Taking the AMD plunge

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cbcjr

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Jan 28, 2006
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Well, after building Intel systems for myself, family and clients for the last 10+ years, I think I'm going to take the plunge to AMD. It seems Intel's been getting their a** kicked all around over the last year on almost every benchmark. I have to admit -- I have avoided AMD partly because of the "possibility" of incompatibility, but it appears this is minimal. The performance and thermals have make me take a serious look, as well as a bump to dual core.

I'm looking at an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, 4800+, 2GB, Raptor 150 in an Antec P150 running WinXP Pro, on 24x7, no overclocking. Other than the common usage patterns, I'll also be using it for gaming, development and media management & creation, including some video conversion.

After a few of weeks getting it going (not in a bug hurry), and if all is OK, I'll finish it off with perhaps an ATI 1800XT (maybe a 1900) and a couple of large drives in RAID 0 (most likely 2 x WD 400GB).

With this in mind, I want to ask if anyone has a similar system and usage patterns, that include simultaneous usage of these applications or similar:

Developemnt: Delphi, MS compilers (VS 6 / VS 2005), CodeWarrior
General: Office, image programs, multiple IE instances
Media: TV recoding (typical 7 hours day using Sage Recorder), some video conversion / editing
Games: Halo, Quake 4, Far Cry

Has anyone experienced any incompatibilities with any of these apps using the hardware described above? Or any other noteworthy software incompatibilities?

Or for that matter, major AMD issues with any of the above hardware?

Comments appreciated.






C
 
AMD Incompatibilities - BULL SIHT'

2x400gb's in RAID0 - one drive dies, your gona loose 800gb worth of data, better idea - get a WD Raptor 74gb for windows, and get two larger hdds (400gb as you said) and do it in RAID1 (one drive dies you still have all your data) -MUCH safer (just protect it from virus's).

With that sort of budget, have you concidered SLI/CrossFire? and in a month or so the GeForce 7900 will be out if you have a while to wait or anything.

PSU - make sure you get a decent branded PSU to power the system sufficently and for years to come.

The Incompatibilities are a myth, AMDs will run just about anything faster then Intel's, aswell as running colder and more power efficent then P4's, Its Idiot Intel Fanboys that give AMD a bad name like that, infact its Intel that more Incompatible - There Itanium wont run with 64bit Windows.

Hope that helps you some.
 
Intel also has some competitively priced dual core processors as I'm sure you're aware, but as you alluded, they run a bit warmer....

As for RAID O....although 2 Raptors in RAID 0 should be quite fast, a few of the top of the line NF4 SLI mainboards have integrated RAID5 capabilities, sparing you the risk of a completely botched system and resultant lost data should one drive fail or glitch.

You mentioned adding a video card card later....; none of the top NF4 boards have any integrated video, so you will need some sort of PCI-e video card initially to do...anything

Power Supply...with dual core, RAID 0 or 5, and a high power video card, I'd be looking at 550-600watt quality power supplies. (Yes, maybe 100 watts of overkill, but better 100 watts to spare than 10 watts too few during system startup and peak load times...)
 
Well, after building Intel systems for myself, family and clients for the last 10+ years, I think I'm going to take the plunge to AMD. It seems Intel's been getting their a** kicked all around over the last year on almost every benchmark. I have to admit -- I have avoided AMD partly because of the "possibility" of incompatibility, but it appears this is minimal. The performance and thermals have make me take a serious look, as well as a bump to dual core.

I'm looking at an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, 4800+, 2GB, Raptor 150 in an Antec P150 running WinXP Pro, on 24x7, no overclocking. Other than the common usage patterns, I'll also be using it for gaming, development and media management & creation, including some video conversion.

After a few of weeks getting it going (not in a bug hurry), and if all is OK, I'll finish it off with perhaps an ATI 1800XT (maybe a 1900) and a couple of large drives in RAID 0 (most likely 2 x WD 400GB).

With this in mind, I want to ask if anyone has a similar system and usage patterns, that include simultaneous usage of these applications or similar:

Developemnt: Delphi, MS compilers (VS 6 / VS 2005), CodeWarrior
General: Office, image programs, multiple IE instances
Media: TV recoding (typical 7 hours day using Sage Recorder), some video conversion / editing
Games: Halo, Quake 4, Far Cry

Has anyone experienced any incompatibilities with any of these apps using the hardware described above? Or any other noteworthy software incompatibilities?

Or for that matter, major AMD issues with any of the above hardware?

Comments appreciated.






C
Click to expand...

No CPU are incompatible. Mostly screwed motherboard cause. What's good is that there is no "bad" motherboard on the market right now. Some are budget, lower performance, but are as stable and compatible than more expensive one. I've tested budget (ECS, Asrock,..) and higher (Asus Gigabyte,...) motherboard class and none of them give me trouble.

You have to understand that, when someone get budget component, it is because he/she has limited budget. And often the motherboard is coupled with a cheap PSU that will make the board/hdd/... to fail. People that get higher motherboard usually get better component too. Making the whole thing more reliable.

As for RAID, well, I've run with RAID since 2001, and still have to see one to fail. Yup, it is true that if one drive fail, the whole aray fail, but if you buy only one drive and it appear that it is the one that would fail, you'll loose anything anyway. Just make regular backup of the most important thing.

But.. I would rather have 2 array composed of 2 x 250 gigs instead of one with 2 x400. Just make sure your board has enough SATA ports in this case... I like Samsung HDD. They run cool, quiet and are fast. I have one 250 gigs in my system and plan on changing my 2 seagate for 2 other Samsung in a near future. My Seagate are RAIDed. Stripping.. 2 years without any failure or corruption.

I'm not a fan of Asus nforce4 motherboard, but some has success ith them. First, the chipset fan will make you probably hate this board. I know of someone that replaced it with a passive one from Zalman. But watch out for conflit with video card.. I use mostly motherboard with pasive cooling. Now running Asrock, plan on Asus A8R-MVP (ATI chipset) soon. Other than that, the Asus a8n32 has a heat pipe design too that eliminate the need for chipset fan. I would rather look at it if you want to get the nforce4 Asus serie.


Even if AMD run not as hot as Intel, they put out some heat too. Added with the heat from the HDD, the video card, voltage regulators,... there will still be some heat in your computer case. I have no experience with the Antec 150, but just make sure that there is good airflow aroung the HDD and video card. too, not only the processor. When dealing with heat, peoples look only at the CPU, forgetting other component.. which in some case, get hotter than the CPU.
 
I cannot speak from experience about compatibility with your professional software, but, I can speak from experience in gaming and general applications. I've never had any hardware incompatibilities with any game I've played on AMD or having multiple applications running. In fact I have yet to find an app that won't run on an AMD. I have a AMD 3200+ Winchester core, 2gb of ram, heh...sorry, rambling. Point is, even though my proc is a single core I usually have Half Life 2 running, several firefox windows, usually a couple chat windows, mmm...sometimes a couple other little programs. It handles it all very well.

With what you're wanting to do I DEFINITELY recommend a dual core AMD. You'd benefit from it in my opinion.

And DEFINITELY stick your windows install on the 150gb raptor. :) I have my OS on my 36gb raptor and it fairly well screams. If you run RAID 0, I'd highly encourage you once again to regularly back up your important data.

Edit: On one other note, the only windows install that I've ever had run extremely reliably 24x7 is Server 2003. Even Win XP Pro gets a little unstable after 30 days of 24x7 running. This has been tested on my home web/ftp/irc server.
 
AMD Incompatibilities - BULL SIHT'

2x400gb's in RAID0 - one drive dies, your gona loose 800gb worth of data, better idea - get a WD Raptor 74gb for windows, and get two larger hdds (400gb as you said) and do it in RAID1 (one drive dies you still have all your data) -MUCH safer (just protect it from virus's).

With that sort of budget, have you concidered SLI/CrossFire? and in a month or so the GeForce 7900 will be out if you have a while to wait or anything.

PSU - make sure you get a decent branded PSU to power the system sufficently and for years to come.

The Incompatibilities are a myth, AMDs will run just about anything faster then Intel's, aswell as running colder and more power efficent then P4's, Its Idiot Intel Fanboys that give AMD a bad name like that, infact its Intel that more Incompatible - There Itanium wont run with 64bit Windows.

Hope that helps you some.
Click to expand...


Apache: I have run 2 x 200 in RAID 0 for a couple of years now. Although you are right, I generally don't have anything that critical on that media drive I cannot live without. My system drive is a Raptor 74; need to upgrade to a bit larger; the new Raptor 150 will be perfect (just in time).

The motherboard I am planning is an SLI, but I don't plan to run it as such. It's just a great board, SLI or not. As for the power supply, the Antec comes with a big and juicy 430W Neo, but there have been some issues with this board. I'll have to swap it if trouble arises.

Power consumption is one of the key reason for the switch. My current in-room heater (P4 3.4Ghz) is pumping ALOT of heat out of the back.

I am finally at a point where I realize the error of my ways in thinking that AMD was a bit less compatible. I should have done it awhile ago. I'll be able to find out for myself. I don't expect major troubles.

Thanks for the comments.



C
 
Intel also has some competitively priced dual core processors as I'm sure you're aware, but as you alluded, they run a bit warmer....

As for RAID O....although 2 Raptors in RAID 0 should be quite fast, a few of the top of the line NF4 SLI mainboards have integrated RAID5 capabilities, sparing you the risk of a completely botched system and resultant lost data should one drive fail or glitch.

You mentioned adding a video card card later....; none of the top NF4 boards have any integrated video, so you will need some sort of PCI-e video card initially to do...anything

Power Supply...with dual core, RAID 0 or 5, and a high power video card, I'd be looking at 550-600watt quality power supplies. (Yes, maybe 100 watts of overkill, but better 100 watts to spare than 10 watts too few during system startup and peak load times...)
Click to expand...

Mdd:

They may be well priced, but when I upgrade, I almost always go for near max performance. And it seems that right now that is the 4800+ and FX-60. Value wise, FX-60 is not a good call for me. But 4800+ should provide what I am looking for.

For a system drive, I typically run just 1 fast drive and leave RAID 0 for a secondary drive for media (storage and editing), games, temporary work area, etc. If a non-catastrophic drive failure occurs, then you can potentially get off of it what later that your last backup. Although

I also do not touch integrated video -- need the good stuff for games. :)

Just to get the machine up, I'm planning on dropping in a old rusty PCI video card. Thanks.



C
 
The other thing you might want to look at is the 165 or 170 Opteron. They are 939 pin, but look at it like a slower fx60. Being dual core, they run just like the athlons, but have the fx lines in the coding on the chip. The best of both worlds.... and they will run on any 939 pin socket as long as the motherboard can take an fx chip. And concidering its a server proccessor, its designed to be running 24x7, which is something else you were wanting. I look at it as more bang for your buck..... thats just me though
 
No CPU are incompatible. Mostly screwed motherboard cause. What's good is that there is no "bad" motherboard on the market right now. Some are budget, lower performance, but are as stable and compatible than more expensive one. I've tested budget (ECS, Asrock,..) and higher (Asus Gigabyte,...) motherboard class and none of them give me trouble.

You have to understand that, when someone get budget component, it is because he/she has limited budget. And often the motherboard is coupled with a cheap PSU that will make the board/hdd/... to fail. People that get higher motherboard usually get better component too. Making the whole thing more reliable.

As for RAID, well, I've run with RAID since 2001, and still have to see one to fail. Yup, it is true that if one drive fail, the whole aray fail, but if you buy only one drive and it appear that it is the one that would fail, you'll loose anything anyway. Just make regular backup of the most important thing.

But.. I would rather have 2 array composed of 2 x 250 gigs instead of one with 2 x400. Just make sure your board has enough SATA ports in this case... I like Samsung HDD. They run cool, quiet and are fast. I have one 250 gigs in my system and plan on changing my 2 seagate for 2 other Samsung in a near future. My Seagate are RAIDed. Stripping.. 2 years without any failure or corruption.

I'm not a fan of Asus nforce4 motherboard, but some has success ith them. First, the chipset fan will make you probably hate this board. I know of someone that replaced it with a passive one from Zalman. But watch out for conflit with video card.. I use mostly motherboard with pasive cooling. Now running Asrock, plan on Asus A8R-MVP (ATI chipset) soon. Other than that, the Asus a8n32 has a heat pipe design too that eliminate the need for chipset fan. I would rather look at it if you want to get the nforce4 Asus serie.


Even if AMD run not as hot as Intel, they put out some heat too. Added with the heat from the HDD, the video card, voltage regulators,... there will still be some heat in your computer case. I have no experience with the Antec 150, but just make sure that there is good airflow aroung the HDD and video card. too, not only the processor. When dealing with heat, peoples look only at the CPU, forgetting other component.. which in some case, get hotter than the CPU.
Click to expand...

Thanks. My thoughts:

- I've also run RAID 0 for awhile; fortunately never had trouble or a failure
- The board I am looking at has a heatpipe instead of a chipset fan
- The one I'm after is the little brother to the A8N32-ALI, but still amazingly capable
- I admit, I have not worried that much about airflow before; guess I've been lucky; this time it will be different



C
 
I cannot speak from experience about compatibility with your professional software, but, I can speak from experience in gaming and general applications. I've never had any hardware incompatibilities with any game I've played on AMD or having multiple applications running. In fact I have yet to find an app that won't run on an AMD. I have a AMD 3200+ Winchester core, 2gb of ram, heh...sorry, rambling. Point is, even though my proc is a single core I usually have Half Life 2 running, several firefox windows, usually a couple chat windows, mmm...sometimes a couple other little programs. It handles it all very well.

With what you're wanting to do I DEFINITELY recommend a dual core AMD. You'd benefit from it in my opinion.

And DEFINITELY stick your windows install on the 150gb raptor. :) I have my OS on my 36gb raptor and it fairly well screams. If you run RAID 0, I'd highly encourage you once again to regularly back up your important data.

Edit: On one other note, the only windows install that I've ever had run extremely reliably 24x7 is Server 2003. Even Win XP Pro gets a little unstable after 30 days of 24x7 running. This has been tested on my home web/ftp/irc server.
Click to expand...

Thanks. That's that feedback I'm looking for. Sounds good. Like you, I normally have a whole slew of stuff I all working on at the same time. And, when its time for my beloved Halo, I leave every bit of it there and fire that up to. Fortunately, my P4 3.4 has done a fairly good job to date, but the prospect of a fix for my current stability problems, a performance increase, and less power usage and heat generation makes it seem like a no brainer.

Yep, system will be on C (Raptor 150), and media and other stuff on D: (RAID).

If you take real care of your Windows XP installation by only installing trusted applications and applcations that you intend to use, and making sure that you apply regular updates and have AV, anti-spyware and a strong firewall (preferable hardware), then you can get a WinXP installation to be stable for much much longer than 30 days. My current rig is a P4 with WinXP, and up until about 2 weeks ago, it had been rock solid for 1.25 years (I mean rock). And I think it had been up for as much as 2.5 months sometimes without a reboot.

If at all possible, you should have a lower powered machine right next to your main system to test applications on for general usability. Although its not a real world test against your main system, you might find some issue that makes you decide that you don't want it after all. Chucking it at that point brings good news: it never had a chance to touch your main system. Of course, that test box should be set up with True Image or your favorite imaging utility to reflash it back to a known good state if need be.


C
 
cbcjr, i actually have 2x80gb seagates in RAID0, im a little paranoid but i actually aggree with you on reliability - anyhow if one drive dies you loose everything, but the same as if you had a single drive (expect raid0 you would have a spare drive to later work with LOL another upside).

I was just checkin cause iv seen a few people go with the hype of "twice as fast and big ill get that and store everything on it" and something goes wrong and all is lost.
 
AMD and Intel have swapped the top spot for performance many times over the years. In the past Intel was definately more solid but this has changed. AMD has come a long way, in part due to much better motherboards. The nForce motherboard chipset from nVidia has as much to do with AMD's recent sucess as anything AMD has done with their CPUs. Anyway I've got 2 AMD systems and 2 Intel systems and all are stable with the programs I run.

I'd be perfectly comfortable making a purchase from either company at the moment.
 
Found some links to development benchmarks for you:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2249&p=12

power consumption is on the next page

and

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2397&p=20

They are older articles but it might help you.
Click to expand...

Wow! Those articles are quite helpful! More icing on the inevitable AMD cake (with 4800 candles). Thanks.



C

I'd have posted gaming links but we all know AMD kicks ass in them so its not necessary. Glad to help.

EDIT: I'd have posted Tom links but I doubt they do Development test and I haven't read anything from Toms in months. BRING BACK TOM.
 
The other thing you might want to look at is the 165 or 170 Opteron. They are 939 pin, but look at it like a slower fx60. Being dual core, they run just like the athlons, but have the fx lines in the coding on the chip. The best of both worlds.... and they will run on any 939 pin socket as long as the motherboard can take an fx chip. And concidering its a server proccessor, its designed to be running 24x7, which is something else you were wanting. I look at it as more bang for your buck..... thats just me though
Click to expand...

Thanks Fox for the idea. Just read a few articles on Opteron. Not a bad idea. I was hoping to find an Opteron closer to the output of the 4800, but they are not here yet. They do come close however. Given this, I am probably still after a 4800.

Oh - as for 24/7 continuous of the CPU. Except for about 2 periods totaling about 3 weeks, my P4 3.4 has been on (fully on - no stanby, no nothing) for perhaps 1.5 years. No troubles.

I'd like to beleive that any modern CPU can accomplish this, but would like any feedback from others on this if this is not the case.

Actually I do a machine upgrade perhaps every 10 to 16 months, making my current system the new test machine and giving the current test machine to a relative or someone who needs a computer.



C
 
I have to admit -- I have avoided AMD partly because of the "possibility" of incompatibility,
Click to expand...

This is so "90's"...

Shhh thats why Intel pays for all the adds you see on TV. Let the sheep buy it. Seriously HP makes some darn nice AMD systems but all the HP commercials are Intel (I wonder whose paying for that) Can anyone say Bahh?
 
cbcjr, i actually have 2x80gb seagates in RAID0, im a little paranoid but i actually aggree with you on reliability - anyhow if one drive dies you loose everything, but the same as if you had a single drive (expect raid0 you would have a spare drive to later work with LOL another upside).

I was just checkin cause iv seen a few people go with the hype of "twice as fast and big ill get that and store everything on it" and something goes wrong and all is lost.
Click to expand...

With RAID 0 and no backup, if you cannot duplicate the array in another machine as a secondary machine, you do lose everything. But with a single system drive and no backup, a non-catestrophic drive problem like an unbootable OS provides the option of dropping it into another machine and possibly recovering the fiiles.




C
 
AMD and Intel have swapped the top spot for performance many times over the years. In the past Intel was definately more solid but this has changed. AMD has come a long way, in part due to much better motherboards. The nForce motherboard chipset from nVidia has as much to do with AMD's recent sucess as anything AMD has done with their CPUs. Anyway I've got 2 AMD systems and 2 Intel systems and all are stable with the programs I run.

I'd be perfectly comfortable making a purchase from either company at the moment.
Click to expand...

Thanks Lake. Thats quite helpful.

I admit, given my very good experience with Intel systems (and especially my last build being stable so long), I have a favorable view of the Intel world. I now want to explore and duplicate this for AMD.

I at first was looking at the Asus A8V Deluxe (VIA chipset) so that I could continue to use my ATI AIW X800XT I purchased about 6 months ago. This board is 939 with AGP and 5 PCI slots. But, I think I'm going to go with the more modern board and delve into the newer PCIExpress technology now and get a new video card. I'll move that X800 into my test machine, which will now allow it to be able to test games also, rather than just non-gaming software.

In your opinion, is nForce that much better than the other AMD chipsets?



C
 
I have to admit -- I have avoided AMD partly because of the "possibility" of incompatibility,
Click to expand...

This is so "90's"...

I would agree here. I guess I've been so busy building computers and using them, I never stopped to consider AMD. But now its post 90's. :lol:



C
 
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