Barton or Thoroughbred

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack Norris
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J

Jack Norris

I'm confused. I want a new CPU, AMD 2800 to be precise. Here, (UK) there is
very little price difference between the 2800 Barton core and the 2800
Thoroughbred core processors. What's the difference, if any? Would I notice
the difference in normal use, word processing, PhotoShop, the odd game etc?

System Abit NF7, 120Gb HDD, 512 DDR. Geforce 3.
 
jpsga said:
The increased processing power of the Barton will show up in Photo Shop.
Click to expand...

The Thoroughbred has a faster clock speed and will be faster for some
applications/tasks where the larger cache of Barton is less useful.
 
I'm confused. I want a new CPU, AMD 2800 to be precise. Here, (UK) there is
very little price difference between the 2800 Barton core and the 2800
Thoroughbred core processors. What's the difference, if any? Would I notice
the difference in normal use, word processing, PhotoShop, the odd game etc?

System Abit NF7, 120Gb HDD, 512 DDR. Geforce 3.
Click to expand...

They're 'rated' same performance class by AMD.
Thoroughbred 2800 runs at a higher clock, Barton 2800
has a larger L2 cache.
Thoroughbred will do stuff like media encoding faster.
But I think I prefer the larger cache for most other stuff.

ancra
 
Jack said:
I'm confused. I want a new CPU, AMD 2800 to be precise. Here, (UK) there is
very little price difference between the 2800 Barton core and the 2800
Thoroughbred core processors. What's the difference, if any? Would I notice
the difference in normal use, word processing, PhotoShop, the odd game etc?

System Abit NF7, 120Gb HDD, 512 DDR. Geforce 3.
Click to expand...
Definitely I would choose the bigger cache.
 
Matt said:
Definitely I would choose the bigger cache.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure - AMD seems to have overrated their processors a bit based
on cache size. Benchmarks at tomshardware etc. seem to suggest the
Thoroughbred is the better chip to have.

Big caches are great in servers which tend to use the same data over and
over, but with the sort of use to which home PCs are put, a faster chip
is probably more useful.
 
I'm not sure - AMD seems to have overrated their processors a bit based
on cache size. Benchmarks at tomshardware etc. seem to suggest the
Thoroughbred is the better chip to have.
Click to expand...

Maybe, depends.
Actually, the problem is tomshardware's benchmarks. They're not very
good. Sandra, PC Mark, SysMark, all are basically just clock counters.
Check some application benchmarks instead.
Barton and Thoroughbred, they're faster on different things, that's
all.

ancra
 
BarryNL said:
I'm not sure - AMD seems to have overrated their processors a bit based
on cache size. Benchmarks at tomshardware etc. seem to suggest the
Thoroughbred is the better chip to have.

Big caches are great in servers which tend to use the same data over and
over, but with the sort of use to which home PCs are put, a faster chip
is probably more useful.
Click to expand...

How much advantage are you talking about due to the faster clock? I
expect that it might give a small advantage all of the time and that the
bigger cache is a huge advantage some of the time. I think the app I
wrote must have a tight locality of reference because it just screams on
my Barton 2500+ (OC'ed to 2800+ by increasing the multiplier). It runs
more than twice as fast on the Barton as on my 2.4G P4, I think because
AMD has a better (smarter?) cache scheme. The P4 also has 512MB cache.
I don't know how to explain it other than by guessing that it is due
to the cache schemes.
 
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