[H-GEN] P4 vs Athlon

[David Jericho]

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On Wed, May 01, 2002 at 12:53:18AM +1000, bob parker wrote:
> He has been as advised by some person who may be something of an expert that:
> 1. The Athlon is faster than the P4 of the same clock speed for games whereby 
> the cpu is running to it's maximum capability only for short bursts.

That's a bit of vague statement. Bizmark and other benchmarks run for
longer than "short bursts", and often rate the Thunderbirds above the
P4s in performance.

> 2. When creating divxs the cpu is maxed out for long times. In this case the 
> Athlon overheats and chokes back to about half clock speed making the P4 the 
> superior cpu for this application.

*shrug* I do a fair bit of raytracing and other cpu intensive tasks
that often take a few hours. I've never noticed my pixel/second rates
slow down on my Thunderbird. I rarely trust what "experts" have to say
about processors and their obscure quirks.

I own machines of both Thunderbird and P3 in both the GHz ranges, and
it's much of a muchness. Sure, the Thunderbird is a hell of a lot more
noisy because of the larger heatsink and fan , but for my intensive tasks, I
prefer the Thunderbird simply because it is faster for the same clock rate.

It also comes down to what processors the application you're running is
written for. Obviously something that uses SSE2 will run better on a
P4 than on an AMD cpu. In anycase, bang for buck, an AMD cpu rules.

--
David Jericho
I need my coffee

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