Intel chipsets are the most stable?

[Ruel Smith]

JK wrote:

Why is it that people who claim Intel chipsets are more stable, never
provide statistical proof to back up their statements? Perhaps it might be
that they can't find any.

I don't have any statistical data to back it up, but I can believe it. Many
technologies on the motherboard are Intel technologies, like the PCI bus.
It stands to reason that since they invented it and have honed it over the
years that they have a rock solid implementation of it. Their reputation
over such technolgies depends on it.

 

[JK]

Not really a flame war. Just a well-deserved smackdown of an obvious AMD
shill. I'm a huge AMD fan myself, but it's insane the way someone keeps
bashing Intel. Just seeking a little balance is all. -Dave

A little balance? What will balance the huge number of Intel ads that people
are bombarded with?

 

[Dave C.]

A little balance? What will balance the huge number of Intel ads that
people
are bombarded with?

What's stopping AMD from advertising like Intel does? -Dave

 

[Dave C.]

Experts? How do you know they are experts? Do they work for Intel?

Well YOU think they are experts, so it's odd that you'd ask me for
roof. -Dave

 

[Ruel Smith]

Intel is better than AMD, at the moment.  The only way AMD could change
that would be to drop their prices by 30% or better.

Yeah, those nuclear reactor Prescotts with the flip-flop socket design that
screws up the pins really is just light years ahead of the Athlon FX CPUs
with their on-die memory controllers and unlocked multipliers... I'm just
dying to get one... NOT!

My next system will be AMD Athlon 64/FX and hopefully dual-core. I recently
built my first AMD Athlon XP system and it went smooth. Pretty fast and
stable system for about $400.

BTW... We have yet to see where Athlon 64 stands as we've yet to be able to
test it in a real 64 bit environment with 64 bit software. Expect AMD to
smoke the current P4's...

 

[JK]

When AMD gets over 50% cpu market share, AMD might or might not
advertise the way Intel did in the 1990s. Until then, Intel's ad budget will
be very many times that of AMD.

 

[Conor]

I came across this. Is the guy right?

WAS right...

Intel chipsets did enjoy a very good level of stability on WINDOWS due
to what was pretty much a marriage between Intel and Microsoft however
things have moved on.

 

[Dave C.]

It was much more of a contest then then. Now AMD is beating Intel in
desktop
performance by such a large margin.

Geez, it's gonna be a long century. -Dave

Gaming: OpenGL: The Intel chips are much faster
Gaming: DX8: The AMD chips are faster, no doubt about it
Gaming: DX9: It's virtually a tie, as the AMD chips are two to three
TENTHS of a percentage point faster than Intel.
So on the gaming benchmarks, that's one win for Intel, one win for AMD and
one tie.
GAMING OVERALL: TIED

Business Applications: Office Applications: Intel blows AMD away
Business Applications: Internet Content Creation: Intel blows AMD away
Business Applications: Overall: Intel blows AMD away

Video Encoding: This one is so lopsided, AMD should have thrown in the
towel before entering the ring. Intel wins by a landslide.

Audio Encoding: Again, Intel wins by a landslide

Synthetic Benchmarks: (PC Mark 2004): Here, Intel blows AMD away on both
*CPU* and memory benchmarks

Even at the same price for CPU, an Intel system can be cheaper to
build, as the P4 boards are more mature at this point, and thus there are
better bargains to be found. Considering that an Intel system will likely
be cheaper to build and WILL perform better on all benchmarks except DX8,
it's kind of a no-brainer as to which chip to build with, at the moment.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040322/index.html

The following is an article on the Athlon 64 2800+. But more interesting
is,
the benchmarks included in the article are a GREAT comparison of the 3.2GHz
P4
processors with the Athlon64 3200+. In this article, these two processors
are
pretty evenly matched, with Intel being faster on some benchmarks, and AMD
being faster on others.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2038&p=1

Now lets look at what Sharky Extreme has to report in their article about
the
3.4GHz Prescott processor. This one has benchmarks that are a great
comparison
of the 3.4GHz Intel chips with the Athlon64 3400+. Here, you have to be
careful,
as Sharky doesn't organize their charts in order of fastest to slowest. And
on
some charts, LOWER scores are better. But if you read all the benchmarks,
you
will again notice that the two chips are pretty evenly matched, with AMD
faster
on some and Intel faster on others.

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article.php/3261_3329681__1

Intel is better than AMD, at the moment. The only way AMD could change that
would be to drop their prices by 30% or better. -Dave, updated 10/2/04

 

[DaveW]

Yes, it's true in my experience. SIS chipsets are among the LEAST stable.

 

[Frank]

Ahh. Intel/AMD flame wars. It brings back so many memories. 8)
It
was more fun back in the Pentium/K6 days, though...

The 3DFX, NVIDEA days were a real hoot.

 

[Frank]

It was much more of a contest then then. Now AMD is beating Intel in
desktop
performance by such a large margin.

A few _cheap_ corporations or bureaucracies will use AMD and off brand
chipsets....Check out the banks who need no fault tolerances....
Intel based IBM........

 

[Never anonymous Bud]

Geez, it's gonna be a long century. -Dave

As long as you keep posting bullshit, it will be.

 

[JAD]

AND it was JEROME (JK) that started them back then also

 

[Tony Hill]

Gaming: OpenGL: The Intel chips are much faster
Gaming: DX8: The AMD chips are faster, no doubt about it
Gaming: DX9: It's virtually a tie, as the AMD chips are two to three
TENTHS of a percentage point faster than Intel.
So on the gaming benchmarks, that's one win for Intel, one win for AMD and
one tie.
GAMING OVERALL: TIED

Business Applications: Office Applications: Intel blows AMD away
Business Applications: Internet Content Creation: Intel blows AMD away
Business Applications: Overall: Intel blows AMD away

All of these tests vary HUGELY depending on exactly which applications
you test (and often even what settings are used within any one
application).

Video Encoding: This one is so lopsided, AMD should have thrown in the
towel before entering the ring. Intel wins by a landslide.

Actually usually it's within 10% one way or the other, again depending
on what application and what settings you use.

Audio Encoding: Again, Intel wins by a landslide

This one is pretty much a dead tie, though one application could
easily show either chip being up to 50% faster than the other.

Synthetic Benchmarks: (PC Mark 2004): Here, Intel blows AMD away on both
*CPU* and memory benchmarks

PC Mark CPU benchmarks are just as useless as every other synthetic
CPU benchmark I've ever seen, it tells you absolutely zero about
performance. For memory bandwidth, Socket 754 Athlon64 chips are
slower than Intel chips, Socket 939 Athlon64 chips are faster. For
memory latency, AMD chips are ALWAYS much faster (the built-in memory
controller ensure that much).

Even at the same price for CPU, an Intel system can be cheaper to
build, as the P4 boards are more mature at this point, and thus there are
better bargains to be found. Considering that an Intel system will likely
be cheaper to build and WILL perform better on all benchmarks except DX8,
it's kind of a no-brainer as to which chip to build with, at the moment.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040322/index.html

Whoa! You really don't want to be quoting Tom's Hardware around here
if you want anyone to take you even remotely seriously! That's like
quoting the National Enquirer for a "news" story!

 

[Tony Hill]

A few _cheap_ corporations or bureaucracies will use AMD and off brand
chipsets....Check out the banks who need no fault tolerances....
Intel based IBM........

<shudder> "no fault tolerances" and they are using x86?! Surely you
jest!

There are plenty of banks and other organizations that do require very
high levels of reliability, and they do NOT use x86 for these
applications, not AMD, not Intel! IBM Power-based servers yes. Sun
SPARC systems, sure. Maybe even the odd HP PA-RISC systems or for the
very high-end something like an HPaq Non-Stop system, but DEFINITELY
not x86!

Either way though, if you want high reliability on x86, AMD's Opteron
should be your #1 choice, it has every reliability feature that Intel
has ever had and then some. Now that Intel has cut off Serverworks
(the makers of the most reliable server chipsets for Intel processors)
from making any future designs, this difference in reliability is
likely to become more pronounced (Intel's own chipsets have never
really matched up, which is why almost nobody uses their chipsets for
servers). Still, even with the Opteron I wouldn't consider the system
to be in the "very high reliability" category, *especially* not if it
were running Windows!

 

[Tony Hill]

Yes, it's true in my experience. SIS chipsets are among the LEAST stable.

Actually myself and a number of others have had pretty good luck with
SiS chipsets. The real problem is that they are used on total shit
low-end piece of crap motherboards. If you take the very best chipset
in the world and put it on a POS motherboard built using bargain bin
components, it will result in an unstable system. SiS chipsets are
the cheapest and therefore the cheapest motherboards use them.
However every once in a while you get a bit of a gem. The ECS K7S5A
was probably the best example of this, dirt-cheap board that was every
bit as stable as boards costing $50 or $100 more. The real problem is
that they are very hit-and-miss.

FWIW my current board is an ASRock K7S41GX, an SiS based board that
was super-cheap which I bought after my previous board died at about
the worst possible time (financially speaking). I've been pleasantly
surprised, it really hasn't caused me many headaches at all in either
Linux or WinXP. The biggest problem I had was that, even though this
board has the 4 holes to bolt a heatsink onto the motherboard (quite
rare these days), there were a couple of capacitor that got in the way
of my heatsink. However even with a bit of man-handling (and filling
down my heatsink so it would fit), the board has worked just fine. I
just wish I could say as much for the low-end Sapphire/ATI video card
I got with it! (note to self: back to an nVidia video cards next time)

 

[rstlne]

A few _cheap_ corporations or bureaucracies will use AMD and off brand

chipsets....Check out the banks who need no fault tolerances....
Intel based IBM........

My wife works for a bank..
They use Dells..
Not cause of low faults..
They use dells cause they cost half of what the same spec pc cost elsewhere.

 

[Roman Werpachowski]

Whoa! You really don't want to be quoting Tom's Hardware around here
if you want anyone to take you even remotely seriously! That's like
quoting the National Enquirer for a "news" story!

No flame intended: what's wrong with Tom's Hardware?

 

[Ykalon]

Well YOU think they are experts, so it's odd that you'd ask me for
roof. -Dave

What experts? Tomshardware might as well change name to intelslapdog.com

 

[Franc Zabkar]

A few _cheap_ corporations or bureaucracies will use AMD and off brand
chipsets....Check out the banks who need no fault tolerances....
Intel based IBM........

IME, large corporations with big budgets nearly always go with the
most prominent vendor, whether or not he has the best product, the
rationale being that, if the product fails to perform as expected,
then the person who authorised its purchase cannot be seen to have
gambled.


- Franc Zabkar