AMD 3200 vrs Pentium 4 2.8 Prescott

Havelock

Right, I've the choice to build my new system around either without the price difference bigging too much of a pain.

So in your experiacne and opions (even biases) what advice would you give me.

Thanks

RicardoSmith

Prescotts aren't as good an older Northwood 4's. Don't bother with them.
Only get a XP class CPU if money is tight. The P4's and AMD64's are better.
The AMD64's are better value for money than the P4's/
The AMD64's are as quick if not quicker than P4's in gaming.
P4's are quicker in encoding and other tasks.
The Intel chipset are overall less troublesome if reliability is a priority.

If money is a real issue get a 3200xp.

For a machine with gaming as the no1 priority I'd AMD64, but only in a month or so when the new socket is out. I wouldn't buy one just yet.

For a machine with where the priority is business, video or music I'd go P4. Fast at gaming too.

neokenzo

When the new A64 socket comes out, it would probably be expensive. So depends on how much you want to spend on your cpu and mobo. If you want to go with the 754 socket, I'll probably wait for the nforce250 which will come out in a month's time and it has a pci/agp lock. Which means you can overclock it a lot more.

Woden

between the choice of a amd 3200+ xp and a 2.8 i'd go with a 2.8ghz pentium and overclock the crap out of it. but as suggested i'd get the northwood core instead of the prescott.

put it in the high end asus or abit motherboard offering and you'll be away.

if you wanted to save some money you could go down the socket A route and pick up one of the mobile chips that require low voltage and you'll get a very good overclock out of that prob from about 1.8ghz to 2.4ghz or so.

data

jesus_thats_gre

http://legitreviews.com/reviews/prescottoc/

This review of the Prescott on this site seems to be very positive!

Azza

Roughly performance wise would be hope I would rate the performance of the current chips not looking at the high priced P4 Extreme Editions or AMD 64 FX series

On 32bit OS at stock speed I would rate the Athlon 64 3400 which has a clock speed of 2.2 Ghz superior to standard 3.2 Ghz P4 in gaming performance by a moderate margin. Athlon 64 loses ground in digital encoding but its not as much as the P4 loses gaming peformance. But really there neck and neck. AMD 64 is more expensive.

The Amd 64 3200 2.0 ghzwould follow behind that then 3.0Ghz p4 very closely followed by AMD 64 3000 1.8 ghz and a 2.8 P4.

I would not touch the precotts which run very hot and not up to the northwood speeds yet. The potentional for overclocking is limited in the AMD 64 usually to about 0.1 while you can better overclock P4. Though remember point 0.1 in amd 64 terms is better than point 0.1 P4 terms. Main reason for limited overclocking of the AMD 64 is the early model AMD 64 (i.e 3000, 3200, 3400) all use old AMD XP barton core which really peaks at 2.2Ghz. Also current generation motherboards using nforce 150 chipset are poor for overclocking but the new nforce 250 will improve situation however I believe the socket changes for those motherboards so the older amd 64 won't be usable on them unless they release specific nforce 250 motherboards for them (not sure if they will).

P4 seem to overclock better but a friend of mine has a standard p4 3.2 and was disappointed with overclocking performance and consider downgrading his cpu to 2.8 which is suppose to better at overclocking. He posted on boards.ie about his problems. He goes by name of Bloodbath.....perhaps he may post a comment if he sees this thread.

Final thing to note about AMD 64 is although the OS like longhorn and Windows xp 64 arent out yet (XP 64 in summer) if you upgrade your os to one of them your looking at about 15-20% performance boast which starting for myself at about 2.3 Ghz will hopefully have a machine comparable to P4 3.6-3.7. Although it may be more or less designers are hoping for 20% improvement in windows which is comparble to current LINUX 64 bit distrabutions. Its all dependent on drivers being released for it. Also some games will be 64 bit like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Far Cry & America's Army which will run better than standard 32 bit versions.

While many say AMD 64 is a wate of time at moment it does the job just as good as intel chips now and will improve with the OS. My 2 cents as a big AMD 64 fan.

Havelock

Money is no object for this project and I as a rule don't over clock.

Looks like I'll go for the AMD 64, when are those 250 boards out?

neokenzo

According to Komplett, the last time I check they were selling the MSI beginning of June. MSI is one of earliest to announce a 250 board. I'm waiting for the rest of them to come out and reviewed before I change my mobo.

Azza

Neokenzo do you know if these new nforce 250 motherboards are gonna support the current AMD 64 socket. I hear that the 3700 and the 4000 are different sockets to what we have got and I thought I read somewhere that the new nforce 250 motherboards where designed for those new chips.

Havelock if money is no Object get the FX 53 or wait till the 55 but I hear they are changing socket as well might want to watch out for this if you go for AMD 64.

neokenzo

Originally posted by Azza
Neokenzo do you know if these new nforce 250 motherboards are gonna support the current AMD 64 socket

These new nforce3 boards supports the current 64 socket. All the reviews so far from MSI, Asus, Epox and Chaintech are all for socket 754. Only Abit I think is doing the nforce3 for the new socket. Besides the new chips are not out yet.

Havelock

So which are the best mother boards?

neokenzo

Well not all of the mobo's are out there yet for review. I've only read review from Epox and MSI but only MSI has been widely reviewed. I think when all of the manufacturers have release their nforce3 mobo, we can then compare which one is better.

[Edit] Review of the MSI nforce3 mobo on Anandtech [/Edit]

Azza

Any sign of AMD 64 motherboards support dual channel memory and if there is some already which ones?

Col_Loki

Any sign of AMD 64 motherboards support dual channel memory and if there is some already which ones?

Socket 939 will support dual channel (out pretty soon), AFAIK the socket 754 will always be single channel.

unkel

Originally posted by Havelock
Money is no object for this project and I as a rule don't over clock.

Well then I think we're all agreed - for a change

Forget about the Athlon XP and the Pentium 4, but get the Athlon 64 so...

jesus_thats_gre

Originally posted by jesus_thats_gre
http://legitreviews.com/reviews/prescottoc/

This review of the Prescott on this site seems to be very positive!

Did anyone read this, and whats your opinion on it?

Woden

yeah i looked over it. it basically says it overclocks well which is fair enough but there was no comparisions. what you'd want is to look at a couple of benchmarks of equivalent overclocked northwoods and prescotts at say 3.4, 3.6, 3.8 and 4.0ghz.

then see where it is the prescott comes into its own as its expected it too, see if or when it over takes the northwood performance wise.

data

jesus_thats_gre

Originally posted by Dataisgod
yeah i looked over it. it basically says it overclocks well which is fair enough but there was no comparisions. what you'd want is to look at a couple of benchmarks of equivalent overclocked northwoods and prescotts at say 3.4, 3.6, 3.8 and 4.0ghz.

then see where it is the prescott comes into its own as its expected it too, see if or when it over takes the northwood performance wise.

Yeah suppose so... Very hard to find links to these though..