Athlon 64??

[Hunhunter]

Anyone got any experience of the AMD Athlon 64 processors? From what I gather, they are optimised to run 64bit programs, however they run slower than a similar spec Pentium when running 32bit programs? Found a good deal on a machine with an Athlon 64 3200 but was surprised that the processor speed was only 2.0GHz?

Any processor Guru's out there??

[Serval]

the AMD numbers like AMD3400 mean they compare them to an Intel 3400 GHz processor.
But in fact AMD processors allways run on a lower frequency.

I cannot say anything usefull about the 64bit part, though...

[Hunhunter]

Hmm...thats whats confusing, a P4 XP1800 runs at 1.8GHz where as the Athlon 64 3200 runs at 2.0GHz

[adlabs6]

The Ghz number on AMD's generally isn't as important as the "rating number" given to the chip. I'm running an AMD Sempron 3100+ (this is on an AMD64 socket 754 core, buth without the 64 bit optimizations). In tests it compares to the AMD64 3000 in some gaming applications.

And I must say that for $95 this chip is *smoking* fast. Compared to my old AMD XP2000 cpu, this Sempron feels limitless. Immediately in FS2004 I was able to use loads of scenery complexity and autogen, which was impossible with the old XP2000 chip. In fact, at this point my PC is probably bottlenecked on my nVidia FX5900, which stumbles terribly with DirectX9 and antialiasing.

If it is a good deal for the money, I wouldn't worry about the Ghz ratings of the AMD64 line, which is certainly widely accepted in the gaming community.

Try checking out some benchmarks on how the 3200 cpu does against the Intel competition, versus prices. Here's a good place to start.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/...u_charts_2005/

And on this page, my $95 budget Sempron 3100+ is listed as par with an Intel P4 3.2Ghz chip in UT2004:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/...05/page28.html

[Serval]

I'm using AMD for many years now. I think ever since there the 200+ MHz CPU's

@Adlabs: If your CPU is smoking I'd take a look at the cooler.
I can recommend this one:
http://www.empc.nl/index.php?page=56...matie&Id=10283

It cools very well and is very quiet also

[adlabs6]

Yes I've heard that Zalman is nice, I wonder if it would fit in my case though? Hehe.

And yes, I've been with AMD since the K6-2 350Mhz.

[Hunhunter]

Thanks guys, thats pretty much answered my questions. I didn't want to get the Athlon and then find that it was no faster than my current P4, that was my biggest worry.

[adlabs6]

What CPU do you have now? Is on that chart?

[Hunhunter]

I have a Pentium P4 XP1800 at the moment and since my mainboard got fried, only 256mb SD RAM Was a good bit of kit when I got it several years ago!! The machine I'm looking at has the Athlon64 3200 with 512mb DDR RAM. I know its nowhere near a top end machine (cant afford one!) but should be a big improvement on the current system. Would like a gig of RAM ideally but that pushes the price up

[adlabs6]

I recently upgraded from 512MB to 1GB for $40. I got the memory at a discount online site that I have used for several years and installed it myself.

Performance with 1GB is not "faster" but rather some things are just done quicker. For instance in FS2004, a couple of my airliners have huge hi-res 32-bit skins that used to take 15 seconds to draw onto the model every time I switched to the external view, now they appear in barely 2 seconds.

However, at large airports when there are say, 50 AI airliners at the gates, I still get audio clipping as the textures for them all load (takes about 5 seconds or so). Framerates are still good though, right now I've set the lock at 19fps and most always get 18fps, even with large, full airports and maximum 3d clouds.