AMD64 or P4-E?

[Lemma]

My desktop died today and I will have to buy (make maby is more correct, as I will reuse a few parts - like the hdd). Now, I use it to compile alot (as I run gentoo on the workstation and my laptop and I intend to use distcc to help speed things up for the laptop) and also converting, DVD to DivX and wav to ogg mainly; everything else is fast enough. I am now wondering if an AMD64 is a better choice than an plain "old" P4(E); according to tomshardware the AMD64 does not seem to a very good choice but there are other sites out there that is showing opposite results when comparing those two (at different Hz). I am thinking mainly of either AMD64 3000+ or P4(E)@3000. What do you people say?
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Always make it as simple as possible, but no simpler
/Einstein

[Little Nemo]

I have an Athlon 64 system which I'm happy with, so that's what I'd recommend. The most convincing argument for me would be its Cool and Quiet technology which - surprise! - keeps the system cool and quiet indeed

If you're doing a lot of multimedia stuff, though, I'd have to recommend against a 64-bit Gentoo installation (a dual-boot system would be another option). Many of the apps involved use Assembler, and few currently include AMD64 code. Transcoding on the Athlon 64 is therefore slower in 64-bit than it is in 32-bit. (A 64-bit installation with compatibility libraries and 32-bit apps would be another option to circumvent this problem, but it might be tricky to set up.)

[ewan.paton]

the amd is a much better chip for most apps, any benchamrks are usualy windows 32bit vs the pentium, i agree that the prescot may be better at certain apps as it has sse3 but all p4s run far to hot and have slower memory interfaces and are on a platforme that has beeb cancelled, the socket 939 may be out for the amd but it will be at least a year till they think about not producing chips for cuurrent boards giving you a much better upgrade path
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Giay tay nam | Giay nam cao cap | Giay luoi

[Lemma]

I do not intend to upgrade any time soon, heck, I didn't intend to upgrade at all (before I was forced to rethink ), so being able to do that is not very important. If now the AMD64 is the way to go (as you two seem to think, sure the P4-E has SSE3 speaking for it but if that's all, it is not much ), the next question that arise is if there are anything in particular that I shall avoide or get in terms of chip, buses (I have an parallell ATA-HDD that I intend to reuse). Shall I get a motherboard with a parallell and a seriell interface or is that a bad idea for some reason, built-in network, any bad/good brands (i have a 10/100 NIC from com3 working now and I may put it in if I need to) and so on. Do you have any ideas as to what is working and what is not? I will be searching this site and google a lot, but I may (will, most likely ) miss a lot, so any help will be appreciated!

Little-Nemo, what are you running and do you have any problem with any part of it in terms of compability? I am running gnome 2.6 (me), kde 3.2 (girlfriend) on kernel 2.6.x (had 2.6.4-gentoo when it died).

I am not looking for an über-computer (even if it would be nice ), but a stable and fast thing I can rely on...
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Always make it as simple as possible, but no simpler
/Einstein

[Jake]

The Athlon64 is awesome for compiling code. There's a FreeBSD benchmark at http://www.thejemreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=117&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0, and a Quake 3 source compilation at http://anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=2002&p=10. Notice that the Athlon64 3000 beats the P4 3400 EE in the Quake 3 compile.

[srs5694]

One extra comment: Most of the benchmarks you see on the Web are for Athlon 64s running 32-bit versions of Windows. As a Linux user, you have the advantage that you can run a 64-bit version of Linux (presumably Gentoo, as you're posting here ). That'll give you an extra speed boost. In a few 32- vs. 64-bit benchmarks I've run, the boost is in the 10-30% range for CPU-intensive programs (gzip, oggenc, etc.), and usually around 15%. That means that an Athlon 64 3000+ is really more like a 3.4GHz Pentium 4.

As to good hardware, there are lots of discussions of that in this forum and in the AMD64 forum. A lot of people seem to like the ASUS and MSI motherboards, but basically anything with more than a couple of users has both adherents and detractors. FWIW, I'm using an MSI K8T Neo-FSR with an Athlon 64 3000+. Overall, it seems pretty good, although I have had a couple of mysterious system hangs. Those have been rare enough that I've not been able to track them down properly, although I suspect either a problem with the ATA driver for the board's SATA controller or heat issues (the hangs occurred during a heat wave a couple of weeks ago, and the room temperature got up to about 80 Fahrenheit). If you intend to use SATA, I'd recommend avoiding anything with the SiS 964/755 chipset, though; that's got very new SATA drivers, that aren't even in the standard kernel yet. Both the nVidia nForce3 150 and the VIA K8T800/VT8237 seem to be fairly well supported, although audio is still not quite perfect, at least for the VIA. There's a new nVidia nForce3 variant (250 or 350, I think; I don't recall offhand) with some extra features, but I don't know if it's actually available in any production boards yet, or if it'd require new Linux drivers.

[Lemma]

Ok, thanks, I think I have a fairly good view over the subject now (and I will go the AMD64 way ). I'll do the rest of my postings in the AMD64 forum(s), thanks again - this is what makes gentoo so great (in part at least), the friendly crowd!
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Always make it as simple as possible, but no simpler
/Einstein

[Little Nemo]