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Socket A, 939 comparison

E

Ehren8879

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Sep 24, 2004
Messages
4,507
clock for clock what kinda of an advantage does the A64 939 hold over a Socket A processor of equal clock speed. I've got my XP running at 2.2 and wondering if upgrading is really worth it to me at this time.
 
Just as an example, http://snipershide.us/images/taint/taint_finish/settings.jpg

Clock for Clock I give the S 939 A 64's roughly a 17% advantage, keep reading tho.

Built that system last year for a friend with a 3500+ S 939 chip. His system running 2500 mhz on a 250 FSB vs my Athlon XP running 2500 mhz on a 227 MHz FSB

Super pi was scoring 34 seconds on a 1 mil super pi run on his system, mine does it in 40 seconds so 13.6% faster for his system.

3D Mark 2001, his system 25k, mine 20k, so 25% faster on his, with vid cards roughly =, 6800 GT on mine vs X800pro on his.

Memory bandwidth on his was pretty damn good, just over 6000 MB/s for both float and int, on mine it's at 3500 MB/s give or take 100.

In actual gaming.

Doom 3, 1600x1200, High quality, 4xAA, timedemo 1, 45 FPS on mine, his 36 FPS (mostly due to my Nv based card)

Half Life 2 Video Stress Test, 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF, both basicly at 78 FPS at the time.

Gaming wise I would say the systems were nearly equal depending on game tho. Synthetic benchmarks, his beat me on virtually everything I ran.

Realize tho that this was over a year ago that I last tested his system.

Overall his system was faster than mine, but not by much. Your currenty running 2200 mhz on an XP, if you could get 2500 or better on an S 939 chip it may be worth the upgrade for you, though for myself, I want dual cores running 2700 mhz at the very least and preferably 3000 mhz would be ideal for an upgrade for me.

Edit: looking at your system specs, your probably better off putting money into your drives. Just put a pair of 36 GB Raptors in RAID 0 in system for main drive and I really notice the differance.
 
Advantages are plenty, hypertransport, ondie memory controller, run cooler, 64bit capable, etc. You truely see the increase of efficiency between the sockets in everyway.
 
I have an Athlon XP 2400 in my old Compaq and an A64 3000+ Venice skt 754 in my new system. Playing HL2 on the old system, player movement was like sliding on ice - no fast, crisp movement. The A64 is nowhere near as poor. It plays at very high res and is fast and sharp. If you were to play BF2 on your system and then play it on a s939 system you'd see a major difference. Don't be trapped in the "clock for clock" comparison. You can't do that because of the differing architecture of the cpu's and video bus (AGP vs PCI-e). The s939 is a completely different animal and will crush the XP cpu in all aspects of performance. Why else do you think AMD left the XP architecture behind? It was great for its time, but its time has come and gone. If you want to play all the newest games and the ones to come shortly you'd better be upgrading soon.
 
socket 939 was based on K7(socket a). add 64 bit support, hyper transport and on die memory controller and you got K8.

i had a mobile athlon at 2500 too.
gave it to my nephew when I went to s939.
if you go dual core then I would say worth it.

other than that I would wait
 
I went from an XP clocked at 2.7GHz to an Athlon 64 3000+ at 2.6GHz.
Using a 6800GT gaming certainly was smoother and Windows ran really snappy.
even at default clock speeds the A64 felt smoother.

There are some nice improvements under the hood with the Athlon 64 chips, many of the speed increases are rarely benchmarked.
A much nicer experience :)
 
Keep your XP until the new socket comes out. Should be here this summer. That's when I was hoping to upgrade. This is the tail end of the 939 era. The question is about to be what advantage to you get from ddr2 in amd's implementation compared to 939. Sorry this doesnt answer the question, but I think it looks at the bigger picture right now.
 
I think it would be more cost effective to just buy the 939, after the M2 comes out. From what I have heard the M2 isn't that big of a step over the 939, and the DDR2 is gonna be a lot more expensive. so why not jus stick with your old DDR, and get a 939. Thats what I am gonna do once the MM2 comes out.
 
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