Athlon 64 3400+ Motherboard...

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Athlon 64 3400+ Motherboard...

Postby Akashio » Wed Apr 13, 2005 12:15 am

Does anyone know of any Socket 754-pin Motherboards capable of carrying an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ that has potential for future upgrades.

I found Asus K8V SE Deluxe--tell me what you think:
http://www.computerhq.com/ASUS_K8V-SE_D ... 47983.html

How do I know if a motherboard has dual-channel DDR capabilities? BTW, isn't twin ddr (2 x 1024MB) faster than a 2048MB stick by itself?
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Re: Athlon 64 3400+ Motherboard...

Postby Scintilla » Wed Apr 13, 2005 1:39 am

Akashio wrote:Does anyone know of any Socket 754-pin Motherboards capable of carrying an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ that has potential for future upgrades.

Last I checked, none of the 754s had much potential for future upgrades, because AMD's pushing Socket 939 -- all the CPUs they have planned for 754 for the future are Semprons.

Unless you're talking about other upgrades. But it's still something to consider.
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Postby Akashio » Wed Apr 13, 2005 3:13 am

so freakin expensive tho... Do you think it's worth it?
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Postby Scintilla » Wed Apr 13, 2005 11:11 am

I do not feel qualified to give a judgment on that, as I've never used an A64 machine. You mentioned upgradeability, so *shrug*
Try asking DWChang or Trythil...
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Postby Brolly345 » Wed Apr 13, 2005 6:41 pm

Akashio wrote:so freakin expensive tho... Do you think it's worth it?

I'd say no because if I remember correctly AMDs are not so good at handling floating point equations. They're only good for arithmetic equations, which are not really what a lot of advanced programs use.

Make your own decision though.
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Postby dwchang » Wed Apr 13, 2005 8:13 pm

Brolly345 wrote:
Akashio wrote:so freakin expensive tho... Do you think it's worth it?

I'd say no because if I remember correctly AMDs are not so good at handling floating point equations. They're only good for arithmetic equations, which are not really what a lot of advanced programs use.


What?

Where are you getting this?

If you're like a Computer Engineer or the engineer who designed the FPU for Intel then I'll believe you.

FPU's are difficult to design, but there is no major difference between the two processors. That you can see from YOUR HUMAN point of view. They go about solving things different, but get the same result.

If anything, I'd say you're actually wrong in the opposite direction. The floating point pipeline for a P4 is something close to 40 stages while the Athlon series is well below 20. At the same time, the P4 runs at a faster frequency per stage (i.e. it does the stage faster) so it evens out TO SOME DEGREE.

If anything if an Athlon-64 had a 20 stage deep FPU pipeline and the P4 a 40, that means the P4 would have to operate at twice the frequency to derive similar performance.

Anyway back to the original post, I strongly suggest a 939 board over a 754. Take the $$$ hit so you can upgrade in the future. We (AMD) has stated that the 754 will be gone by 2006 (although the Sempron may stick with 754 pinset) and the Athlon-64 set will be 939 only (with 940 as server). Just spend the extra dollars, go 939 and in a few years, go dualcore 939 :lol:
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Postby trythil » Wed Apr 13, 2005 10:42 pm

Brolly345 wrote:
Akashio wrote:so freakin expensive tho... Do you think it's worth it?

I'd say no because if I remember correctly AMDs are not so good at handling floating point equations. They're only good for arithmetic equations, which are not really what a lot of advanced programs use.


Yeah, because floating point isn't arithmetic. :roll:

You probably meant "integer performance", although I still want to see proof for what you state. Also, floating-point performance is just one aspect of overall system performance for video editing. It's not something that you'd base a buying decision on by itself.
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Postby sysKin » Thu Apr 14, 2005 10:26 am

I'm quite sure no part of video editing is floating point. Definitely decoding (both mpeg-based and huffyuv) have no floating point at all, filters don't have it at all, and encoding doesn't have it at all. And GUIs either.

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Postby Brolly345 » Thu Apr 14, 2005 10:48 am

Well, I did some research on this subject. Because I was considering going AMD, and I found out some useful information from a thread here on AMV. Maybe some of you remember it. It had a picture that showed the benchmakrs for the latest Intel and AMD processor. Thread reference here. Note the picture is no longer there, but it was enough to make me go looking.

I found a lot of information just using google on the definitions of Whetstone and Dhrystone. I found a lot of web pages, forums, ect on the subject. All of the sites I found that were related to the benchmarks told me that Whetstone is floating point, and Dhrystone is arithmetic, or string, or whatever you want to call it. So now if any of you can remember that picture from that thread that showed the results of the benchmarks on the AMD and the Intel, I should have saved that picture, know that the AMD only slightly outperformed the Intel on Dhrystone, but got killed by the P4 in Whetstone.
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Postby trythil » Thu Apr 14, 2005 1:27 pm

sysKin wrote:I'm quite sure no part of video editing is floating point. Definitely decoding (both mpeg-based and huffyuv) have no floating point at all, filters don't have it at all, and encoding doesn't have it at all. And GUIs either.

Radek


Some video editing and compositing systems can make use of floating-point RGB data when performing composition or effect work; Cinelerra is one such system.

That's about all that's coming to mind, though...

I found a lot of information just using google on the definitions of Whetstone and Dhrystone. I found a lot of web pages, forums, ect on the subject. All of the sites I found that were related to the benchmarks told me that Whetstone is floating point, and Dhrystone is arithmetic, or string, or whatever you want to call it. So now if any of you can remember that picture from that thread that showed the results of the benchmarks on the AMD and the Intel, I should have saved that picture, know that the AMD only slightly outperformed the Intel on Dhrystone, but got killed by the P4 in Whetstone.


If you read that much, you should also know:

- Whetstone is a synthetic benchmark. (That alone should raise some suspicion if you know anything about how these things work: in particular, that this is generic code not specifically scheduled for a particular processor's architecture. Compilers can do more and more with each month, but if you really want to squeeze the best performance for an algorithm, you're probably going to have to do it yourself.)

- Related to the first point: There are different versions of the Whetstone tests! For example, there's the "generic" version, and then there's the version optimized using the SSE2 instruction set. It's obvious that proper usage of SIMD stuff like SSE/SSE2 will allow a significant speedup (in best case, proportional to the number of data units that can be operated on simultaneously) on processors that implement it. Which graphs were you looking at?

- Whetstone tests both floating-point and (to a lesser extent) integer performance.

- Arithmetic operations are not string operations. (Actually, most processors don't have instructions to operate on strings.)

- If you really like pictures, this one demonstrates the dual Xeon getting spanked in most of the Whetstone tests. Which Whetstone? Who knows, they don't say. Might as well be worthless results.

From this, I'm not sure how you cannot draw the conclusion that results from any synthetic benchmark, without context, are total garbage.
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Postby dwchang » Thu Apr 14, 2005 4:55 pm

I'd also like to add that benchmarks as a whole are garbage period. I know most of you are like *gasp*, but it's true.

I believe it was two years ago that one of the major hardware sites found out that the mailing address for a multitude of benchmarks (I'm pretty sure it wasn't Sysmark) was a building that Intel owned.

Furthermore, one year (I believe 2002), AMD *won* that particular benchmark. I *think* one of the tests was crunching a lot of excel data. The following year, the benchmark was changed to favor Intel and they, surprise surprise, won. Basically they do better with HUGE excel sheets (that you will almost never use) and AMD was better for everyday use. Guess which test was included.

Now after that debacle, benchmarking has gotten better (mainly b/c Intel is being watched), but it's hardly the perfect tool to use for comparison and never will be. Sites do their best to even things out, but they will never be even.

Now at the same time, I'm not saying to totally disregard them. Instead, take them with a grain of salt or just as advice, not absolution like a lot of people seem to take them as. Benchmarks are made by people and a lot of those people work for Intel :P.

If you *really* wanna know the performance of a processor and have 20,000 dollar simulation software, then I guess you could figure it out for *one particular set of tests that you are testing*.

Can anyone say Monopolistic Business Practices? No wonder why they're being sued by the Japanese Goverment :P.
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Postby trythil » Thu Apr 14, 2005 5:56 pm

dwchang wrote:Can anyone say Monopolistic Business Practices? No wonder why they're being sued by the Japanese Goverment :P.


Funny that you say that, given the Japanese government's tolerance of existing Japanese monopolies...
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Postby dwchang » Thu Apr 14, 2005 9:40 pm

trythil wrote:
dwchang wrote:Can anyone say Monopolistic Business Practices? No wonder why they're being sued by the Japanese Goverment :P.


Funny that you say that, given the Japanese government's tolerance of existing Japanese monopolies...


Hey man don't rain on our parade :P. I think AMD is suing too since they saw the government do it.

Too bad Japan != Teh World.
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Postby oldwrench » Fri Apr 15, 2005 8:01 pm

I tend to put more faith in "real world" tests. They run application software that people actually use for content creation, audio and video encoding, image editing, and game playing to come up with benchmarks. These don't always give perfect results but I think they are closer to the truth. Maximum PC magazine does some interesting tests this way, check out their web site maximumpc.com.
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Postby kooda » Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:42 pm

If you're going AMD, get a 939 pin like the other guys were saying. Wait for the Venice core if you can. They should be appearing soon. Late April I believe. They support DC, and more SSE instructions than my 754 pin, which is gonna hit a dead end at the end of the year. Ugh.
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