NefCanuck,Jul 27 2005, 07:51 PM Wrote:Here's my two cents, take it for exactly what its worth ;)
I prefer Intel simply because in all my years I've never had an issue regarding heat/power consumption issues when using Intel and their MB's.
Too often AMD gets their speed at the expense of those two issues (heat/power) and I've been called in to baby AMD systems that skated that wedge and fell off. I mean AMD on their own practically invented the extra cooling gear craze as people cranked their CPU's to insane levels to get that last bit of CPU processing speed they could so they could best Intel. Raw speed is nice & all, but I want a system that I can depend on to boot up when I hit the big button.
As to the video card issue, I fell off ATI's bandwagon when they couldn't release a stable video card driver to save their lives :ph34r: nVidia cards have gotten power hungry but that seems to be the price of admission for high end graphics these days :rolleyes:
As to HD's I'm running WD currently no issues, ran Seagate years ago no issues, just outgrew that drive. Maxtor is sketchy, you either get a drive that lives for ever or it starts rattling like BB's in a tin can after a few years.
NefCanuck
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I respect you immensely, so I'll address your points as non-fanboyish as possible:
AMD heat - 4 years ago, the tables were indeed reversed. AMD made heat and was struggling to keep up. Intel had processors that ran fairly cool and did a fair amount of work for the clock speed. AMD's problem was the 180nm process was killing them, they were dissipating an UNGODLY amount of heat due to the low overall die surface area and the fact the T'bird and Palomino were pushing 1.85-1.9 volts through the core. Add in the fact that most of the best coolers of the day were lightweight aluminum with unfinished bases and you had a recipe for 55C+ idle temperatures. Overclocking made it quite worse, obviously. Heck, rewind a year before that and the Tualatin core P-III was THE processor to own. Even I wanted one.
Nowadays, it's the complete inverse of the above story. It started not long after the Palomino 180nm chips, with the 130nm Thoroughbred Rev A and B chips. The B cores especially scaled nicely on .2 less voltage than their Palomino cousins, and did it on a core process shrink while dissipating less heat (130nm). Then the Barton came along with 512K L2 cache, same core voltage, and increased multipliers (which allows for a variety of RAM options, from value to performance). As the Barton matured, the Athlon 64 desktop chips appeared, and the game was over for Intel. Integrated memory controllers meant lower memory access latencies, which means overall computer responsiveness improved dramatically and memory bandwidth was closer to the theoretical limit of the chips. Surprisingly the L1 cache sizes didn't change (twin 64K for data and instruction) but they didn't need to because of the overall efficiency increase of the K8 architecture. The chip flat out does more per clock cycle, commonly referred to as IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle).
The Pentium's fall from grace has been because of two main reasons - a failed roadmap relating to clockspeed, and outdated architecture. The P-III 1.26GHz Tualatin was the fastest processor of its day. It could do far more work than the newly introduced P4 1.3-1.6GHz Willamette core processors. Yet, because AMD was "keeping up" in the clockspeed and horsepower wars thus far Intel felt they needed an edge. The Netburst architecture was introduced and deviated from several years of really good processor development. It introduced higher clock speeds (GHz) at the expense of work done per cycle. This is because the pipeline within the processor itself was over two times "longer" than its predecessor. It's easier for the processor to "stall" if it runs out of work, which contributes to its lower efficiency.
How do you fix that inadequacy? Write specialized instruction sets that cater to the Pentium's special microcode and crank up the clock speed to fill the pipeline. That worked for a couple of years with the Northwood processors. They were fairly fast, but they excelled at video encoding simply because all encoding programmers loved the SSE/SSE2 instruction set as the specialized instructions allowed for more work to be done "on-die" and then transferred out to memory. There was also one more ace up Intel's sleeve, and it's ultimately something they wish most tech-savvy people would just ignore. It's called Hyper-Threading and it's their biggest folly to-date. Hyper-Threading exists in every single Northwood processor ever made, but was only enabled in about 45% of them. Intel to this day either denies it or claims that the tech wouldn't help the lower-clocked processors, depending on which PR rep you talk to. Basically over half of the world's Northwood P4 users were cheated out of 30% of their chip's performance, with no apology from Intel or rationalization.
In a nutshell, Intel out-accelerated themselves and caused more grief by running their processors "too fast". The die was too small to adequately dissipate all the heat as efficiently as they would have liked, and their heat problems increased. To this day, every single Intel P4 running idles and runs hotter than its competing AMD rival by up to and exceeding 20C. Check the thermal dissipation page from the latest Tech Report article, and then cross-reference with any Tech site of your choosing.
The only smart path left is the Intel P6 project, which is the desktop equivalent of the Pentium-M processor. It is proven to be basically on-par with the AMD64 single-core series of processors as far as raw horsepower, and it doesn't need insane clock speeds or Hyper-Threading to accomplish that. Incredible.
ATI's drivers have been great over the last year or so... and while Nvidia's drivers are never really bad... they've been caught being "overly optimized" more than once in the last 1 1/2 years in an attempt to distance themselves from ATI inthe framerate wars. I'll stick with ATI.
I've got a plethora of Maxtors around the house, and the only drive to go south for me in the last 2 years was a WD. All three big names are good by me.