AMD or Intel Processor??

[Gabriel Adei]

Ok I am considering building a new rig (first time) and I want to push the $$ a little but not too far. I am torn between AMD and Intel reveiws and would like some candid [Mod - Happy Thoughts]essment from folks. Plz do a performace/cost benifit reveiw with real experiences or close to that. Overclocking potential, heat generation etc.

 

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor - $222.90

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor - $317.00

 

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Windsor 2.8GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor - $179.00

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor 3.0GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor - $222.99

 

Will appreciate some feed back to this before I go shopping and if you have any other in mind will like to hear that too. And some good motherboard to go with your selection might not be bad. Thx all in advance.

[Wycliffe Barrett]

Keep away from all that overclocking nonsense and buy the Intel E6600 its actually better than the e6700 which in actaul fact is the E6600 but slightly overclocked by Intel.

 

It's a little technical but as you know most things have an operational tolerance above 100%.

 

With the intel chips as with the amd chips They release a chip and then suddenly a whole bunch of others come out almost at the same time.

 

Basically you get say an E600 and that is the chip running at 100% all othere derivitives of that chip are in fact the same product but slightly overclocked and so get a different designatiion number.

 

My understanding is that the even numbers E6400 e6600 etc are the 100% chips and any thing inbetween are the overclocked chips. Overclocking as we all know produces more heat and so therefore more opporrtunities to burn out and fail.

 

so your caught between a rock and a hard place as they say.

 

but i would still by Intel and thats from an ex AMD user.

[Luke Harvest 929620]

The E6600 is better than the FX-62

[Gabriel Adei]

Thx u guys. After all the research and ur suggestions I came up with this shopping list. Building next wk

 

VGA XFX PVT80GGHE4 8800GTS 320MB

CPU INTEL|C2D E6600 2.4G 775 4M

MEM 1Gx2|CRUCIAL BL2KIT12864AA804

HD 320G|ST 7K 16M SATA2 ST3320620AS

XFX nForce 680i SLI Ready Socket 775 ATX Motherboard

XP Pro 32 Bit

 

Fingers crossed. I will let u know how I make out. Thx so much.

[Matthew Kreilein 881422]

I have heard that on 7/22, Intel will do some price dropping. A QUAD core will go from $500 to $270-ish. If you can wait a month...do so. That's what I'm doing.

[Wycliffe Barrett]

Gabriel

 

Just a comment nice shopping list you'll do well with that. Also I see your going for XP which is an excellent choice.

 

Keep away from VISTA for a while yet. I notice that your mobo is SLI ready. SLI is a bit of a misnomer, you can set up two cards SLi'ed together but they will not have any impact on framerates at all. It was a bit of a con.

 

Your far bnetter off getting your duo cores working. With FSX and SP1 multicore capability is initialised.

 

Keep your FS2004 sim you'll be achieveing 100fps but turn it down to 30 and it will be like silk.

[Gabriel Adei]

I cant wait to see FS9 silk operation. Finally going away from all the stuttering and 2-3FPS during landings on VATSIM even if there are no other pilot at the airport. I have FSX but I have shelved it for a while. Wycliffe, what do u mean FSX with SP1 is multicore capability initialised? Does that mean it runs better on the multi core than FS9? Oh well I c I am already counting my chicks before..... Just excited I finally made a move to build a new rig. The old one will run all my peripherals. I tried to squeeze every juice out of it and it was still not cutting it. The 2.4 P4 just wasnt good any more even with the added 2G memory and a Geforce 7600GS AGP. It was ok when I got it in '03.

So you dont think I shd get another Geforce 8800GTS to SLI it. I have read some reviews that people have been satisfied withthe SLI. So u think its more of a hype huh. Anyway even if I decide to go to SLI it wont been anytime soon.

Matt thx for the heads up on the price drop. I cant wait any longer. I believe the price wars will go on for ever. By the time I get into Quad core we'll be buying it for buck . All the video cards would have droped in price too. I read some reveiws when people bought this same E6600 for over $400. Now its just over $200. If I wait I am sure to wait again for the price drop of the Geforece 8800GTX. Thx guys!

[Wycliffe Barrett]

Gabriel Said

 

I cant wait to see FS9 silk operation. Finally going away from all the stuttering and 2-3FPS during landings on VATSIM even if there are no other pilot at the airport. I have FSX but I have shelved it for a while. Wycliffe, what do u mean FSX with SP1 is multicore capability initialised? Does that mean it runs better on the multi core than FS9?

 

2-3fps my god when you get your new rig running you will have to pick your jaw up off the grd.

 

FSX! Ok in the past month Microsoft released Service Pack 1 which gave a 20% - 40% increase in FPS, I can vouch for this even though on my machine which is not dissimilar to your new setup I was already getting 30fps.

 

FS9 is not multicore functional only FSX with SP1, but with your suggested rig it wont matter Fs9 will be incredible, believe me.

 

If you have been dissapointed with FSX install it, get service pack 1 from www.fsinsider.com and see for yourself.

 

Sli! yes its a con, don't waste the money on another card. Use the money to get yourself two sata drives,

 

Now for the important bit Ihave three drives in my pc two 300gig Sata and 1 120 gig IDE drive.

 

XP is installed on one of the SATA'a along with FSX and that is all, on my othere SATA I have my Horizon Generation X vfr Scenery and some addons (not many)

 

On my old 120 gig IDE drive I have Fs9 all sliders maxed to the right, my addons for that and my VFR PhotoScenery of the UK. I have all my VATSIM software, FSinn, Vroute, servinfo etc on this drive. I also have all my apps such as photo editing, web design stuff and all sorts of other stuff. Don't forget I can achieve 100fps in FS2004 on this old IDE drive no problem.

 

If you can keep FS9 and FSX on seperate drives of their own I know it's a large dollar outlay but the benifits are staggering in keeping everything seperate.

 

So I think thats it, let us know how you get on.

[Larry James 901346]

Hi, Wycliffe. You seem to be very knowledgeable about your computer hardware and configuration. However, I believe you’re mistaken to think it makes a difference about where FSX and FS9 are installed in relationship with each other. If they were sharing some type of functionality it’s always better and more efficient to have access spread out between multiple drives. This would cut down in access time, as it would require less head motion. However, since the applications are totally independent of each other, it doesn’t matter optimum wise, where they are located in reference to each other.

 

For convenience, I always retained them on the same physical drive. I recently did an OS reinstall and didn’t reinstall FS9 this time. I might reinstall it later because I’m trying to learn more about Instrument reading, and I know there were some fair instrument lessons in FS9. I didn’t find the equivalent in FSX.

 

I also notice your strong adverse to Vista. It’s slow in some aspects such as file copy, move, and deleting, but it seems to run the applications that I use more efficiently than XP. Some of the main applications being Premiere and FSX... I’m sure the built-in DX10 will do well for FSX when the support for it is updated. So for that reason, getting started with becoming familiar with the Vista environment might not be a bad thing.

 

Oh yea, it also has a lot of annoying security prompts when installing programs and changing configurations. I’ve kind of gotten used to answering the prompts, and the warnings to a novice computer user might be a good thing to help them avoid incidentally or accidentally installing something when they didn’t know they were making a system change. As far as the file operations, I usually do many of those functions from the command prompt when I don’t want to wait.

 

There are annoyances with the OS, but a person eventually gets used to them, just like we’ve gotten used to the many annoyances of XP.

 

Again, I see you know your hardware, and I’m sure, you’ve already considered all the ins and outs of Vista. I just thought I’d throw out a matter for consideration on the OS point.

 

-- L. D. James

 

--

L. D. James

[email protected]

www.apollo3.com/~ljames

[Wycliffe Barrett]

I hear what your saying larry

 

Its just that having tested a number of FS9 FSX configurations in relation to hard drives etc I feel that sepearte drives works best, especially if we add in the head seek variable3 and the fragmentation of files and folders and the impact that has on head seek times.

 

I maybe talking a load of waffle but it works for me, and besides which what else am I going to aspend all my hard earned cash on.

 

Computers my wife and fine single malt whisky. Nuff said.

[Paul Byrne]

Hi Wycliffe,

 

Single malt? eugh! I'm a Bourbon man myself.

 

Quick question about your setup. I'm going to be getting a couple of new hard drives over the next few months and was thinking of setting them up in a RAID config for even faster access times. Do you do this? Or if you don't, any specific reason?

 

Cheers!

Paul.

[Matthew Kreilein 881422]

I knew I had real data here somewhere.

 

As mentioned, wait ~30 days and you'll save a BUNDLE on a better CPU...

 

http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6451862

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aXLuplwhw8wM&refer=home

[Wycliffe Barrett]

There is a lot all over the web about serial raid setups but as far as i know the whole raid array setup situation is a little like the sli discussion.

 

It's hard to find any real benifits of having raid arrays.

 

Wikipedia

Standard RAID levels

Main article: Standard RAID levels

A quick summary of the most commonly used RAID levels:

 

RAID 0: Striped Set (2 disks minimum) without parity. Provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance from disk errors or disk failure. Any disk failure destroys the array, which becomes more likely with more disks in the array. The reason a single disk failure destroys the entire array is because when data is written to a RAID 0 drive, the data is broken into "fragments". The number of fragments is dictated by the number of disks in the drive. Each of these fragments are written to their respective disks simultaneously on the same sector. This allows the entire chunk of data to be read off the drive in parallel, giving this type of arrangement huge bandwidth. When one sector on one of the disks fails though, the corresponding sector on every other disk is rendered useless because part of the data is now corrupted. RAID 0 does not implement error checking so any error is unrecoverable. More disks in the drive means higher bandwidth, but greater risk of data loss.

RAID 1: Mirrored Set (2 disks minimum) without parity. Provides fault tolerance from disk errors and single disk failure. Increased read performance occurs when using a multi-threaded operating system that supports split seeks, very small performance reduction when writing. Array continues to operate so long as at least one drive is functioning.

RAID 3 and RAID 4: Striped Set (3 disk minimum) with Dedicated Parity, the parity bits represent a memory location each, they have a value of 0 or 1, whether the given memory location is empty or full, thus enhancing the speed of read and write. Provides improved performance and fault tolerance similar to RAID 5, but with a dedicated parity disk rather than rotated parity stripes. The single disk is a bottle-neck for writing since every write requires updating the parity data. One minor benefit is the dedicated parity disk allows the parity drive to fail and operation will continue without parity or performance penalty.

RAID 5: Striped Set (3 disk minimum) with Distributed Parity. Distributed parity requires all but one drive to be present to operate; drive failure requires replacement, but the array is not destroyed by a single drive failure. Upon drive failure, any subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that the drive failure is masked from the end user. The array will have data loss in the event of a second drive failure and is vulnerable until the data that was on the failed drive is rebuilt onto a replacement drive.

RAID 6: Striped Set (4 disk minimum) with Dual Distributed Parity. Provides fault tolerance from two drive failures; array continues to operate with up to two failed drives. This makes larger RAID groups more practical. This is becoming a popular choice for SATA drives as they approach 1 Terabyte in size. This is because the single parity RAID levels are vulnerable to data loss until the failed drive is rebuilt. The larger the drive, the longer the rebuild will take. With dual parity, it gives the array time to rebuild onto a large drive with the ability to sustain another drive failure.

 

[edit] Nested RAID levels

Main article: Nested RAID levels

Many storage controllers allow RAID levels to be nested. That is, one RAID can use another as its basic element, instead of using physical drives. It is instructive to think of these arrays as layered on top of each other, with physical drives at the bottom.

 

Nested RAIDs are usually signified by joining the numbers indicating the RAID levels into a single number, sometimes with a '+' in between. For example, RAID 10 (or RAID 1+0) conceptually consists of multiple level 1 arrays stored on physical drives with a level 0 array on top, striped over the level 1 arrays. In the case of RAID 0+1, it is most often called RAID 0+1 as opposed to RAID 01 to avoid confusion with RAID 1. However, when the top array is a RAID 0 (such as in RAID 10 and RAID 50), most vendors choose to omit the '+', though RAID 5+0 is more informative.

 

 

[edit] Common nested RAID levels

RAID 0+1: Striped Set + Mirrored Set (4 disk minimum; Even number of disks) provides fault tolerance and improved performance but increases complexity. The key difference from RAID 1+0 is that RAID 0+1 creates a second striped set to mirror a primary striped set. The Array continues to operate with one or more drives failed in the same mirror set, but if two or more drives fail on different sides of the mirroring, the data on the RAID system is lost.

RAID 1+0: Mirrored Set + Striped Set (4 disk minimum; Even number of disks) provides fault tolerance and improved performance but increases complexity. The key difference from RAID 0+1 is that RAID 1+0 creates a striped set from a series of mirrored drives. The array can sustain multiple drive losses as long as no two drives lost comprise a single pair of one mirror.

RAID 5+0: A stripe across distributed parity RAID systems

RAID 5+1: A mirror striped set with distributed parity (some manufacturers label this as RAID 53)

 

[edit] Non-standard RAID levels

Main article: Non-standard RAID levels

Given the large amount of custom configurations available with a RAID array, many companies, organizations, and groups have created their own non-standard configurations, typically designed to meet at least one but usually very small niche groups of arrays. Most of these non-standard RAID levels are proprietary.

 

Some of the more prominent modifications are:

 

ATTO Technology's DVRAIDâ„¢ adds parity RAID protection to systems which demand performance for 4K film, 2K film, high-definition audio and video.

The Storage Computer Corporation uses RAID 7, which adds caching to RAID 3 and RAID 4 to improve performance.

EMC Corporation offers RAID S as an alternative to RAID 5 on their Symmetrix systems.

RAID-Z in the zfs filesystem of OpenSolaris solves the "write hole" problem of RAID-5.

 

Nuff said

[Paul Byrne]

Hi,

 

Thanks for that. Looks like I'll keep them seperate as there seems to be pros and cons [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ociated with it, so I'll keep the status quo.

 

Cheers!

Paul.

[Gabriel Adei]

Wow Matt. It looks like the prices are really going to come down. But oh well I guess I could not wait. In a year or so I will upgrade to the quad when they have another price drop. My current FPS is really annoying to wait any longer. Thx a lot for the heads up though. Btw are applications supporting quad cores yet. Cos these have not even been in the market for over 6mths. If FSX was just rewritten with SP1 to support 2 core, I wonder the real benifit of quad if applications out there are not designed to use it yet.

[Wycliffe Barrett]

SP1 is multicore, so if you havi four it will utilise four.

 

bears some thinking about if you can afford one now, personally get the duo wait for the price drop on the quads next year and drop one into your board then.

[Gabriel Adei]

Yeah Wy I am sticking with this shopping list for now. I just cant wait any longer. Next year I might consider and upgrade if necessary. What do u guys think or know about the PhysX by Ageia. Does it do any good for FS or is one of the hypes? Thx

[Wycliffe Barrett]

Stick with what your getting not much has been written for the Physix cards includig FSX.

[Gabriel Adei]

Well sticking with the shopping list below I am happy to annouce that my build is complete. Infact I cant believe how relatively easy it was and is to build a computer these days. I guess the most difficult aspect of it was really the research. Thx to all that provided input for me. The Cheif pilot at my VA's direction to Tom's Hardware was wonderful. Must read if you want to build something. Everything posted well and running on stock settings. Took my first flight from CYOW to KORD last night in an E170 running FS9. Every slider to the right. FSInn running on the old P4. It started around 40fps on the ground in CYOW. Only two other planes there. Once I reached cruise of FL360 it stabilized around 60-70fps with occasional jumps to as high as 117fps. However at full 3D clouds it only managed 20-25fps. The clould density I think I will tame down since the coverage was too much. Coming into KORD the place was packed with pilots and I had a none stuttering stable approach at about 20fps. I must say I like this build and so far seems to be working well. Not that I need all those 60+ fps but i left it unlimited just to see how far it will go since I've heard others report 200+ Now I know its possible. I will try locking it at 25-30FPS. But all in all I am happy. The total damage was less than $1.2K. Thats as much as I paid for my 03 Dell which is now relegated to the background. Well the damage is going to go up as the old lady wants something from Tiffany.com to compensate. Oh well what can I say. Keep everyone happy and life will be happy.

Thanks all