George said:
Currently I have a A7N8X-D ver. 2 motherboard, Barton 2500+ and a 9800
Pro. I'm looking to upgrade the motherboard and cpu only. I
primarily want to use the system for post-processing of digital photos
(using Photoshop Elements 3, etc). I'll be handing off my current mb
and cpu to my son, so I'm trying to decide if I should stick with the
same configuration, go to a Pentium or an AMD64 system. I'd like to
keep costs down, but wouldn't mind getting a bit of a boost (my system
just isn't upto processing digitial images.
Recommendations?
http://www.chaosmint.com/benchmarks/powermac-g5-ps7bench/
http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,pg,8,00.asp
One comment I've read, is it is hard to get fair benchmarks, as each
platform is good at a different thing. Photoshop can benefit
greatly from SIMD instruction optimizations, so when you read that
a new processor has added support for one of the SIMD instruction
sets, that means new potential for that processor.
The third benchmark above suggests the Athlon64 side might be
interesting, but the trick then is pricing - you will need to
price out the two platforms, to see whether shaving a few
seconds off the benchmark is worth it. (One of the beauties of
dual processor configurations, would be not only is Photoshop
accelerated, but you might also find the desktop is just
plain more responsive compared to a single Athlon system. But
for casual use, a dual is usually out of most people's
price range.)
Another unresolved issue, is the amount of memory versus
memory subsystem performance. The Athlon64 dual channel
either needs 1T or 2T timing, when all four slots are
occupied, depending on the RAM used, and the stepping of
the silicon die. We would need a whole set of benchmarks,
which compared the various ways of configuring that memory,
to figure out which platform is best. The Athlon64 loses
maybe 20% memory bandwidth when running at 2T command rate,
so that makes the same difference as stepping down one
"P.R." notch on the processor. In other words, if the
benchmarks listed at the top of the page, are done with
2x256MB single sided DIMMs overclocked to DDR600, the results
will be a whole lot different than 4x512MB double sided DIMMs
running at DDR400 and perhaps needing to use 2T command
rate setting. And benchmarks don't tend to consider that.
They also don't consider the differences possible between
running 2x1GB modules versus 4x512MB modules - 1GB performance
modules don't tend to be as fast as their 512MB counterparts.
On balance, I would think either a mid-range processor
from either the Athlon64 camp or the P4 camp would be
a workable choice. Dual channel memory gives more upgrade
options, if you find you need more memory at some point.
HTH,
Paul
