Best Time to Buy a "-hammer"

Hi all! sup? I hadn't seen one yet, so, this shall be the post where I expect everyone to tell their opinion on the best time to get an Athlon64 - - taking into considering price at launch, how it may change over time, (how well Prescott and the P4EE will do...) the imperfections/bugs that ARE ALWAYS in early versions of new hardware, how some early ones might not overclock as well as ones down the road, and most importantly the whole thing with the Single/Dual channel support and socket switchero AMD will be playing; and so on and so forth.
- - go

My opinon on the opteron and athlon64, is to wait to get one, right now they are just like Paliminos were, not that stable, dont oc well, not that fast. Once the 90 nanometer manufacturing process comes out, it should probably get better. For example, right now its kinda in the "palimino" stage, we probably want to wait till it gets to the "1700 DLT3C" stage
An Opteron 244 (1.8Ghz) on LN2 (liquid nitrogen) can only overclock to 2.2 Ghz. http://wetandchillychips.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=402

Also, right now, the chipsets IMHO arent that good either, they dont suppot many overclocking features, and have sevral bugs in them, some of them can be tricked and worked around, http://www.overclockers.com/tips00457/.

So once again, my opinon is to wait on the K8. Also, the prices should drop significantly in the next few years, and once Intel starts battleing AMD, then the speed and stablility will increase extremely fast yet not expensive.

Cheers!
-f1

modenaf1 said:

My opinon on the opteron and athlon64, is to wait to get one, right now they are just like Paliminos were, not that stable, dont oc well, not that fast. Once the 90 nanometer manufacturing process comes out, it should probably get better. For example, right now its kinda in the "palimino" stage, we probably want to wait till it gets to the "1700 DLT3C" stage
An Opteron 244 (1.8Ghz) on LN2 (liquid nitrogen) can only overclock to 2.2 Ghz. http://wetandchillychips.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=402

Also, right now, the chipsets IMHO arent that good either, they dont suppot many overclocking features, and have sevral bugs in them, some of them can be tricked and worked around, http://www.overclockers.com/tips00457/.

So once again, my opinon is to wait on the K8. Also, the prices should drop significantly in the next few years, and once Intel starts battleing AMD, then the speed and stablility will increase extremely fast yet not expensive.

Cheers!
-f1

Click to expand...

How do you know that A64's are unstable, bad overclockers, and slow? That overclockers.com article you linked was written about someone on the tbreak forums who overclocked one to 2.4gigs on air cooling. He reported no stability problems... and I think the benchmarks speak for themselves. (24000+ 3dmarks on air i think it was)

Check out the specs on the Gigabyte k8 board, multiplier, fsb, memory control, all the voltage controls etc etc. Furthermore, how do you know "the chipsets" are full of bugs?

I probably won't recommend buying an Athlon 64 right away either, but for the right reason. The price! Though it sounds like a good product regardless.

PS. I had a 1600+ for a long time, and I don't remember any of the problems you mention being present. It was not a bad processor for the time by any means.

Demont said:

How do you know that A64's are unstable, bad overclockers, and slow? That overclockers.com article you linked was written about someone on the tbreak forums who overclocked one to 2.4gigs on air cooling. He reported no stability problems... and I think the benchmarks speak for themselves. (24000+ 3dmarks on air i think it was)

Check out the specs on the Gigabyte k8 board, multiplier, fsb, memory control, all the voltage controls etc etc. Furthermore, how do you know "the chipsets" are full of bugs?

I probably won't recommend buying an Athlon 64 right away either, but for the right reason. The price! Though it sounds like a good product regardless.

PS. I had a 1600+ for a long time, and I don't remember any of the problems you mention being present. It was not a bad processor for the time by any means.

Click to expand...

I have read numerouse reveiws complaining about chipset troubles, even the article i linked to, was about how people have to do certain things that dont make sense to get them to overclock. As for the Cpu's some of the early opterons had alot of trouble overclocking, but you are right, 2.4 ghz isnt bad.
As for unstable, i shouldhave just said dosent oc well, becuase what determines the oc is how stable it is right? if it stays stable up to XX Ghz, that is where the oc ends. Anyways, i never said they were bad, just that it isnt as good as some of the stuff that comes out later, for example the new barton stepping, and the jixib 1800, etc.
I was mistaken with the features the mobo had, from what you said it looks pretty darn good.
I apologize for the error
-f1

If you have the money, right now. It's no fun watching other people have their fun/anguish before you, and finally getting the coolest thing much later than you should have. Hey, if a super revision comes out much later than when you bought your chip, just buy the new one. They should be cheaper as well. You are an enthusiast after all.The bugs modena mentioned are small and will most likely be fixed in new bios revisions rather soon.

i still think it takes one or more revisions before it is *safe* to buy any new hardware...g0d...the amd760 (remember that ole' thing?)...now that is example enough to stay from first generation parts...

Some posts here mention the poor overclockability of the A64. I personally don't think they're doing any worse than the socket K7's did upon initially appearance. Actually about the same...it took a few months before we started seeing 600MHz Durons hitting 1 GHz.

And then in regards to chipsets, anyone remember the VIA® KT133 chipset? It would hardly go to 115 MHz...then KT133a showed up boasting overclocks in the 140 - 150 MHz range.

So you see, we're seeing much the same circumstances with K8. The only difference is, K7 hardware cost much less than K8 hardware does.

If a Athlon 64 3200+ & motherboard cost $350 (same as a good AthlonXP setup), a lot of the arguments people have for not buying would go right out the window.


-PC

*edited for clarity

the best thing to do in my opionion is to wait for .09 and socket 939..

the 2 things that make the a64 own are on-die memory controller and dual channel non-reg DDR.

PCphreak said:

Some posts here mention the poor overclockability of the A64.

I personally don't think they're doing any worse than the socket K7's did upon initially appearance. Anyone remember the VIA® KT133 chipset? It would hardly go to 115 MHz...then KT133a showed up boasting overclocks in the 140 - 150 MHz range.

We're seeing much the same thing with K8. The only difference is, K7 hardware cost much less than K8 hardware does.

If a Athlon 64 3200+ & motherboard cost $350 (same as a good AthlonXP setup), a lot of the arguments people have for not buying would go right out the window.


-PC

Click to expand...

Comparing it to kt133 is a little unfair in my opinion. From some initial results it doesn't seem like these processors are overclocking much worse than the tbreds and bartons we have now... and they are much more powerful clock for clock. Not actual percentage-wise overclocking, as they don't sell any low speed grades such as 1700+'s... but 2.2-2.4 gigs on air is what I've seen at most of the review places and thats pretty much the same as tbreds and bartons.

But you are right, if they were cheaper this would be a different ballgame. Right now you are probably looking at $600-650 for an A64 cpu and motherboard and close to $1000 for a A64 FX51 + motherboard. We will see them down to about $400-450 and $600-650 fairly soon though I'd wager. That will be quite a bit more affordable to many people... I will probably be tempted.

Demont said:

How do you know that A64's are unstable, bad overclockers, and slow? That overclockers.com article you linked was written about someone on the tbreak forums who overclocked one to 2.4gigs on air cooling. He reported no stability problems... and I think the benchmarks speak for themselves. (24000+ 3dmarks on air i think it was)

Click to expand...

Sshhh... he's only telling what he's seen on other hardware sites. You don't think he actually has one to pass his opinions on, do you?

Demont said:

Comparing it to kt133 is a little unfair in my opinion. From some initial results it doesn't seem like these processors are overclocking much worse than the tbreds and bartons we have now... and they are much more powerful clock for clock. Not actual percentage-wise overclocking, as they don't sell any low speed grades such as 1700+'s... but 2.2-2.4 gigs on air is what I've seen at most of the review places and thats pretty much the same as tbreds and bartons.

But you are right, if they were cheaper this would be a different ballgame. Right now you are probably looking at $600-650 for an A64 cpu and motherboard and close to $1000 for a A64 FX51 + motherboard. We will see them down to about $400-450 and $600-650 fairly soon though I'd wager. That will be quite a bit more affordable to many people... I will probably be tempted.

Click to expand...

Hey Demont-

I have been unclear in the beginning of my post.
From what I've read the chipsets for A64 (nForce3 & K8T800) seem to max out at within ~20 MHz over-stock.

While not identical to the situation with KT133, it's more-less similar- seeing as how they didn't overclock much at all. The next revision of the chipset was more refined, and offered more headroom for overclock (from stock).

So, I wasn't comparing the Athlon-64 processor to the KT133. I was comparing the KT133 to A64 chipsets. After re-reading my post I can see why you'd think so, because I made no mention of A64's chipset before talking about KT133....I type faster than I think (and that's sad). I'll re-edit my post for clarity.


-PC

i've heard that the nForce3 sucks, is this true? Might it be caused by the memory that these early configurations run? or...what?

PCphreak said:

Hey Demont-

I have been unclear in the beginning of my post.
From what I've read the chipsets for A64 (nForce3 & K8T800) seem to max out at within ~20 MHz over-stock.

While not identical to the situation with KT133, it's more-less similar- seeing as how they didn't overclock much at all. The next revision of the chipset was more refined, and offered more headroom for overclock (from stock).

So, I wasn't comparing the Athlon-64 processor to the KT133. I was comparing the KT133 to A64 chipsets. After re-reading my post I can see why you'd think so, because I made no mention of A64's chipset before talking about KT133....I type faster than I think (and that's sad). I'll re-edit my post for clarity.


-PC

Click to expand...

Then who's getting the 200- 600mhz overclocks? Ghosts?

dreammmatt said:

i've heard that the nForce3 sucks, is this true? Might it be caused by the memory that these early configurations run? or...what?

Click to expand...

I wouldn't say sucks but isn't up to par with via's offering. The nforce 3 has a 600mhz hypertransport bus while the via has an 800 mhz bus for now. Nvidia is supposed to release a chipset that will support 800 MHZ bus soon according to information
I have gathered from multiple sources. There are other differences but I don't remember them all off the top of my head. That one there just sticks out in my head.

At present it would seem that vias offerings are better than the NF3 - but then again the original NF sucked whilst the NF2 is a cracking chipset. Maybe the NF4 will do the biz? lol. Actually have all reviews been done with the NF3 150 or have some used the NF3 250?

well then, waiting to buy a Hammer when the "nForce4" is around (or comparable 'later model' chipsets) might just be the ticket! because i assume by then major glithces and errors will be removed; obviously there will be enhancements; and it should be a lot faster, since the engineers will be more used to working with K8 stuff - - right?

Just like the XP nFarce chipset, the version 2.0 should be better. Several reviews have compared the nForce3 and K8T800 and have found better performance and stability with the via chipset (for now with early bioses). For example, nForce3 reportedly has trouble with intense disk i/o operations.

Did anyone else notice in the benchmarks that have appeared so far that the XP 3200 and A64 3200 are worlds apart in performance? AMD finally made a major revision to the PR system.

As far as overclocking goes, the best report that I have seen was on Aces hardware or an FX-51 overclocked to 2.8 GHz (600MHz over stock). http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000268 Not bad for early silicon...

It is also interesting that several sites were provided Intel's Xeon Extreme Edition (oops. Pentium 4 Extreme Edition) and it was still beaten by a stock FX-51.

Good CPU bad buy for now

These new cpus kick butt when it comes to clock for clock speed. Amd has Intel beat on the heat problems with this new SOI process. these new suckers are 1.5vcore default which is great. Prescott is gona be a hot processor. Intel and amd are taking different approach intel raised cpu frequency but have gotten a bit smart with P4 EE edition meaning they realize it all ant about cpu frequency. Amd is doing more work per mhz and SOI means you get a faster cooler cpu at lower clock speeds and vcore. The 2nd half of next year I'll probally getting one of these cpus which should be around the 3ghz mark buy then and DDR2 should also be in the works. Right now it offers a substantal performance benefit over my Barton @2.3ghz but it still ant worth the money yet to upgrade. Intell better pull SOI and other procedures to make the p4 do more work per mhz or they are going to have a verry hot cpu requiring a massive blower on the cpu which will cut all the wires that come near it cause it will suck everyting into it. LOL, thats my thoughts.

im in the process of a new rig construction so this hits me str8 in the face also.

for some ppl out there who havent been around for a few years to see how things generaly work in the cpu world,id truely wait!

first generation chips of a new design suck generaly compared to chips 6 months down the road.and those are bought at half the price of the originals.

new chipsets are buggy on new releases also.
and many times the packaging on the socket changes on a new cpu.this is already a 64fx concern


fx may be changing pin counts,andis way to high priced.
a64 isnt much better than a oced xp imo since it uses a single mem controller.64 bit os might help it alot tho.

amd has many choices now and i dont want what i can afford and want what i cant afford.


this might sound dumb but here is what im looking hard into.
a 940 pin mobo with multis unlocked and seeing people hitting 2.4 ghz with 1.4ghz opterons.
amd down binned chips with xp's to meet demand and i dont see no reason these opterons arent just temperaliy locked and are the same core as a 2ghz opterons.wishfull thinking i know!
the mobos im seeing people say some with unlocked multis and some need bios updates or hacks.this should be fixed soon if the opterons are truely unlocked.im no master ocer yet but im sure a good chance this can be done withpin mods.or mabey someone with guts to pop an opteron ihs off and check for pins
prime time will be 1-1 1/2 months for me to see which way this is working.

i was brought up on amd so i pay as little as possable and want the most for it.if i cant have that ill buy something else and beat it to death and then buy the 64fx..

One question for everyone who is saying that the new Athlon64's are too expensive: Compared to what? Compared to a bargain basement chip that happened to overclock like a dream (the T-bred B 1700)?

If you compare the Athlon64 chips to the Intel parts or to Barton Athlon XP's, they are priced appropriately. AMD must make money on these cpu's if thye are going to stay in business.

A retail box Athlon64 FX-51 is selling for $799 at newegg.com

A retail box Intel 3.2c P-4 is selling for $616 at newegg.com

A retail box Athlon64 3200+ is selling for $453 at newegg.com

A retail box Barton 3200+ (400fsb) is selling for $458 at newegg.com

Tell me again, how is the Athlon64 overpriced?