Intel 820D/X1800XT vs X2 3800+/7800GT

rufio

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 4, 2003
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Choice at hand.

Now I’ve looked at loads of amd v intel reviews and I know amd will be better for gaming. But no one does any REAL productivity comparisons; I don’t care if I can encode LAME mp3's in x seconds. Applications that are important to me are the Adobe CS2 and Macromedia Studio.

I’m going to be upgrading from a shuttle p4 2.8C @ 3.1 6800GT w 2 gigs of ram and I plan on staying SFF with a Silverstone sg01. I’m pretty satisfied with how it handles games at 1280x1024, but its showing its age with new games, and I’m having slowdowns when working in indesign, photoshop, and illustrator all at once.

It'll cost me about the same net to build either system. Which combo would give the best of both worlds? Enjoyable 1600x1200 rates in games (no AA 8-16x AF) and seamless multitasking of 4+ apps?
 
Now that there's actually decent M-ATX AMD boards out, I'd say go with the 3800. You could recycle your memory with that, too.
 
GForce64 said:
Now that there's actually decent M-ATX AMD boards out, I'd say go with the 3800. You could recycle your memory with that, too.

Not to downplay your response but please substantiate your response(s).
 
The Pentium D's are nice as space heaters. Apart from that, they're rather useless.

Might I propose a third combo? I think you'll like this one more.

Opteron 165 1.8GHz Dual Core

That thing is guaranteed for at least 2.6GHz on air. That will put you in dual FX-55 territory, since all Opterons have a 1mb L2 cache. The dual-core models have 2x1mb, for a total of 2mb.

And as far as a video card...

Sapphire Radeon X1800 XL

Better than a 7800GT, for about the same price. This thing has overclocking headroom like it's nobody's business, and I'm quite confident that an OC'd X1800XL would be able to keep pace with a 7800GTX.

So, final answer - Opteron 165 + X1800 XL. You will NOT be disappointed. And yes, invest in a $50 air cooler to get the most out of that Opty.
 
Good suggestion, but with the silverstone sg01 there is little room for aftermarket coolers (as all are basically huge) so how successful have these opterons done on stock cooling? Think 2.2 would be doable at stock voltages and cooling?
 
Bona Fide said:
The Pentium D's are nice as space heaters. Apart from that, they're rather useless.

Might I propose a third combo? I think you'll like this one more.

Opteron 165 1.8GHz Dual Core

That thing is guaranteed for at least 2.6GHz on air. That will put you in dual FX-55 territory, since all Opterons have a 1mb L2 cache. The dual-core models have 2x1mb, for a total of 2mb.

And as far as a video card...

Sapphire Radeon X1800 XL

Better than a 7800GT, for about the same price. This thing has overclocking headroom like it's nobody's business, and I'm quite confident that an OC'd X1800XL would be able to keep pace with a 7800GTX.

So, final answer - Opteron 165 + X1800 XL. You will NOT be disappointed. And yes, invest in a $50 air cooler to get the most out of that Opty.

i don't want to flame or anything and i think that's a better setup than the op posted but an opteron 165 is not guaranteed to run 2.6 on air.

@rufio 2.2 should be doable with stock cooling at stock voltage or a little above
 
Are opterons even optimized for gaming? Would there be any difference opposed to the athlon x2s?
 
paintb4707 said:
Are opterons even optimized for gaming? Would there be any difference opposed to the athlon x2s?

They're the same cores as athlons, sometimes with different amounts of cache. The x2's certainly aren't optomized for gaming. The idea that a processor is optomized for gaming isn't really correct imho. Athlons are generally made for general home computing, and the opterons are meant for enterprise, but the different has more to do with duty cycle and reliability than actual architectural differences.
 
ok gaming totally aside, an opreron would smoke a pentium d in illustrator/indesign/photoshop?
 
rufio said:
ok gaming totally aside, an opreron would smoke a pentium d in illustrator/indesign/photoshop?

Without a doubt. I don't know about smoking it at stock speeds, but with minimal (200MHz) overclocking, definitely.
 
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