AMD Athlon 64 3700+ versus Intel P4 640 Prescott

If your stuck with AGP then A64 is not the way to go there are IMO no good AGP mobos out there, DFI should be releasing a 939 nf3 mobo with AGP soon, if so that would be the only one i would buy, see if you can sell your card to cover the cost of moving to PCI-E. It also seems silly to me to spend a few hundred $$ on a new mobo and cpu if it causes you to have a video card you cant use in a year.

I doubt you'd notice the difference in gaming but you would in video encoding. The Intel would be much better for that especially in nicely coded hyperthreaded adobe applications.

the p4 is very ncie and should oc great but in the end the 3700+ will kill it.

should have posted this in the cpu colum, not the intel side. Of course your gonna have 50 intel fans yelling that intels are faster. And if u posted this on the amd side u would get the same results there too. Its a toss up which one i would choose, ask yourself " what do i do more" video encode? or " play games ". If playing games is your thing then go with the deigo. There hard to beat in real world gaming performance. As for video encoding i have actually witnessed encoding on a slower 3.4 p4 and it really was faster than most of the A64's that ive seen. But then again on that same system with a new current video card gameplay was pretty slow feeling. So is it worth it to buy a cpu with higher mhz just to shave a minute or two off your encoding and games will play a tad slower or ? Or have a generally faster gaming cpu that will leave u waiting maybe a minute longer while you encode your favorite movie. I MEAN CAUSE EVERYBODY JUST SITS AND WATCHES MOVIES ENCODE FOR HOURS, REAL FUN THERE... I would go with a 3200 venice for about 190 and clock it to about 2.8 and save the left over cash for another part later on.

cwhits said:

the p4 is very ncie and should oc great but in the end the 3700+ will kill it.

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aNTiChRisT said:

Just on a note, the AMD x2's lag behind a bit in video encoding too, but two cores should really make some smoothness that the A64's lack. If AMD made thier own, stable chipsets damn... i think i'd go AMD!

~t0m

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AMD tried that once. I guess you don't remember how bad that flopped.

Well the 760 was a solid chipset, its just that in the end consumers preferred the price and performance of the 266A over stability.

One thing AMD has over Intel right now is the 64bit. Intel is in its first gen of 64bit. AMD has a mature platform going on (3 sockets later). I have respect for both chips and would not hesitate to have either of them. I would assume Intel will in the next gen be doing rather well with the 64bit. Not saying the current 64bit compatable chips don't work well. It's just AMD has the edge on the time doing it. I would love to see Intel move the memory controller off the FSB and have a unified chipset like AMD has right now. It just seems simple to have one chip doing all the work and not two of them. Plus the Intel would actually be rather awsome with an intergrated Memory controller. If you don't plan to use 64bit then disregard my opinions.
Other than that Intel would hold its own for what the engineers planned it to do. I go with products not names. You take the nameplate off the chip and go by the model, you just might find a great chip.

I agree, VIA should be avioded. I never had a good time with that chipset. I always had sound issues with the southbridge.

Enablingwolf said:

One thing AMD has over Intel right now is the 64bit. Intel is in its first gen of 64bit. AMD has a mature platform going on (3 sockets later). I have respect for both chips and would not hesitate to have either of them. I would assume Intel will in the next gen be doing rather well with the 64bit. Not saying the current 64bit compatable chips don't work well. It's just AMD has the edge on the time doing it. I would love to see Intel move the memory controller off the FSB and have a unified chipset like AMD has right now. It just seems simple to have one chip doing all the work and not two of them. Plus the Intel would actually be rather awsome with an intergrated Memory controller. If you don't plan to use 64bit then disregard my opinions.
Other than that Intel would hold its own for what the engineers planned it to do. I go with products not names. You take the nameplate off the chip and go by the model, you just might find a great chip.

I agree, VIA should be avioded. I never had a good time with that chipset. I always had sound issues with the southbridge.

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Intel has been running 64 bit before AMD came up with the idea.

They are not new to this stuff, and there is no need to rush into it. There is still almost no benefit at this point of 64-bit anything.

Yeah the servers have been running 64bit for years now. But this is their first line of desktop chips.

{PMS}fishy said:

AMD tried that once. I guess you don't remember how bad that flopped.

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i do, some of us old timers.

Can we hear from the poster what he plans to do with this computer? That might make the decision easier.

Enablingwolf said:

Yeah the servers have been running 64bit for years now. But this is their first line of desktop chips.

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so what?

and as far as i knew, pressies have always had emt-64, its just recently, in the 6xx line that intel actually "turned it on".

{PMS}fishy said:

AMD tried that once. I guess you don't remember how bad that flopped.

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Not really. If there's one thing you'll notice, every time AMD releases a new architecture requiring a new chipset, they release their own chipsets also.

They do this just so that the chipsets, and therefor mainboards are available as soon as they release their new CPU series.

Think back to the release of the original (K7) Slot A Athlon CPU, they released the old Irongate chipset for this. In the end they released a second revision which sped it up a little but added no features. As additional manufacturers brought out chipsets with a higher feature level and better performance, AMD discontinued production and developemnt of these chipsets.

With the release of the K8 AMD had gained enough support from partners like VIA and nVidia that they already had chipsets available for launch. What AMD didn't have was chipsets available for their multi processor server and workstation class mainboards for their Opteron processors. As with the initial release of the K7 architecture, AMD released their own chipsets for these processors to ensure that a solution was available.

Personally I've always preferred the AMD chipsets as I've found them to be that little bit more stable than the nVidia solutions. However as they were just stop-gap measures until other maufacturers could take up the slack, they lacked features. Not just features, but as they effectively stopped chipset deveopment, performance also. Performance should no longer be as much of an issue as support of newer memory types is now the province of AMD's on die memory controller.

The thing to remember is that AMD don't have much by way of manufacturing capacity. They don't want to be tied down with making less profitable chips like chipsets rather than CPU's. It benefits them best to leave the chipsets to third parties like nVidia, VIA, ATI and unfortunately the likes of SiS and ALi.

I'm willing to bet that this past trend will continue with future AMD CPU's when new chipsets are needed. AMD will release their own chipsets until someone else can make them.

But you guys can make up your own mine. Thats just my 2 cents.....

Go HERE and read the review yourself.

But even if we disregard all these cases, Pentium Extreme Edition 840 still doesn’t make the desired impression after we have once seen what AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ is capable of. Intel’s dual-core solution cannot compete successfully with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ although they belong to the same price group. In other words, if we compare these two rivals side by side, Pentium Extreme Edition 840 will almost always fall behind.

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TekeTorvo said:

Go HERE and read the review yourself.

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Looks like the X2 almost trounces the Intel equivalent across the board.

It's the next generation Intel dual core solution we need to look out for as it's being designed from the ground up to be a dual core solution. The current solution from Intel was simply slapped together so they could say they had a dual core CPU too to please the OEM like Dell, HP etc etc.

For the most part, I believe this will be enough for Intel to retain most of their marketshare (Think of the Joe Sixpacks. My belief is that noone on at OC Forums fit's this category so remember that we're not the norm).

qwertyuiop said:

Can we hear from the poster what he plans to do with this computer? That might make the decision easier.

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He probably bolted because he originally asked about:::

I'm comparing the Intel P4 640 Prescott to the AMD Athlon64 3700+.

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And here we are talking about DC's.

TekeTorvo said:

And here we are talking about DC's.

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who is this "we" you speak of? you and mjw21a? as far as i can tell, your post (#35 of the thread) is the first to talk about dual core at all.

Aye, my apologies. I tend to be led off topic rather easily......

You need to re-read the first page. I counted 6 times, before I got halfway down the page. Then I stopped counting. I was just following the conversation.