Price difference between Intel & AMD systems

[Alex Fraser]

JK wrote: [snip]

The motherboards aren't that different in price.A decent socket 754
motherboard is around $80, while a socket 939 one is around $110.
Of course there are more expensive ones. A decent Pentium 4 775
motherboard is at least $110.

And the cheapest AMD with dual channel costs $315 www.pricewatch.com !

AFAIK, all Socket 939 motherboards are dual channel. Anyway, see ebuyer
Quickfind code 64800.

All new Pentium 4 have dual channel.

Suggesting that dual channel is an advantage of P4-based systems is similar
to suggesting that the higher CPU clockspeed is an advantage. In both cases,
a direct comparison is meaningless due to architectural differences.

Alex

 

[JK]

[...]

For Doom 3, it takes an $810 Pentium 4 3.2 ghz EE to come close to the
performance of a $150 Athlon 64 3000+.

What is Doom 3 and why do you need to run it? ;-)

[...]

The motherboards aren't that different in price.A decent socket 754
motherboard is around $80, while a socket 939 one is around $110.
Of course there are more expensive ones. A decent Pentium 4 775
motherboard is at least $110.

And the cheapest AMD with dual channel costs $315

The Athlon 64 dual channel has the controllers on the processor,
so there is no bottleneck of a fsb running slower than the processor.
The Athlon 64 3000+ is available for socket 939(dual memory
controllers on the cpu) at around $185. The socket 754 version
is around $150. There is also an Athlon 64 3200+ socket 939
chip. As the supply of socket 754 chips is used up, and the
supply of socket 939 90 nm A64 3000+ and 3200+ chips increases,
expect the pricing on the 939 chips to drop.

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

Games don't do motion blur, so you do need more fps than
you might think. With fast motion (common in games),
40fps isn't enough to make it look smooth.

Blur is a point (and could be added!) but I think the
real problem is not the average 40 fps, but the occasional
slow frame/stutter. Also, 5 ms jitter around
the 25 ms frame rate might make a difference.

-- Robert

 

[Tony Hill]

And the cheapest AMD with dual channel costs $315 www.pricewatch.com !

Low cost Athlon64 chips in a Socket 939 packaging should start
appearing over the next two weeks or so. These guys claim to have
them in stock now:

http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=M&Category_Code=AMD64


There are, of course, cheaper dual-channel AMD options available for
Socket A as well.

All new Pentium 4 have dual channel.

Unless they use the low-cost i848 chipset or some of the non-Intel
chipsets. Not very common for the build-your-own crowd, but you will
often find the i848GL chipset (or even the older i845GV chipset) used
in the low-end OEM stuff from Dell and HPaq.

 

[chrisv]

For Doom 3, it takes an $810 Pentium 4 3.2 ghz EE to come close to the
performance of a $150 Athlon 64 3000+.

Will you get off your P4-EE kick? No one buys that thing. It may as
well not exist, and using it for your "value" comparisons is stupid.

 

[Michael Brown]

Blur is a point (and could be added!)

Good general motion blur cannot (AFAIK) efficiently be done with current
generation polygon blatters (though can be somewhat approximated, see Need
For Speed: Underground for example). To get good blur you need to support
volume rendering and use volumes instead of polygons, and even then it gets
dodgy if you've got rapidly (with respect to the frame rate) rotating
polygons. It's possible to do completely correct motion blur with a
raytracer and a good numerical integrator (each ray generates a line on the
polygon, then you need to integrate the texture data along the line) but I
don't know off the top of my head which (if any) raytracers that do this.
There's probably hundreds of other methods out there I haven't heard about
though

[...]