AMD vs MAC vs Intel

maybe only if AMD is in Antartica and Intel in Sahara

 

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shadarlocoth, where did you get a PC like that with 5 gigs of RAM for that price?

I have been looking at tigerdirect.ca, they seem to have some of the best online prices. I might get my video card off of eBay. Since I have not gons shopping fer a video card for a long time, does anyone have any suggestions? I want to try out Doom 3, so I need something with power.

So what is the difference between this: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=716809&Sku=P450-8511

and this: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1009364&Sku=E145-6802

I can't afford the second one unless I get a huge deal on everything else.

What is the best video card for the price? Any suggestions?

I have decided to go with an Intel Hyper-threading processor since programs always seem to work better with Intel. I need a good Video Card to support it.

 

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go Intel go Intel

*cough*i have intel stocks*cough*

Buy Intel, go Intel go Intel.

only took a quick glance at the gfx cards, but damn your have to look deep in your pocket to get the last one

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, also note it got "only" DVI output, not a bad thing unless you get a older monitor.

 

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vslayer: AMD is about the same price as intel for the speed you get, and it is a fact that AMD CPUs operate at a higher temperature than intel. therefore, with an intel system, you have great performance, as well as less system becuase the fans do not have to run as high

ilikesalt: he did not say 5gb of RAM, he said 1.5gb....it is impossible to have more than 4 gb of RAM in a 32bit system, more than that cannot be allocated. really, anything more than 1gb or 1.5gb is overkill for the average user, even if u plan on playing doom 3 a lot...go with a high end graphics card over more system memory if you want better gaming performance. i would suggest the new ATI X800 line of video cards...they are a bit expensive, but their performance will play any game today, even doom 3 at high settings with no problem.
this one looks really cool: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-161-119&depa=0
it has better performance than the geforce 6800, a very cool (no pun intended) cooling system, and is much lower in price than the geforce

 

That looks like a great video card. The price is still a bit high, but II'm still shopping around.

 

Look for what provides the best performance for your price range.

 

I'm not exactly sure what kind of performance I want...

I want something that won't go obsolete in the next year and that can run the latest games (like Doom 3) with maxed out (or almost maxed out) settings.

I heard that PCI express cards are better than AGP ones. I'm reading a lot lately. What is your opinion on PCI express (16x) cards?

 

Then you will want a Athlon 64 FX with more then 512MB of DDR400 (two sticks for duel channeling of course) and a Radeon X800 or Geforce 6600.

PCI express are rare on motherboards but sure you want max performance go for it, it won't help you mcuh thought maybe in a few years it will have been worth it but not now.

edit please read refreances:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2149&p=7

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http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040310/index.html

 

Thanks for the chart WellCookedFetus,

Pentium 4 EE is the Extreme Edition and Pentium 4 E is Hyper-Threading and Pentium 4 C is normal, right?

 

All of them have hyperthreading, but as performance goes EE>E>C

hyperthreading is the ability to run more then one thread at a time, processors with this feature on can run two thread at the same time simulating dual processing. This feature is very useful in doing multiple tasks, but few games are design to take advantage of multiple processing (multiple simultaneous threads). Doom3 like Quake 3 is design to take advantage multiple simultaneous threads, even so the P4 simple is no match for the Athlon 64’s on-die memory controller with extermely low latancy, hypertransport channel and 3Dnow.

Multiple threading is the future though, processor years from now will most likely run dozens of thread simultaneously or have multiple processing units on one chip. To give you a understand of why this is so important: the best neurons in the human brain can fire about 200 times in a second for a short burst, that would be about 200hz in computer language, extremely slow yes but the human brain runs billions of neurons in parallel doing different task simultaneously, equivalent to running billions of threads simultaneously.

 

To clear up some common anti-Mac info (though I do love Ctrl-Alt-Del), the G5 is very capable processor, and the only chip of the three 64-bit desktop chips which can claim direct parentage from mainframe/server processors (which has its advantages).

That and it seems the G5 Powerbook may very well be announced Monday (based on some Paris Expo advertisements - "Then: Super Computer on your desktop. Now:_______. Paris Macworld"). The G5 iMacs will be announced monday, for sure (already sub-announced last month in the midst of the "oops, we ran out of iMacs to sell you" debacle), but the price/performance for the iMac has always been sub-par.


What you should get really depends on what you are planning on doing with the machine. From the sound of things, the amount of non-console (xbox, PS2, etc) gaming you are planning on doing will largley removes Apple from your possible choices. While there is a healthy gaming market for Mac games, 95% of them are ports; they do not run as fast or as smoothly as their Windows counterparts. It is a major downside of having <5% of the installed userbase of personal computer systems.
Doom 3 will be released for Mac OS X sometime this fall, buut currently the official ship date for it is "when it's done", which isn't too promising.

further applicable tech notes:
1)AMD vs Intel. IME, and in the Expirience of many others, AMD chips are comparible to Intel offerings, for less money. For those of us who care about the Engineering asthetics of the underlying hardware, AMD chips were designed to be efficient and powerful. Intel chips were designed to run as fast as possible, efficiency and future advancement be damned.
This is why today you have a 3.4 Ghz Pentium 4 that isn't able to keep up with Athlon XP chips running at 2.1 Ghz, or G5 chips (IBM's 970, and now 970FX) running at 2.0Ghz. Intel lengthend the instruction pipeline to insane levels; this allows for more clock cycles per second, but causes serious real-world speed penalties when pipe bubbles or branch mis-predictions occur.
This is also why Intel has recently changed their marketing numbers, as they move away from the P4 "netburst" arcitecure, over to the much cleaner and more AMD and G5 methods used in the Pentium M (which can keep up with a Pentium 4 3.0 ghz while running at a paltry 1.6 Ghz).

2)My personal preference is the macintosh, because I use Windows 2k and XP all day at work, and hate the way it functions. And all too often, the way it breaks (1 registry file=1 point of failure=poor OS design). I would use Linux, but it's not *quite* there yet as an everyday desktop OS. I used it all the time back in college, and attempt it again every few months, but I still feel like I spending more time fixing and tweaking the system than I am using it. Plus, most games don't run under Linux w/o help from WINE, which incurs its own performance hit.
So, I get all the benifits of Linux with Mac OS X (based on a customised FreeBSD/Mach subsystem/kernel), no windows type spyware/viruses/vulnerabilities, *PLUS* MS Office and Photoshop and Garageband and Final Cut Pro (video editing) *and* gcc all on one machine.
And I do all my gaming on my PS2.


Specifically in reponse to WellCooked's post:
3)hyperthreading is not quite how you defined it. all modern chips and all modern OS's have the ability to multi-task, and more importantly, run multi-threaded applications (run peices of related code seperate from other code in the same application), and run instruction OO (Out of Order).
Hyper threading has to to with the method of handing the threads as they enter the processor's insctruction pipline - it reduces the chances of pipeline stalls due to one thread stalling out. So instead of "hyperthreading is the ability to run more then one thread at a time", its closer to "hyperthreading is the ability to actively handle more then one thread in the pipeline/CPU instruction queue". The processor's ALU (where the number crunching is done) only handles one instruction at a time .
Also, because Intel has not yet full implimenting operation grouping, the hyperthreading performance gains have been so far unimpressive.

4)Most modern games are also built threaded, however, games don't benifit as much from OOE and a threaded design, because everything is very sequential in games - much of the instruction code can't be heavily threaded, because it is dependant on everything else. Game really have four main threads: audio, video, UI, and background processing; each thread handles its own thing independantly of the others. It very difficult to break up one of those threads (say graphics) in any effective way.

5)AMD and gaming performance. You are correct in AMD's power in gaming right now, and as you hinted at, it's due to the XP 64's bandwidth, more so than the processing power. Getting information from RAM->CPU->GPU is much, much faster on the current AMD systems than on the 800mhz FSB Pentium systems.

6)multi-core chips: AMD has multi-core CPU's in t he works, the IBM POWER5 is multi-core, and the 980 (Apple G6) will most likely be dual-core as well. Motorola is presenting a dual-core G4 chip in October, which should be available for sale in PPC-based desktops before the end of Q1 '05.

7)Brain power vs computer power: that's my main theory of true AI, we may not see true AI until we have machines where every bit of memory is also a CPU.

good luck!

edit: reference material from my favorite tech site, ARStechnica.com. Most of the above theory info is from my college professor, all the CPU model specific info is from Hannibal the guys over on the ARStech boards.

introduction to microprocessor terminology and technology:
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/c/cpu/part-1/cpu1-1.html

multithreading & hyperthreading
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/h/hyperthreading/hyperthreading-1.html

explination of the the CPU pipeline
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/c/cpu/part-2/cpu2-1.html

pentium history part I
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/004/pentium-1/pentium-1-1.html
part II
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/004/pentium-2/pentium-2-1.html
Pentium future
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/004/prescott-future/prescott-1.html

The 64 bit argument in the Intel/AMD world
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/x86-64/x86-64-1.html

introduction to the 970: part I
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc970-1.html
Part II
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/ppc970/ppc970-0.html
(you should be noticing alot of similarities between all these chips by now)
Addendum
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/03q2/ppc970-interview/ppc970-interview-1.html

and the article only an Apple geek could love:
http://arstechnica.com/cpu/004/ppc-1/ppc-1-1.html

 

the multitasking to modern processor is simple stopping one task run over to another and then running back, at any one instant a processor is doing one instruction, there are some exceptions but those are in limited acts of caclutions, but in whole a processor is serial and cannot run in parrelel.

 

yeah. there is some level of simultainious instruction execution in the ALU of most processors (one integer, two fast integer, one FPU calculation might all be dispatched in one clock), but for the most part it's one instruction at a time once you get to the actual computation.