Upgrade path

[Bill Stock]

I currently have a Barton 2500+, which is pretty decent, but the DVD recodes
are a tad slow. I was thinking of upgrading to a ASUS SLI & 3500+, but the
3dMark scores look pretty much identical (2026 vs. 2097) to mine and the CPU
scores are not phenomenally different (2793 vs. 3600). I'm surprised there
is so little difference, but I don't know the stepping of the comparison
CPU.

Ideally, I would just overclock my Barton to 3200, but I have an old ASUS MB
and the Northbridge can't handle the heat. I thought if I upgraded now, I
could pop a better chip in later, when the prices fall. But with so little
difference and AMD going to Socket M next year, I'm vacillating.

I'd appreciate comments from anyone with a similar upgrade path or X64
experience.

TIA

 

[Conor]

I currently have a Barton 2500+, which is pretty decent, but the DVD recodes
are a tad slow. I was thinking of upgrading to a ASUS SLI & 3500+, but the
3dMark scores look pretty much identical (2026 vs. 2097) to mine and the CPU
scores are not phenomenally different (2793 vs. 3600). I'm surprised there
is so little difference, but I don't know the stepping of the comparison
CPU.

Ideally, I would just overclock my Barton to 3200, but I have an old ASUS MB
and the Northbridge can't handle the heat. I thought if I upgraded now, I
could pop a better chip in later, when the prices fall. But with so little
difference and AMD going to Socket M next year, I'm vacillating.

I'd appreciate comments from anyone with a similar upgrade path or X64
experience.

Intel DO beat AMD for multimedia stuff wuch as WMV9 decoding and
encoding DVDs. If you're not gaming then socket LGA775 with a Pentium 4
531 is a good cheap option. Although it runs at 3GHz, it'll ramp up
another 500-700MHz with a little voltage tweaking on the stock cooler.

Current advice for AMD is to go to Socket 939. An AMD 64 3200+ will
nicely overclock up by around 30% and is a very good buy. It has all
the SSE3 stuff etc of the high end AMDs.

Both options around £120 GBP for the CPU.

If you want dual Core then the Pentium D 820 (LGA775) or Athlon 64 3700
- both options around £180 for the CPU.

 

[Michael Brown]

Conor wrote:
[...]

Intel DO beat AMD for multimedia stuff wuch as WMV9 decoding and
encoding DVDs.

This isn't entirely clear cut. Which one is faster depends heavily on the
codec and system settings. For example, the P4 does better (on average) with
WMV, whereas the K8 does better (on average) with XviD. Or possibly the
other way round, I can't remember The difference MHz-to-rating is almost
always less than 10%, and less than 5% most of the time, much closer than
the K7 days when the P4 could be up to twice as fast. Unfortunately, it's
doesn't seem to be possible to say whether a particular system will do
better than another one in a particular case, as even for quite similar
systems, different review sites get quite different rankings. Presumably
this is due to different codec and system settings (quality settings, RAM
latency, etc).

Oddly, the K8's almost always do better at audio (MP3/OGG) encoding than the
equivalent P4, though the margins are still quite small.

[...]

If you want dual Core then the Pentium D 820 (LGA775) or Athlon 64
3700 - both options around £180 for the CPU.

I think you mean the 3800+