for a quick clean death like a soldier after two weeks of torture!" (hyperbole added by me). They were all "NOTHING can handle Oblivion at 1280x1024" or some stupid sounding statement. I'm running an Athlon 64 3500+ with 1GB of PC3200 and an X800XT AIW. I play at 1600x1200 and yeah, sometimes the framerate gets unbearable, but then again this card wasn't even new when I picked it up a year ago, now you can get two X1800 XTXs or a quad SLI setup with a faster dual core beast and several GB of RAM. I'd been sure those would be able to handle 1600x1200 at good framerates, and you just confirmed that.

Can someone tell me what is the software or plugin for CPU-z they use to measure temp?

Thanks

I have first hand experience of this, and almost swore off AMD products because of this. Had it not been for AMD's VERY low price-point at the time, I would have. At any rate, I took the heatsink off an Athlon 1.1 Ghz processor for about two seconds while viewing the BIOS screeen. The temp shot to 95 C immediately and the processor died. Two seconds .. sheesh .. Fortunately for AMD, replacing the processor (including the original cost) was still cheaper than an equivalent Intel processor.

I recently (yesterday) had another bad AMD experience. I have an Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton core) installed on an nForce2 Ultra mb and was formatting my hdd/installing WinXP. Anyhow, I kept getting a BSOD and just gave up. I put the same processor in a known working KT266A system, and had the SAME thing happen. After toying with voltages, bus speeds, etc, I came to the conclusion that the processor was bad. Now, this is the first time I have had a processor just suddenly fail after 4-5 years of use. I realize this is probably a very isolated incident, but it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth for AMD products.

It seems like most games are already very much in the single threaded world, still. So, I wouldn't expect the performance of the single core CPUs to differ much. Considering the cost of the lower clock speed models of Core Duo or Core 2 Duo, I don't see why Intel would bother producing single core CPU's at all - unless it is just a cost saving benefit of dealing with low yields (IE disabling a non-functioning core and rebading the CPU).

it looks like you aren't alone

first of all speaking of THAT time i bought me also northwood after having read the THG heat test i had like "well i can afford the cost for a molten AMD in worse case but ui ain't gonna take the risk

let it be that haqlf a year later i got unemployed

then worse case scenario did happen suddenly the heatsink fell off (had most probably badly clicked it in while doing my 6 monthly dusting of my comp) except a loud smack from the heatsink hitting the bottom of my case and my comp acting like an ordinary pentium 200 nothing happened... my friends AMd had a fan failure and his AMD (that was then better) died even worse the mobo got a part of the heat blow as well....

then had here an AMD athlon XP 2600+ the mobo and chip blew as well

now i won't blame AMD for that as the fault was a crappy PSU (it was an OEM comp)

however what i noticed is that AMD often gotsq the crappy stuff around the CPU

positive sidenote though for a friend i built a Athlon XP 2400 in 2003... it still runs smoothly without glitch

in global i have to say: i look for what i need in first place i still sit on my 2.4 Northwood cause i don't NEED an upgrade it still is enough for what i do (even if computing fractals take longer then with the last cry CPU's from AMD or Intel)

i only look for an upgrade if:

1 it is really worth the cost/performance gain
2 if there is something i wish to do that is not possible with what i got

slowly the second aspect is getting in reach

i always had intels as comps mainly due to the fact that i move and hassle my comp around a lot and that AMD had that heat problem till end of 2003 (last upgrade was in december 2002)

so next year i gonna get a new one and for me it's simple

if conroe gives me the best price/performance that will be the one

if AMD athlon FX comes with a better option then i will take AMD

why? i look at stability reliabilty but also for the best for every buck i give not for a company name and benchmarks as that never says it all!! with one crappy piece of hardware you can easyly make an intel or AMD as unstable as you wish to... same with a crappy written program on a stable system.

so in the end who gains? like many told we as users

(though i slightly prefer ATI as i prefer their "color balance" but i am not a gamer so i plan to buy for the upgrade a matrox as i mainly do 2D work used Nvidia and ATI they both did good service but ATI seems to be just that tad more "gentle for the eye to me"

but that is something so subjective that if the new Nvidia would come with a more matrox nearing 2D quality that i would with no doubt put an Nvidia into my next comp....

like i said i look to what i get, not at a brand or benchmarks

Gimme a break f*** wits. Let's remember that it took Intel a whole year to hit back from AMD's X2 world takeover. A YEAR! Also remember that Intel is still using a FSB--how, uh, caveman. But let me be clear here. The Core Duo line does BLOW AMD out of the water. That's some heavy duty artillery that Intel came up with. Impressive after all their other overheating bottleneck shiznit! Their slowest Core Duo beats AMD's fastest dual core, and it does it for less money. Last, even the X2 3800s still keep up with anything game makers can toss its way, so that's not really a big deal at this time either. However, for video editing / converting, heavy Photoshop work, etc., that new CD is sweet. Beats my "old" x2 4800 by about 30%. I wouldn't count AMD out yet. It's a much smaller company whereas Intel is bloated and has already cut jobs in order to compete. I have a feeling that AMD is just getting warmed up, not cooled down. Again, good job for Intel coming out with a true dual core processor that runs coolly and efficiency. Damn, that was some good engineering.

If AMD played it's cards right, they should be in a situation now, since beating Intel so badly last year, 2005-2006, that they can counter punch immediately. In other words, with AMDs introduction of the x2, which hit Intel hard, they are now on the offensive. In other words, AMD is in the drivers seat. They can choose to hit back now, which means no time in between Intel's latest offering, which will cut into Intel's new line market, or they can wait another year, and hit back then. In the latter case, they gave themselves 2 years of R&D to Intel's one year--since the X2. I do have to say though that Intel punched back HARD for only one year. Damn.

The way I see this by analogy is with a prize fight. AMD hit Intel so hard they didn't even know which direction it came from. Then AMD offered a couple more same line punches, but Intel wasn't really there to hit, back in its corner sewing stitches over the left eye.

They in the next round, Intel sends a right haymaker with all of its weight behind it and hit AMD squarely in the front of the jaw--so ahrd that AMD gets knocked out of the ring. I mean AMD doesn't even have any teeth anymore. But, AMD gets up fast and sits down on the bench for the next round.

AMD can dance the next round (2006-2007) and simply give the round to Intel without a knock out, or it can try to hit back. Who know on that one. But if they give this round up, then they HAVE to hit back in 2007 or they may lose the entire fight to become lower end chip makers once again. This is NOT AMD's market plan. If they do hit back, they will need to make sure Intel, who will have yet another year to R&D, don't counter punch so hard that it takes away AMD's new market share. I'd expect an X4 at over 4Ghz that Intel can't punch because of their FSB problem or some other older-ish architecture that AMD has overcome a long time ago. But make no mistake, AMD has a few very hard punches left before it's knocked out--runs out of capital.

I think that only the X6800 Extreeme can be overclocked. At least is what I read on Toms.

VtrainAll the Conroe's can be overclocked. It's just that the X6800 has an unlocked multiplier, so you can change the multi either way and play around with FSB speeds. The non-Extreme chips have to be overclocked strictly by raising the FSB.

Similar to the athlon 64s, Only the FX have unlocked multipliers and non fx can be overclocked by just raising htt/fsb.

We just have to hope they can get the truck back on the highway.

Your analogy falls well short of the mark, unfortunately. This is serious business and cannot be reduced to boxing cliches.

I just hope they have creative ideas and designs because left hooks don't mean sh!t to electrons flowing through semiconductors.

We just have to hope they can get the truck back on the highway.

Your analogy falls well short of the mark, unfortunately. This is serious business and cannot be reduced to boxing cliches.

I just hope they have creative ideas and designs because left hooks don't mean sh!t to electrons flowing through semiconductors.

Of course I don't have any inside information, only what I have read and heard from the CEO of AMD. When AMD decided to outright compete with Intel a few years ago, the CEO stated something very similar to "Where ready to do battle with Intel, it's going to be a punch out and I think we are ready." Well, the real punch out has just begun. G** Damn Intel counter punched hard. I have a feeling that AMD is just getting warmed up. The reason I say this is because it was well stated position that AMD was literally gunning for Intel's market share. The way I see it, Intel jsut sat back and had the attitude something like, "Tough words, so why don't you start gunning?" Then came the X2 and FX series running 1Ghz slower and beating the best Intel had, and that knocked Intel out of its dogmatic slumber. AMD must have known this was coming or they would not have challenged Intel like they did. It would be pretty stupid, not to mention naive, to think hat if you slap a company in the face and knock them out of their chairs that they won't hit you back, hard. And equally important, you better have your counter punch well lined out and ready to go. Only an idiot would think one first line of awesome CPUs would do anything except piss off the Intel, something like tossing rocks and a beehive and putting a big dent in it. You better start running or have a flame thrower ready. If not, you're gonna get stung literally to death. That said, I'd be very, very surprised if AMD, which is a very healthy company at this point, could not counterpunch with something equal or better in the next year.

If they could hit back RIGHT now, that would REALLY put a dent in Intel markets because it would dilute Intel's profit for a new product by funneling some of it, or tons of it, to AMD's new CPU line.

The reason some AMD fans are a little worried is because they have never seen Intel come out with such a diverse and completely new CPUs that perform so much greater over their older (year old) CPUs. We're not used to that. I mean the difference between Intel's new CD CPUs and their old series is night and day. AMD can't touch them right now. AMD's fastest CPUS can't even tough, or barely touches, Intel's lowest priced new CD CPU. That's gotta hurt. This is probably AMD's worst case scenario.

I think it's partly AMD's fault because they should have dropped the FX series completely and spent all resources on dual cores, bringing the X2 up at least to the mid level Intel CPU CDs. That would have hurt Intel pretty badly--"Intel comes out with completely new line of CPUs, but they cost more and only the top level is marginally faster than AMD's best, plus MAD radically drops its price today." That would have been a realy slam.

So AMD, fiddlef**k with your FX series while Intel takes your own advice and makes these wonderful new all dual core processor lines. Plus, they really cleaned house offering them in all new laptops.

Still, I just don't think AMD is done by a long shot. They made a lot of money when they came out with that stupid FX line and the X2 especially. Nothing Intel had could compete. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2810

This board can be had for $54, and makes upgrading to Conroe as simple as buying the board + CPU, and can use existing DDR 400, and AGP Video cards, with supposedly very little impact on performance. Kind of makes me wish I would have waited on my AM2 system . . .

Where did all this intelligent discussion come from?