Artnut said:
Hi all,
I am buying a new pc. Can anyone tell me if I should settle for an Intel
processor/motherboard or go in for AMD processor/mb. I Googled for the
comparison but didn't find anything helpful some of them were mixed reviews.
Which motherboards are best for AMD and for Intel?
I'am also planning to make it a dual OS. I have heard that AMDs are good for
Linux.
Any help appreciated in this regard.
Thankyou all,
Arty
AMD covers low and mid-range. Intel processors cover low, mid-range and high.
Intel's middle of the road stuff now, compares to AMD's best stuff. Price
for performance matches pretty well, where the two companies are competing
and having a price war. But the very best Intel processors, would still
sell for the traditional $1000 mark. And the very best Intel processors
are not described in the following, simply because they may not be very
good value for your average computer.
Some midrange processors were tested here. The AMD 6000+ socket AM2, is
compared to some other Intel processors. An Intel E6700 (or the current E6750)
is slightly better than the AMD one. The Intel does it, while running at
2.66GHz, while the AMD processor is running at 3GHz to try to keep up.
These processors are dual cores, meaning tasks enjoy the services of two
processors inside the same integrated circuit package.
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2933
If you go to the bottom of that page, the high end of the AMD line, is
drawing more power than the Intel processors. That is a slight
disadvantage. The AMD processors, AFAIK, are 90nm for their higher end
ones (versus 65nm for Intel), and the processor has a higher power
consumption as it nears 3GHz. Intel has processors, ones for example,
that are even stronger than the ones shown on the chart, such as the E6850,
that still manage to stay at the 65W TDP spec.
So you can safely buy either an Intel or an AMD system. If you are buying
low end equipment, the processors might be getting closer to one another,
as that System Power Consumption Under Load chart shows. At the midrange,
the midrange Intel processor has better power consumption than the high end
AMD processor.
In practical terms, up to that mid range, like E6700/E6750 or AMD 6000+ or 6400+,
you could simply buy on price, and either company's product will do the
job. When the systems are idle, you'll notice that the AMD system had
a lower total consumption. But if the computer is running SETI all day,
then the AMD solution with something like a 6000+ or 6400+, will run a bit
warmer than its Intel counterpart. For many people, their computers are
idle most of the time (email, MSOffice, web surfing, are bursty applications
that are mostly idle), so that may influence your choice slightly, to the
AMD side.
If you want absolutely lowest price, you have to price out whole systems,
to see how they compare. Current AMD socket AM2 systems use DDR2 memory
(which is cheap), while Intel LGA775 socket systems use DDR2 (cheap)
or DDR3 (more expensive). The Intel motherboard may, on average, be
more expensive as well. One reason for this, is that Intel has been
increasing the FSB of the processor, causing fewer competing chipset
makers to be able to provide a solution. So if an Intel processor
has FSB1333, there are fewer motherboards that do that properly,
than the older FSB1066, where you could find a few VIA chipset boards
for cheaper. You'll notice that the older Intel processors with
FSB1066, are more expensive, so an E6700 suitable for use in a
VIA chipset motherboard, costs more than an E6750, which might only
work with an Intel or Nvidia chipset board. So if you are building
from parts, you have to look at the total price, to decide which
is the cheapest way to go.
Much easier with prebuilt systems, in the sense that you have a finished
price, and it is just a matter of comparing what is in the boxes.
You can get some charts here, but you really have to be a rocket
scientist, to find the mistakes in the results (Photoshop is wrong)
and figure out which processors are dual cores, which are quad cores
etc. I don't think any of the charts on here anymore, compare single
threaded tasks running on the processors, and a lot of real world
applications still do all their work with just one of the two
cores. And thus, this chart is misleading, unless you know how
to convert the figures for comparison purposes. If the chart
showed something like SuperPI execution times, plus something
like Cinebench, you'd have two criteria to go by (single threaded,
versus Cinebench multithreaded/scalable).
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html
I wish another site would offer charts like that, but offer
different benchmarks for comparison purposes. Many sites are
content to run comparison reviews only, without summary charts
of all their work.
Paul
