Is the X2 truly that bad?

[photographer]

Still waiting.

 

[Twisted_Sister]

someone posted earlier about advertising budgets, i have an uncle who still wont buy amd because someone told him that they are not 100 percent compatible. That intel inside thing canscare off the uniformed.

Marketing is a fundamental business function... don't blame Intel for spending billions on branding... just good business.

 

[Twisted_Sister]

On the cheap side, Intel is the path for me. I can go e4300 after April 22 then upgrade to Quad after the Q3 price cuts!!!

I doubt a quad AMD desktop solution is going to compete with a $266 Quad 6600 in the next 9-12 months.

 

[photographer]

Marketing is a fundamental business function... don't blame Intel for spending billions on branding... just good business.

Hmmm, don't blame them for branding but I do blame them for their exclusionary business tactics.

 

[photographer]

On the cheap side, Intel is the path for me. I can go e4300 after April 22 then upgrade to Quad after the Q3 price cuts!!!

I doubt a quad AMD desktop solution is going to compete with a $266 Quad 6600 in the next 9-12 months.

Actually "on the cheap side" I just bought an AMD 4600+ for $118. If anyone really needs a quad core proc then they'd be plum silly to buy before AMD intros their Barcelona.

 

[m25]

On the cheap side, Intel is the path for me. I can go e4300 after April 22 then upgrade to Quad after the Q3 price cuts!!!

I doubt a quad AMD desktop solution is going to compete with a $266 Quad 6600 in the next 9-12 months.

1-We'll have to see if it will really be priced like that
2-AMD is already going to sell it's top dual cores for $250 or less so I'd not see anything strange in a $400 2.1GHz Barcelona quad which (if AMD's claims are true) should perform at least like a 2.7GHa Kentsfield. And that would be a lot of competition.

 

[photographer]

<RANT>

Ya know this is probably going to sound silly to some but I wish just every now and then manufacturers would produce a motherboard with :

A) No sound card
B) No NIC
C) No integrated video
D) No Firewire
E) No SLI/Crossfire
F) No parallel and serial ports
G) No floppy or IDE connections
H) No anything else !

Jeez Louise ! I get so tired of paying for what is essentially cheap hardware and/or yesterdays technology (being kind here) I could just screem ! Does anyone outside of gamers get any benefit from SLI/Crossfire ? How many Firewire devices have you owned and used in the past 10 years ? Integrated video is the exact opposite of SLI/Crossfire and should be left for mail stations and/or network terminals. HD audio brings a new level of improvements to onboard sound but I'd be perfectly willing to shave $15 off the price of the motherboard and buy a good M-Audio card which I already have anyway.

</RANT>

 

[rodney_ws]

No, no it's not. There's your honest, simple answer.

My X2-4400 is nearing 2 years old... has run almost its entire life at 2.6 GHz (up from 2.2 stock) and honestly I'm not sure if it's ever BSOD'd on me. However, if I were in the market today for a PC, I would not be considering it over a C2D. All of these die-hard AMD fanatics... I wish one would just buy my rig and I'd move up to a C2D system.

 

[photographer]

No, no it's not. There's your honest, simple answer.

My X2-4400 is nearing 2 years old... has run almost its entire life at 2.6 GHz (up from 2.2 stock) and honestly I'm not sure if it's ever BSOD'd on me. However, if I were in the market today for a PC, I would not be considering it over a C2D. All of these die-hard AMD fanatics... I wish one would just buy my rig and I'd move up to a C2D system.

Well now ya tell me !

 

[MU_Engineer]

I can identify with onboard audio not being the greatest and wanting to use a discrete solution. However, the rest of your rant is not very good. Many newer motherboards like my abit KN8-SLi already lack serial and parallel ports. If you don't want the ports, get a board that lacks them. Ditto with integrated video and SLi/CF. SLi/CF is not that expensive and there are chipsets that don't support it (NF Ultra series and Intel 945/965.) Running two GPUs SLi or CF is usually dumb, but the boards themselves are great. The advantage of the SLi boards are that they have two high-bandwidth PCIe slots, either as 2 x8 signal/x16 slots or 2 x16 signal and slots as opposed to the non-SLi/CF boards having one PCie x16 and one or two PCIe x1 slots. I run my single GPU in one slot and a PCIe x4 SATA disk controller in another. Very few motherboards have a PCIe x16 slot and a PCIe x4 slot, or they put one lane to the x4 slot, which will bottleneck any SATA card with 4 or more drives attached.

I can take or leave FireWire as I've never used it either. Intel decided to drop PATA support from the 965 chipset, so it would be possible to get an IDE-less 965 board. However, most optical drives are PATA and judging from the feedback here, lots and lots of people use it. Floppies are outdated except to flash the BIOS with. If the vendors would ship CD ISO images instead of floppy disk images to flash the BIOS with, then the floppy could die. Otherwise, you need a floppy to flash the BIOS. There are some Windows-based utilities to flash the BIOS with, but I neither trust those utilities nor run Windows, so I put a floppy in my box just to flash the BIOS (it has a USB card reader, too.) On-board NICs are generally quite good as they are gigabit and connected to the chipset via PCI Express. That is much better than 99% of discrete NICs out there, half of which are 10/100 and not gigabit and almost all of which run on the legacy PCI bus instead of PCIe.

I suppose you don't include SATA and USB controllers, fan headers, and PCI slots in your "everything else" category? USB and SATA can be handled by discrete cards and generally SATA on a discrete card is better than motherboard SATA as the motherboard SATA controllers bottleneck if you run a RAID on them while discrete cards don't. Only the ICH8 (Intel 965) USB controller can throughput full bandwidth to two I/O-hogging devices on two different controllers- the rest seem to share bandwidth among all devices on all controllers. Discrete USB controller cards don't seem to have this same problem, else you could just plop in another card and it will be solved. PCI is also at least as legacy as PATA is and yet you don't call for its removal either. Odd.

I personally don't mind having some "extra" stuff on my board as there are not nearly enough slots to add in all of the discrete cards to handle everything that's integrated into a motherboard today. It's also a ton cheaper to put it on the board than on discrete cards. Also, if you don't want to use an integrated part, then you're free to use discrete cards for that function. Thus I really don't see much of the trouble you are.

 

[m25]

No, no it's not. There's your honest, simple answer.

My X2-4400 is nearing 2 years old... has run almost its entire life at 2.6 GHz (up from 2.2 stock) and honestly I'm not sure if it's ever BSOD'd on me. However, if I were in the market today for a PC, I would not be considering it over a C2D. All of these die-hard AMD fanatics... I wish one would just buy my rig and I'd move up to a C2D system.

...you'd better wait for a Penryn or Barcelona quad; time is moving so fast nowadays that you've got to get brand new technology to enjoy it for only few months

 

[martyjs]

Whoops sent it twice. 😳

 

[martyjs]

No not the prices I have 5200+ is cheaper than the E6400 and the 5400+ is just above it. 5200+ is a least equal in performance if not better, and the MOBO with more features than the Intel is cheaper by about $50

 

[martyjs]

Yea and Did you here what happen in New Zealand, A company who was trying to do just that.

Marketing is a fundamental business function... don't blame Intel for spending billions on branding... just good business.

Telling every one that there Juice had 5x more vitamin C than orange Juice. "Just good marketing you say" Couple of school girls doing a science experiment proved it had almost no vitamin C.
Company has been taken to court and has lost.

In Australia at the moment McDonalds is running adds saying their food is good for you! 8O "Just marketing you say", while our kids get fatter and unhealthier by the day. (Not mine I might say)

Never under estimate the power of human stupidity!

People are being conned all the time by "Just Marketing"

 

[chungdokwan]

the thing that bugs me is the "is AMD going to fold" type threads Intel was on top for years then AMD now Intel again, I really liked AMD socket A processors back in the day and the FX series were great.

Now Intel has some great chips doesn't mean thats the only option.

anyway thats my rant for the day have a good weekend all.

 

[photographer]

Just built my new-ish AMD rig using the following :

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+
MSI K9A Platinum motherboard
2GB Super Talent DDR-II 800 (now running 4-4-4-8 ;>)
Cooler Master Hyper TX CPU HSF

System board has no fans and I'm using an ATI X600 which also has no fan. Fortron Source Group 350W PSU, a Lite-On DVD/RW and a M-Audio 2496 sound card round it out. This system satisfies my criteria which is

1) Cool
2) Quiet
3) Fast
4) Inexpensive

Total out of pocket is right at $500.

 

[chiefwonk]

WHat are you kidding me? is a better performer on pentium d's and take a look at P4 that is truly bad...

 

[neocristi]

C2D is the winner now, as it should. We should all admit it.

When AMD was king with Athlon 64 (Remember FX57 days?) and Athlon64 X2, Intel was criticized very badly from all directions and Intel fans were laugh at. In 2005 for example Intel had nothing to say in the desktop CPU market cause Netburst was crap.... still is, and people still buy it

It might be the time (as always happens) that AMD will take the performance crown again this year. It's the natural evolution in the chip business.

As for me... My over clocked Athlon64 serves me well since 2005. I noticed in fact that the HDD is the bottleneck in my system, then the lousy video board Probably the next upgrade will be a better video board and a bigger faster HDD (maybe a raid).

So... the cpu's are fine these days, the other components are lousy. HDD's, mainly, then the Operating System... i think is loading lots of crap by default that we don't use.

C2D is better these days... so what? Still won't make you a much better system without other premium components (and these other components make the difference, trust me).

 

[photographer]

C2D is better these days... so what? Still won't make you a much better system without other premium components (and these other components make the difference, trust me).

I completely agree. I think we've hit the top of the bell curve regarding CPU performance while the overall system performance is still anchored in the 90's. Take optical drive performance for instance. Even the fastest drives are dreadfully slow in both data transfer and seek rates. Hard drives have improved significantly however they're still another anchor in overall system performance from boot time to system shutdown.