[Pc_Support] AnandTech on Dual-Core Athlon64 ... impressions of single-core Athlon64 3200+

[Bryan J. Smith]

Although AMD does not plan to ship a dual-core Athlon64 in volume until
Q3/Q4, and only selling more premium costing dual-core Opterons for now,
they have been releasing samples for testing.  AnandTech has a review
here:  
  http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2410  

As I posted before, I upgraded to a MicroATX nForce4 (standard) with a
single-core Athlon64 3200+ (S939, 2.0GHz, 512KB L2, 90nm).  I have been
very happy and a little disappointed with it at the same time, coming
from a dual-Athlon MP2400+ (S462, 2.0GHz, 256KB L2, 130nm).

It's definitely a tad faster for gaming in both Windows and Linux, and
especially at UT2004 GNU64/Linux64.

As far as multitasking, the pre-empt patch in Linux 2.6 is far more
responsive than a single processor was in Linux 2.4 without it.  But
it's still not as nice as dual-CPUs at times.  I'm sure another reason
for some "stalls" when multitasking is due to running on a single ATA
device, instead of my RAID-1 or RAID-0+1 configurations where reads
could be load-balanced.

So, I figure later in the year I'll upgrade to an Athlon64 x2 4200+
(2.2x2, 512KB) or 4400+ (2.2x2, 1MB), or whatever is the "best bang for
the buck."  Hopefully _real_ hardware PCI x1 ATA RAID controllers will
be out by then, or maybe I'll just use Linux's LVM2 software RAID on the
nVidia's SATA channels (and leave XP non-RAID'd, but I'll image a copy
in Linux of the C: drive regularly -- which is good for bringing it back
to a past state anyway).

I'll definitely upgrade the case to at least a 7"x13"x13" MicroATX from
it's current 5.5"x12"x12" form with limited cooling.  I might look at a
MicroATX case that takes a full ATX power supply (they exist) if my
current 450W MicroATX P.S. can't take both the dual-core CPU and GeForce
6800GT PCIe video card.  I'll check that before upgrading the case.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                 b.j.smith at ieee.org 
----------------------------------------------------------------- 
Beware of those who define their preference in terms of hate of
another option, and not on the positive merits of their selection