P4 Vs AMD64 In stability

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delusion_2005

Gawd
Joined
Mar 8, 2005
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Hey guys, i was just thinking if there was a Intel and AMD system put up to the stability test who would win?, One is a AMD64 939 socket 3200+ Venice and the other is a Intel Pentium 4 640 3.2GHZ HT, there ram, graphic card, motherboard is the same but of course it use a different socket such as the Abit Fatality, both are using stock coolers with 4x120 case fans, so i was wondering which one would run more stable in gaming, encoding, burning and whatever.
 
It all depends on the motherboard. Get the most stablest motherboard for Intel (which should most likely be Intel's chipset) and the most stablest motherboard for AMD (which should be whatever). The final result should be a toss up basically.

Who knows...

If you asked this question years ago, all votes would be for Intel. But I have a slight hunch that it just might still be true today-- Intel.

-J.
 
The only stability issues on the AMD platform were really the fault of shitty VIA and SiS chipsets about 6 years ago, which were blamed on the chip by some unknowledgable parties. With the advent of chipsets like nForce 1-4, AMD's CPUs have no reason not to run amazingly stable, and they do. :D Right now, higher-end Intel chips are actually at a stability disadvantage due to the extreme heat they output that must be dealt with, and the kind of stress they put on weaker power supplies with their insane wattage drawn.

Tom's Hardware Guide is doing a stability test of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and Intel's Pentium EE 840, both companies' most powerful dual-core offerings. So far, the Intel machine's been offline for a long while to constant reboot issues, overheating problems (those seem to be caused by them installing the wrong cooler, but there is still no good reason for any modern chip to run this hot), motherboard incompatibilities with the new chip, the absurd power draw of the EE 840 frying a voltage regulator on a THIRD motherboard, so forth. The 4800+ system hasn't crashed or rebooted once yet, which does show there is no problem with AMD's procs. :) Of course the crashes on Intel's side are mostly the fault of the team of soviet rocket monkeys rigging up the machines at THG, but the heat/power issues definitely must be taken into consideration.

Some factoids.
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seriously the heatsink thing. Is hilarious then they blame it on intel. LoL. I had a heatsink kinda like that once. Stock heatsink 3.6 (I know they are not the same but they do look similar). Techreport told the differences between the two in one of there reviews, and maybe even toms did as well.

In my opinion I think either would be fine. You might have to tweak a little to get perfect stability.
 
Long story short, if you are using an AMD chip and an nForce chipset (or probably a VIA one, now, they aren't as terrible as they were) or an Intel chip and Intel chipset... your RAM is nondamaged and everything is running in spec with a GOOD power supply, you should have no stability issues unless your PC is spyware-ridden or something. Most of stability is just good maintenance. :) It's no fair to say, get 27 copies of Gator going at once then blame Intel or AMD or VIA or nVidia for your system instability. ;)
 
if you get an intel do not get an sli intel nvidia motherboard. As we both saw (the guy above me) the 3.2dc xe smoke the boards :eek: . They just don't seem to be primetime ready.
 
Well, seeing as they aren't even out yet, that's not a safe assessment to make. I was just pointing out the design flaws in the dual-core P4 chips, not saying that there was a fault that would be expressed in FINALIZED boards.
 
I would say that for the most part Intel chipsets are still more stable then nVidia/VIA/SIS chipsets and probably always will be. Most any system can be made stable with a few tweaks but some take more tweaking then others. Usually intel setups are more plug and play while AMD setups are more plug and tweak and play later. Intel's main problem right now with stability is the heat issue of course. The thermal production and power draw of their current chips are just crazy compared to that AMD64's. Intel should have stickers that say "possibly combustable" on the retail CPU boxes. But AMD also has some problems with their A64's as well in the area of the memory controller. The memory controller helps performance alot but in alot of cases the memory controller can be weak and not have very good compatibility with alot of RAM. I know i'm just about to get pissed off at my new Venice 3200+ and my OCZ PC3200 Platinum Rev2 TCCD because i've tried a plethora of settings and i just can't get the thing Prime stable at the speeds i know the RAM is capable of running. You also cannot populate all for 4 DIMMs on Athlon 64 boards and run DDR400 1T yet because of the stress it puts on the MC. In the end i would take an A64 over an Intel chip any day of the weak for the moment.
 
I completely forgot about the heat issue. Well, in this case, the winner goes to AMD by a fair margin. But I would by no means dismiss Intel's often proven stable chipset drivers.

-J.
 
Being able to run your RAM at insanely tight settings for a miniscule performance increase is "tweakability". Not "stability". 5 or 10 minutes of research can confirm what RAM will and will not work properly in a system with an Athlon 64, and almost anything will. Revision E (Venice) also added some nice improvements to the controller, mostly fixing the only real major 'bug' in the controller. If this was causing rampant instability issues, I'd mention it, but given how difficult it is to spec a system with an A64 that won't run stably with the RAM you purchase is so amazingly uncommon, it's not really much of a detriment at all.

Now, the traditional thing to say is "Intel chipset, Intel CPU, more stable than nVidia/VIA!" Well, the simple fact of the matter is, there's no real quantitiable fact behind this. Intel chipsets were surely more stable than old VIA/SiS chipsets. But, so are nForces and modern VIA chipsets (not so sure about SiS. I still avoid them like the plague, understandably.) I'm yet to see any stability issues with nForce chipsets, and their featureset and BIOS flexibility is usually superior to those of Intel chipsets and the BIOS'es that support them.

As for 'AMD needs tweaking'.... the last 5 or 6 AMD64 boxes I built required the following tweaks. "Turn on Cool+Quiet" and that was optional. That's all the config in the BIOS that was required unless I wanted to overclock it which I didn't need to. That's not "tweak and then it's stable". If you can't just drop a processor into the board it's made for and have it run stable without adjustment, you did something wrong. ;) Also, don't take this the wrong way, OCZ doesn't make the most sturdy RAM on the market. I've had compatibiltiy issues with it in boards with the memory controller in the Northbridge like the old days. I'm yet to see any problems with the MCH in the Athlon 64 and Corsair or Kingston RAM.

You don't NEED to tweak a lot on an AMD based system. You just can. On an Intel system your options are usually more limited, but you're certainly nto required to mess with anything just because you CAN.
 
Guys please don't be a fan boy or bias here, it just that i want to know which one would be more stable under load and gaming and etc.
 
I'm not being a f*nboy, I'm telling it like it is. If the chips are running in spec and you aren't using the most godawful motherboard, chipset or RAM known to man, both are perfectly stable. You just have to worry about heat and power more with the P4. Either way, in games, worry more about your video card. But you will want an A64 for the best possible framerates in most games. The other tasks vary, generally P4s outperform A64s in media encoding and some forms of software rendering, while A64s outperform P4s in dynamic work-- non-CS photoshop, most content creation, audio and video EDITING, scientific apps, compiling/decompiling, and obviously, gaming (and some forms of software rendering. Depends on the app and exact task).
 
I have both an AMD 64 and an INTEL P4 2.8 northwood. Both are stable,take your choice.
An unstable system is more than likely memory or some other pheperial or a bad software issue.
 
if the computer is properly configured, with quality PSU and there are no hardware compatibility issues either one should be as stable as the other...
 
....we're an Intel house, and I don't "worry" about heat issues. Our systems run 24 / 7 and are all very, very reliable. Usually, the only reboots are for driver updates and those aren't all that often.

Earlier posters are on the money. AMD got a bad rap due to early VIA and SIS chipsets that were uniformly crappy. That was five to six years ago; I can't say how they are these days as "stay away" was very sound advice, and I've followed it....:D

Not much debate that the current AMD parts are eating Intel's lunch in the performance / gaming department. But - in the stability department, give me an Intel CPU on an intel motherboard, or at least an Intel chipset MoBo. This is what many of the bigger IT shops are running, and for good reason.

Truth is - both companies are very, very good anymore. Solid drivers and a clean OS install probably matters more than the hardware does, with a few notable exceptions.

Regards - B.B.S.
 
They are both stable if you know what you are doing. There is no take sides here for stability. Just like what was stated earlier if you have good components to put in it and they are compatible it should run stable out of the box. If you F with the bios then guess what unstability can happen. What some of you seem to be doing to taking sides is looking at the overclocking perspective of stability.

John's Terms:

AMD: Stable
Intel: Stable
Both with crap components or bios tweaks gone bad: Unstable
 
I know this might be a rehash, but....

It's really the matter of the components used. any one or even combo of components can make a system not stable. I have been running AMD system for some time now, and I have has some very good luck with system stability.

Anyways, I think both camps can suffer form the same problems, and that compared to AMD or Intel vs. stability both do not have advantage in that department.

Intel heat. It is true that heat can lead to stability problems. and that Intel has some heat concerns, but I think with proper cooling methods that it's not that big of concern. Both AMD and Intel system can have stability problems if heat is not handled within a system...
 
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