s939 & Mobo - Save £400

[TeaLeaf]

Sufficient information about the various s939 CPUs and how they perform is now out there in the public domain and my interest is beginning to be peeked.  It looks like about £200 could provide a complete system upgrade to 64-bit and some tremendous performance.  

The original Athlon64 Newcastle cores are almost totally replaced now by the Winchester core Athlon64 CPUs based on the newer 90nm process.  AMD are pushing out some quality A64 silicon these days, particularly at the lower end of the Winchester s939 range which runs from the £110 Athlon64 3000+ (not to be confused with the Athlon64 3000 which is a Newcastle 130nm process).  Top of the A64 range (not Winchester) is the £570 FX-55.  The CPU that has peeked my interest is the Athlon64 3000+ which for a total of £200 can be coupled with a decent s939 motherboard (Asus or Epox appear to be the current overclocking favourites) and made to run at some humongous speeds.

Hexus have a good example here where they have taken an off the shelf Retail Athlon64 3000+ and overclocked it to 2.4GHz on the supplied AMD reference cooler!    That's the same speed as AMD's £490 2.4GHz Athlon64 4000+!!!!!  (remember 2.4GHz on an A64 is *way* faster than something like an Athlon XP at 2.4GHz).

But what about memory I hear you ask?  Ok, none of you asked, but I'll share the info anyway  That overclock was achieved with PC3200 memory - and an awful lot of people already have PC3200 or faster memory sitting in their current system.  If you are one of these lucky people then the total cost of the system upgrade could be just £200.  That's £400 less than buying the Athlon64 4000+ CPU with the new motherboard.

/me looks at the OCZ PC3200 currently sitting in my overclocked PC............ anyone want a slightly used JIUHB XP1700 and an NF7-S v2.0 motherboard?

TL.

[Barley]

I how have an Abit AV8 board which is the home to my little Athlon 64 3200+ 90mn CPU.

I've tried overclocking it on the reference HSF, but anything over 210fsb seems to make some of my games crash

I to am also using PC3200 memory, two identical sticks in dual channel mode.

Overall I would definately rate the Abit AV8 board highly.  Every single review/benchmark I've seen has had the Abit AV8 board coming out top, it's also Custom PC's motherboard of choice.  That is, assuming, you get the board with the 1.5 BIOS, otherwise your system won't boot with the new 90mn CPU's

[FatBob]

still waiting for the release of an nforce4 pci-e board. they are all over the place but no-ones got any stock!!. processor wise i think the 3500+ winchester is looking good value at under £200.

[suicidal_monkey]

how does an athlon 64 3000 compare to an athlon xp 3000. There's too many cpus about these days, I no longer know which ones are better/faster/more parallel/ what-have-you. Intel have their fair share of cpus with similar clock speeds / names but radically (or not?) different performance. And price doesn't always seem to follow the cpu tree as you'd expect...

Think I might wait another 6 months and see if the market makes sense to me by then

[Barley]

well I only upgraded because my Slot A motherboard broke a while ago, otherwise I'd have waited for a wee while yet.

[TeaLeaf]

Originally posted by suicidal_monkey@Dec 7 2004, 03:18 PM
how does an athlon 64 3000 compare to an athlon xp 3000. There's too many cpus about these days, I no longer know which ones are better/faster/more parallel/ what-have-you.

The XP3000 is a Barton based CPU, i.e. 32-bit and running a 333MHz FSB (Max 400MHz FSB) via the Northbridge on the motherboard.  

The Athlon64 is a 64-bit chip and:

• has an integrated (i.e. on the CPU) DDR DRAM memory controller instead of using a Northbridge on the motherboard.  The integrated controller is 128-bit (2 x 64-bit channels) and runs at full core speed, so the faster the processor, the faster the 'FSB'. This is estimated to reduce latency penalties by up to 25% and means your mobo  manufacturer does not need to make a fancy Northbridge chipset for you to rely upon.  
• has a larger L2 cache running at the same speed as the CPU.  A decent sized L2 chache allows for more frequently used pieces of data to be stored on-chip and the intelligent pre-fetching of data speeds up the processing of required data.
• has larger L2 Translation Look-Aside Buffers .  This is like Internet Explorer's 'History'.  If there has been a 'miss' in the cache then the CPU looks in the TLB to see if it has the equivalent of a 'shotcut url' for that required data. This speeds up the fetching of data the A64's TLB is twice as big as that in the previous generation of CPUs.
• has longer integer & floating point pipelines (now 12 & 17 respectively, increased from 10).  Longer pipelines help AMD scale a CPU in speed (MHz) terms, but extra stages also mean extra penalties for cache misses (the same criticism was levelled at Intel's increased 20 stage pipelines on the current P4s).  When the pipeline is re-used it has to be 'flushed' first.  More stages in a pipeline means longer to flush the pipeline and more latency.  To counterract this both AMD and Intel use forms of branch prediction to help minimise the misses and flushes.  Less stages are processed faster though, so multistage pipelines whilst allowing the CPU to be ramped up more easily to higher GHz, do not correct their cache misses quickly and suffer performance-wise when branch prediction fails.
• Silicon-On-Insulator Technology.  Essentially this means that AMD have inserted a layer of silicon dioxide between the transistors and the substrate. This means that no electrons can escape to the wafer below. This helps reduces the thermal output of the CPU (which is why an A64 runs way cooler than a P4) and you can run lower voltages as fewer electrons are 'wasted'.  This in turn makes the A64 more efficient than the current Barton in terms of it's ability to process instructions per clock cycle.

That's a quick summary of the biggest differences between the old XP3000 and the new Athlon64 3000+.  The bottom line is that the A64 kicks some serious Intel backside and is *the* dominant CPU in the market today by a long way.  It runs cooler, faster and is cheaper than anything that either the old XP range or Intel can throw at it.  What more do you want?

And there is no spoon.

TL.

[Barley]

Originally posted by TeaLeaf@Dec 7 2004, 06:30 PM
The bottom line is that the A64 kicks some serious Intel backside and is *the* dominant CPU in the market today by a long way. It runs cooler, faster and is cheaper than anything that either the old XP range or Intel can throw at it. What more do you want?

And there in no spoon.

TL.

[post=71061]Quoted post[/post]

[/b]

Couldn't have put it better myself

[suicidal_monkey]

well, that cleared that up Ta

Hopefully should be affordable round about my birthday next year...