Athlon XP3200+ to AMD64 2800+ - Worth it?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ben Pope
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Ben Pope

me!! said:
Is it worth upgrading to a amd64 2800+ from a xp3200+?
Click to expand...


Probably not. Depends how much money you have.

I'm sure you can find some benchmarks and work out if it is worth it to you.

The A64 should be faster in most cases, but if I were in your position, I'd
hold off until you can afford a s939.

Ben
 
me!! said:
Is it worth upgrading to a amd64 2800+ from a xp3200+?

Rest of system is

Audigy 2 zs
PCI freeview card
768mb pc3200 ram
plextor dvd writer
2x 80gig hdd ( ide )
radeon 9800 pro
a7n8xe deluxe mobo



would be getting a nforce 3 mobo by asus KN8 ( i think )
and a AMD64 2800+

would i get better performance in games as the chip is rated slower
than 3200+ ( 1.8ghz as opposed to 2.2Ghz )

cheers all



paul
Click to expand...

Not worth it except for the fact that it gets you switched
over to AMD64 so that a future upgrade path opens up
for you. With an XP3200+ your upgrade path has hit a dead end.

I suggest you wait until prices come down enough that
you can afford a Socket 939 or 940 motherboard with at
least a 2.2 GHz AMD64 cpu. 2 GHz is about as slow as you
can go and still have most of the benchmarks tell you
that you got at least a little faster, while at 2.2 GHz
you might start to see improvements with your bare eyes
rather than having to use benchmarks or stopwatches.
 
Is it worth upgrading to a amd64 2800+ from a xp3200+?

Rest of system is

Audigy 2 zs
PCI freeview card
768mb pc3200 ram
plextor dvd writer
2x 80gig hdd ( ide )
radeon 9800 pro
a7n8xe deluxe mobo



would be getting a nforce 3 mobo by asus KN8 ( i think )
and a AMD64 2800+

would i get better performance in games as the chip is rated slower
than 3200+ ( 1.8ghz as opposed to 2.2Ghz )

cheers all



paul
 
I had the same quandary recently... I populated my Cart at Newegg with an
Athlon 64 3400, both new and refurbed, along with an Asus MB only to clear
the cart at least 6 times before I finally settled on upgrading my ram from
512 MB dual channel to 1GB dual channel and installed a pair of 75GB raptors
in raid 0.

My present CPU is a Barton 2800 with a 128MB 5900 video card on a A7N8X
Deluxe. After much thought, I decided the CPU upgrade really wasn't worth
it. In our CPU range, (Barton Core) I believe we have to go up to at least a
64 3800 to get a meaningful upgrade and at 640 dollars, that's too much for
me to spend when a Barton system is still very much a robust and viable
solution for what I do. I have run Farcry and many of the latest games with
a high degree of satisfaction and reports are that Doom 3 system
requirements will be low; Athlon 1.6 GHz and MX video so I don't see the
need to rush into an upgrade for myself right now. Your situation may differ
of course.

I'm very happy with the upgrade I did do now, the Raptors in raid 0 are an
awesome upgrade although the 1GB ram is less noticeable but I know I have a
sound foundation when I do go to AMD 64 sometime around the new year when
the price on that 3800 should be well below 300.00 Heck, when I upgarded
from a Palomino core XP2100 to this Barton 2800, it was the most
underwhelming upgrade I've ever performed. I think the Barton still has a
lot of legs left.
 
Egil Solberg said:
http://www.storagereview.com/

Do you do video editing or run a hefty database server? Otherwise you would
not notice that RAID0.
Click to expand...

While the array does _nothing_ for gaming besides fast load times, the
overall feel of the OS and general operation has a much improved quickness
over the WD 7200RPM JB drive I had previously. IMO, the upgrade was well
worth the 165.00 price for each of the drives. I do some video editing but
it's far from my regular use on this machine. When those Raptors first came
out, they were North of 400.00 a piece.
 
Michael-NC wrote:

While the array does _nothing_ for gaming besides fast load times, the
overall feel of the OS and general operation has a much improved
quickness over the WD 7200RPM JB drive I had previously. IMO, the
upgrade was well worth the 165.00 price for each of the drives.
Click to expand...

I think you would get the feel with a single Raptor as well. Game load times
are not influenced much by running a RAID0.
I would run the drives separately for increased data security.
 
Egil Solberg said:
Michael-NC wrote:



I think you would get the feel with a single Raptor as well. Game load times
are not influenced much by running a RAID0.
I would run the drives separately for increased data security.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your opinion
 
Il Sat, 24 Jul 2004 20:42:47 +0200, Egil Solberg ha scritto:
Michael-NC wrote:



I think you would get the feel with a single Raptor as well. Game load times
are not influenced much by running a RAID0.
Click to expand...

Again??? There is a bigger difference. U just run raid 0 and if your
system is well configured u would notice it.
I would run the drives
separately for increased data security.
Click to expand...

That's a different story.

Some guys on here seems too lazy to do some backups and so they prefer to
loose speed and overall HD performance and not run raid 0, also if many
people talking like u never actually really used a raid 0 system.
 
_P_e_ar_lALegend said:
Some guys on here seems too lazy to do some backups and so they
prefer to loose speed and overall HD performance and not run raid 0,
also if many people talking like u never actually really used a raid
0 system.
Click to expand...

I tried a dynamic disk software RAID 0 on WinXP once. Never impressed me.
Sandra Disk benchmark was super though, but of course not based on real life
usage pattern.Have a read here if you haven't already:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101

As you see, the "feel" is probably just wishful thinking.

This thread is also good reading:

http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=15912
 
Egil Solberg said:
I tried a dynamic disk software RAID 0 on WinXP once. Never impressed me.
Sandra Disk benchmark was super though, but of course not based on real life
usage pattern.Have a read here if you haven't already:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101

As you see, the "feel" is probably just wishful thinking.

This thread is also good reading:

http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=15912
Click to expand...

That was an interesting read, unfortunately, I do admit to having not read
it before I made the decision. I will say this, having not read the article,
I'm guilty of everything the forum members accuse "raid 0 fan boys" of. I
noticed a much snappier OS and game loading did increase dramatically, not
so much in Farcry but Painkiller loads _very_ fast.

I also do a lot of file manipulation with ISO's and Rar's and like the
performance. Would I get the same performance with just one Raptor? I don't
know and I don't know if I'm willing to break the array just to find out.
Data security is _not_ an issue for me as my machine is backed up to a
networked machine, as well as an external hard disc. If worse comes to
worse, I spent 165.00 to get a 5% improvement over a single Raptor and more
importantly is a fact that wasn't touched on in either article. I have a
_single_ 138GB 10,000 RPM hard drive for much less money than would
otherwise be possible. I already have some 60MB's of data on it. I certainly
wouldn't want to run just a single 75 GB disc. All in all, I'm still very
satisfied.
 
Egil Solberg said:
Michael-NC wrote:



I think you would get the feel with a single Raptor as well. Game load times
are not influenced much by running a RAID0.
I would run the drives separately for increased data security.
Click to expand...

I also run a twin Raptor RAID0 array. All important data is kept of the
array, and backups are done of the OS and apps which are on the array.

I am happy with the improvement in performance over the Maxtor drives.
Having gone straight to RAID, I am not able to compare it to single Raptors.
 
Egil Solberg said:
Michael-NC wrote:



I think you would get the feel with a single Raptor as well. Game load times
are not influenced much by running a RAID0.
I would run the drives separately for increased data security.
Click to expand...

I also run a twin Raptor RAID0 array. All important data is kept of the
array, and backups are done of the OS and apps which are on the array.

I am happy with the improvement in performance over the Maxtor drives.
Having gone straight to RAID, I am not able to compare it to single Raptors.
 
I tried a dynamic disk software RAID 0 on WinXP once. Never impressed me.
Sandra Disk benchmark was super though, but of course not based on real life
usage pattern.Have a read here if you haven't already:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101

As you see, the "feel" is probably just wishful thinking.
Click to expand...
We discussed a lot about that article on here in the past. Check the
message archive. And we found out Anand pretty much do not know what
exactly a raid configuration is :-)
 
_P_e_ar_lALegend said:
We discussed a lot about that article on here in the past. Check the
message archive. And we found out Anand pretty much do not know what
exactly a raid configuration is :-)
Click to expand...

:) That's also a way to look at it.
 
Doug Ramage said:
I also run a twin Raptor RAID0 array. All important data is kept of the
array, and backups are done of the OS and apps which are on the array.

I am happy with the improvement in performance over the Maxtor drives.
Having gone straight to RAID, I am not able to compare it to single Raptors.
Click to expand...

I noticed an added quickness when I went to 10kRPM SATA
Raptors, not in RAID. I use the WD74 as the system drive and a
WD34 as a capture drive. It works great processing video files as
I can capture to the capture drive, process to the system drive, and
if I need another processing step send it back to the capture drive.
The source and output are always on separate drives.

I have a pair of 80G WD JB drives that I was thinking of putting
in RAID0 on my other system. But the cost of SATA to IDE
adapters seems too high, I could get a PCI IDE RAID Card for
the cost of just one. Plus, I'm not looking forward to re-installing
everything all over again. From these posts it looks like it might
be worth the effort though.

Luck;
Ken
 
Ken Maltby said:
I noticed an added quickness when I went to 10kRPM SATA
Raptors, not in RAID. I use the WD74 as the system drive and a
WD34 as a capture drive. It works great processing video files as
I can capture to the capture drive, process to the system drive, and
if I need another processing step send it back to the capture drive.
The source and output are always on separate drives.

I have a pair of 80G WD JB drives that I was thinking of putting
in RAID0 on my other system. But the cost of SATA to IDE
adapters seems too high, I could get a PCI IDE RAID Card for
the cost of just one. Plus, I'm not looking forward to re-installing
everything all over again. From these posts it looks like it might
be worth the effort though.

Luck;
Ken
Click to expand...

I used Ghost to clone my OS and apps to the RAID0 array via a PATA drive. I
too did not want to do a re-install.
 
Ken said:
I noticed an added quickness when I went to 10kRPM SATA
Raptors, not in RAID. I use the WD74 as the system drive and a
WD34 as a capture drive. It works great processing video files as
I can capture to the capture drive, process to the system drive, and
if I need another processing step send it back to the capture drive.
The source and output are always on separate drives.

I have a pair of 80G WD JB drives that I was thinking of putting
in RAID0 on my other system. But the cost of SATA to IDE
adapters seems too high, I could get a PCI IDE RAID Card for
the cost of just one. Plus, I'm not looking forward to re-installing
everything all over again. From these posts it looks like it might
be worth the effort though.
Click to expand...


I have a WD360GD (Raptor) and a WD2500JD (7200RPM/8MB) and the sustained
transfer rates are about the same, at least at the beginning (75%) of the
drives. The Raptor shines in seeking which is clearly not your usage
pattern for video (unless you write large files to highly fragmented
drives - why?).

So I suggest leaving your system drive where it is.

Offload the normal processing drive to the 80s in RAID and flick your
Windows swap drive over to the small Raptor.

Would save reinstalling the OS, so would be easy to try RAID out and be more
effective use of your hardware.

There's really not gonna be THAT much difference, and it depends how much
RAM you have, but if you want to squeeze that last out of it...

Ben
 
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