Which Processor is better for my uses?

[Hate_Bot]

I'm having a hard time deciding, between an AMD Athlon 64 3200+, and an P4 3.2 ghz 800mhz FSB with HT.

Gaming will be 40% of mycomputer uses. Another 10% will be basic stuff (Web, word, etc..) another 40% will be doing some (alot) of video editing, pretty heavy stuff (hour+ long movies) and it's pretty important. THe last 10% will be doing some minor (still learning) coding etc...

So ya, with my uses in minde, which would be the better processor?

(Might possibly OC, slim chance, but it's a possibility)

Thanks

 

[Peach]

The P4 just because it has HT. You'll get more performance in video editing and encoding with HT, and multitasking will be alot faster than on the A64, it will be like 5% slower in games though.

 

[Scali]

I vote for the P4 aswell, simply because the points in which it is weaker, don't really matter that much. So what if you get a few fps less in games? They're still very playable and enjoyable... On the other hand, video encoding takes a long time and it's boring to wait, so the shorter it takes, the better.
As for coding, well I always like Intel CPUs because they offer the latest features to experiment with (HTT, SSE3 for example)... Although AMD gave us 64 bit first, this time.

 

[ameoba]

I dunno how well that argument holds up... Slower performance in games is something you'll notice whereas video-encoding is the type of thing you start & just walk away from.

 

[Big Worm]

I dunno how well that argument holds up... Slower performance in games is something you'll notice whereas video-encoding is the type of thing you start & just walk away from.

what are you talking about??

You wont notice a 5-10% slowdown in games if you have a decent video card,

and heeell no... I dont just get up and walk away from an encoding half the time, usually I am waiting browsing the net or messenging on aim and possibly playing a game or two... first off... the P4 will encode alot faster especially since the HT will help in multitasking while encoding, not to mention its possible at all to play a game or do general surfing and messenging while heavy encoding. On an AMD setup its painful doing anything while the cpu is under load.


PS: you should just get an ES chip.

 

[ImLazZzy]

flip a coin ---- head ot tail.... either one you just paranoid...

 

[steviep]

The P4 will offer you a better experience while doing your video stuff. Losing 10FPS in games is worth the responsiveness you'll gain when the CPU is under full load encoding.

 

[Peach]

I think if you were just orientated on building this PC for just doing ONE thing and ONE thing only, the AMD would be a better choice, but the P4 covers the spectrum while taking a miniscule performance hit.

 

[Formula383]

I have owned both amd and intel

from my experience i like the intel better
i do aproxametly the same as you for uses of my computer
my old 2200 mobile athlonXP @ 2.7Ghz is about the same fps as my 3.0e intel @ 3.9
however the intel plays much nicer and can host games MUCH better
My friend just bought a Athlon 64 3200+ and he runs it @ 2.5Ghz tho i havent used it for hosting games i can tell you that it's fast for installing games and playing them, oh and windows boot times are supper, now if he wants to watch a movie and do any type of other activity his movie will pause untill other work is done! My 3.9 doesnt sniff when i multi task.

So basicly i would take the intel over amd.... however theres one more thing Price! the amd system is quite a bit cheeper in many ways... so if you care to here more i will go into detail about why, but i gtg for now

_______________________________________________________________
Current System:
3.0e @ 3.9 1.488v core
OCZ 4400 2x512MB 3-4-4-8 MEM (realy great over clocking ram btw)
Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G (springdale) (only bought this mobo becase it was cheep and has nice holes for mounting north bridge water block + still waiting for my epox board to come back, this board is crap for good mem scores cant run t1 unless you want to run like 100mhz fsb tryed 4 diff brands of memory too good backup board for cheep tho)
Leadtek 6800GT @ 415-1.12
2 40gb wd 2mb sillicon image chipset raid0 pulling 85-88MB/s
1 250gb wd 8mb
cheap o case and 600w ps

 

[(cf)Eclipse]

now if he wants to watch a movie and do any type of other activity his movie will pause untill other work is done! My 3.9 doesnt sniff when i multi task.

while i respect everything else you said, this one part stuck out at me.
people who have video/music stuttering when putting a load on their system must have something improperly configured in their system.

an example: the other day, i was watching the new naruto episode on one monitor, rendering a terragen scene in the background, and randomly browsing the forum on the other monitor. no stuttering, no slowdowns.

yeah, there are times when the system lags. that seems to be mostly when i'm downloading something from campus network at 10mb/s. somewhat heavy hit from the onboard nic, and opening programs is slowed down severely due to the hard drive being written to at the same time. anything that is purely cpu related doesn't slow down at all, it's just when something needs hd time. the way to fix this though, is not to get a faster cpu, but a faster hd drive. or a second one and go raid.

 

[Scali]

while i respect everything else you said, this one part stuck out at me.
people who have video/music stuttering when putting a load on their system must have something improperly configured in their system.

Not really. Sometimes applications are just written poorly.
For example, PowerDVD... it runs with normal priority... This means that even if I have something simple like my webbrowser in the foreground, and I scroll through a page, PowerDVD won't get enough cycles to prefetch the next data from the DVD in time, and it will skip. If you use Task Manager to set the priority to Above normal, it will be fine.
But with HyperThreading, you simply won't run into such problems that easily, because you can run more than one thread simultaneously, so you don't have to go and tweak your priorities all the time. Which is nice.

 

[(cf)Eclipse]

i don't tweak priority settings.

i think my point wasn't as much that HT is needed for smooth computer usage, but a decent base for the processor power. good hard drive that's kept defragged. enough ram. those kinds of things. if you go match a 4200rpm laptop drive to a 3.73EE, you'll have amazing slowdowns every time you try to open a file.
but if you have two raptors in a raid, you shouldn't notice much of a problem when trying to get data off the drive.

basic moral of the story, have as many threads/cores as you want, but you can only make one hard drive access at a time. more ram and well written applications can prevent the slowdowns that most people see with any system when trying to do what you just described.

 

[Scali]

i don't tweak priority settings.

i think my point wasn't as much that HT is needed for smooth computer usage, but a decent base for the processor power. good hard drive that's kept defragged. enough ram. those kinds of things. if you go match a 4200rpm laptop drive to a 3.73EE, you'll have amazing slowdowns every time you try to open a file.
but if you have two raptors in a raid, you shouldn't notice much of a problem when trying to get data off the drive.

basic moral of the story, have as many threads/cores as you want, but you can only make one hard drive access at a time. more ram and well written applications can prevent the slowdowns that most people see with any system when trying to do what you just described.

It doesn't work that way. Ofcourse a fast HDD is nice, but I was talking about a DVD skipping (or even a CD, they skip too). That's not a case of the hardware being too slow, obviously, but rather a case of the thread not being scheduled in time. That problem is just a lot smaller when your clockspeed is higher and you can run multiple threads simultaneously. And that sort of thing is what makes the P4s work so much smoother.

 

[Big Worm]

i don't tweak priority settings.

i think my point wasn't as much that HT is needed for smooth computer usage, but a decent base for the processor power. good hard drive that's kept defragged. enough ram. those kinds of things. if you go match a 4200rpm laptop drive to a 3.73EE, you'll have amazing slowdowns every time you try to open a file.
but if you have two raptors in a raid, you shouldn't notice much of a problem when trying to get data off the drive.

basic moral of the story, have as many threads/cores as you want, but you can only make one hard drive access at a time. more ram and well written applications can prevent the slowdowns that most people see with any system when trying to do what you just described.

I really dont care what you say to convince me, a HT CPU will be faster for multitasking period, even my old wd SE 8 meg cache IDE drive can deliver data fast enough, not to mention dual channel on a P4 is quite wide enough.

 

[(cf)Eclipse]

just because i feel that i am still being misunderstood, i was NOT saying that HT doesn't improve performance. it does. nowhere did i say what you guys appear to be thinking.. i said that it's important to have a good rig to feed the data to your cpu.

and scali, what you say is true. there's no getting around the fact that in order to play a movie, the video card needs the data from the cpu to render the movie on screen. however, you shouldn't need much of a system to play a DVD and scroll through a web page without stuttering. my old p3 733 could do that just fine if i turned off smooth scrolling. my 2500+ at 2.2ghz never had a problem either. nor does my a64. (i never had a dvd player on my pentium2 though, so i can say if that has enough power )

this is why i said what i did before about something must be improperly configured with his friend's system, because it just doesn't match up with what i find with any of my setups. no need to get uppity about about it

 

[Dan_D]

For the usage described I'd say go Intel. I've currently got both. A Pentium 4 550@3.9GHz and a AMD 3800+@Stock speeds and in games the AMD throws down an asswhipping to my Pentium 4. Otherwise the Intel setup is smoother and more responsive.

 

[MScrip]

If you're serious about video editing and encoding, you might wanna invest in a realtime video editing accelerator like the Matrox RT.X100. It encodes in real-time, so there's never any waiting for it to render. It's a PCI card that handles all of the encoding, and it's got tons of effects too.

It's pricey... but, you can spend a small fortune by always buying the fastest processors as they are released, to get shorter rendering times... or you can buy a solution that has NO rendering times!

Matrox RT.X100

 

[(cf)Eclipse]

wow, that thing looks amazing. i don't see a price anywhere though.. and probably for a good reason

 

[Hate_Bot]

If you're serious about video editing and encoding, you might wanna invest in a realtime video editing accelerator like the Matrox RT.X100. It encodes in real-time, so there's never any waiting for it to render. It's a PCI card that handles all of the encoding, and it's got tons of effects too.

It's pricey... but, you can spend a small fortune by always buying the fastest processors as they are released, to get shorter rendering times... or you can buy a solution that has NO rendering times!

Matrox RT.X100

I've heard of it. I considered getting one a while ago. Except for the fact tat here, it can cost upwards of $1300 (CDN)...

http://www.academicsuperstore.com/market/marketdisp.html?PartNo=702018


http://www.vistek.ca/details/detail_over.asp?eCode=213734&TYPE=&Specs=N&Box=N


Goddamn, it would save me SOO much time (considering that compiling a movie, on my computer, even if it's like half an hour long, take about 5 or 6 hours.... a 7 minute movie I did for school took 1 hour to compile...) So it would be awesome...

Edit: However, prior versions like the X.10

http://www.academicsuperstore.com/market/marketdisp.html?PartNo=703765

Are ALOT cheaper. Thy offer the same basic performance. The .X100 is better because of the software given with it..

 

[MScrip]

Yeah, it's expensive... but you'd save so much time with it, and you can be more creative. Sometimes, after I render a movie overnight... I'll watch the DVD and decide I need to change something. Then it needs to render for hours and hours again.

The Matrox card not only eliminates rendering time, but it's got tons of effects... PiP, 3D graphics, video overlays... you can be more creative with all that power!

It's on my list of items to buy... after I build a new computer!

Also, I'm seriously considering getting a DVD duplication tower... It kills me to burn 40 or 50 DVDs.... one at a time!

DVD Duplicator

 

[Scali]

and scali, what you say is true. there's no getting around the fact that in order to play a movie, the video card needs the data from the cpu to render the movie on screen. however, you shouldn't need much of a system to play a DVD and scroll through a web page without stuttering. my old p3 733 could do that just fine if i turned off smooth scrolling. my 2500+ at 2.2ghz never had a problem either. nor does my a64. (i never had a dvd player on my pentium2 though, so i can say if that has enough power )

As I say, you need to increase the thread priority (I am specifically talking about PowerDVD here, perhaps other DVD players have an increased priority by default, but this is just an example). It's not about the CPU speed (as I say, CDs skip too, and that includes audio CDs... which don't require any CPU power at all, because they don't even need to be decoded, they just need to read the raw audio from CD and send it to the soundcard... problem is, it needs to be done in time), it's about the thread scheduling.
And why on earth would you want to disable smooth scrolling on a brand new system?

Now please stop pretending like you don't understand, it is NOT the CPU speed. It's the scheduling.