DFI and 2.1ghz Dothan or FX-55 and Neo 2?

I am going to be finishing off my system on one fell swoop on the 15th. Keep in mind that I have already ordered a prometia Mach 1, so that will be cooling the CPU.

Now I was originaly planning on grabbing a fx-55 and jacking it up to around 3ghz..possibly up to 3.1 or 3.2. That would be blazing fast coupled with my mushkin v2 tccd.

But then I saw the dothan benches and how a 2.4ghz blew away the fx-55 in most gaming benches and games....and hit 2.6ghz on air.

So my question is threefold:

what is a dothan 2.1 likely to hit under a prommie, can a prommie be mounted on the dfi board, and which would you take, fx-55 or dothan 2.1ghz?

FX55.

the dothan is ok at 3dmark2003 and 2005, and ok at games.
but I'd still take a overclocked FX55 anyday over the dothan.

the dothans biggest problem is it's simplest problem.
it's limited to a ancient motherboard.

Off topic...

Kunaak,
jus clicked on your photo link. that's quality work dude, and great narration... didnt look at them all but will def get round to it.
d'you snowboard or are those your mates?

use to snowboard, but don't anymore, saw too many friends get killed every year in avalanches. so now, I just hike with my friends, and do the photos.
skateboards, and surfing is enough for me.

anyways, back on topic, if you wanna talk more about it, just PM me.

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Originally Posted by Kunaak

the dothans biggest problem is it's simplest problem.
it's limited to a ancient motherboard.

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Well...as long as the performance that he´s looking for is on par and as long as the featuers he´s looking for is included...then I can´t se how the usage of an old techique can be a problem.
It´s working....and it´s working bloody well and fast.

Wait for DFI nF4 boards, and then get one with a FX55...

Isn't there a good DFI board for Dothan coming out soon/now? or was it bad?

it sucks, the Aopen is the better of the two.

yeah the Aopen board is a better choice if you want a P-M...I'd still take the overclocked FX-55...the high memory bandwidth, good benches and me just liking the FX-55

jjcom

Why go the easy way? Go the Pentium M route. I like the idea of doing something different. AMD might be going against the mainstream, but AMD is the mainstream on XS. :D

A Pentium M 2.0 will cost you roughly 1/2 of an fx55 and when a decent M board comes out, you will pwn us all. :lol:

Oh, and I just spent the day video encoding and multitasking (really, I did) with my poor, maligned Pentium 4 @ 4.4 GHz. What do you plan to do with this rig? If all you do is game and bench, that's one thing. But if you do a lot of video or 20 things at once, you have to consider the P4. I can assure you that my rig video encodes faster than most AMDs :stick: (stick for personal bragging, not to defend mutlibillion dollar corporation of which I own no stock). Try surfing the Web and sending e-mail and listening to music while encoding video on any system, and you'll know what I mean.

FWIW, I am platform agnostic, and if the FX's had hyperthreading I'd likely have one under my Vapo right now. Could still happen...

EDIT: Don't forget the 533s P-M's are coming. :rocker:

Man, I'd go with the FX-55. It's pretty fast with great mobo support. The only reason to hate the Dothan is that there's no 64 bit support and bad mobos on it.

I just went through a similar decision. I wanted P4-M cause no-one really has one.. but the options are limited.. really limited. A mATX board is just not good for a gaming system and the price/performance isn't there either.

I went with a Wenchester 3200+, glad I did, these things just totally rock for the price.

well the biggest consideration is


will the prommie work?

and all I do is game or bench. ANy word on when a new dothan board is coming out?

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Originally Posted by computerpro3

well the biggest consideration is will the prommie work?

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Well, it should fit the mounting bracket of the Aopen, but the 479 socket is lower/shorter than 478, so will it reach? Vapo evaporator can be adjusted downward. Can the Prommie evap be adjusted to reach a lower sitting chip? :confused:

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Originally Posted by computerpro3

and all I do is game or bench. ANy word on when a new dothan board is coming out?

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Wow, can I have your life? :lol:

Its a really interesting question if taken from a money point of view. I dont follow US prices so I'll give my example in terms of pounds. All the prices shown here are from Overclockers just cus they have all the things in stock. Because both can use DDR ram I will ignore it

AMD RIG
FX-55 = £558.07
DFI board = £105.69 (the cheapest of the three btw)

DOTHAN RIG
Dothan 2.0GHz = £293.69
Aopen board = £157.39

Clearly the dothan rig is cheaper (£212.68 cheaper!), and WHEN OVERCLOCKED can perform on par with the FX-55. However, the FX-55 can also be overclocked putting it back ahead easily. Alot of you raise the valid point that the FX is uniformally good at test whereas the Dothan excels only in certain programs.

The thing that people seem to forget is that buying into a new AMD rig may cost alot more than they expect. For instance, no AGP support so a new graphics card is needed. Those of you planning SLI better get wise to the fact that you will need a 600Watt PSU minimal (check threads here). There may be other extra costs to incur depending on how often you "upgrade" your hardware.

The point I'm trying to make is that if your starting off fresh and have the money then FX-55's make sense, but if your upgrading your hardware then there may may be more to choosing the Dothan route, as it will give you STOCK FX performance for alot less cash!

At the end of the day it's your money, so you may as well spend it how you like.

AND....

when benching is done, you can set up a sff uber-quiet rig with the Dothan.... ridiculously cool running!

C

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I wanted P4-M

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A P4-M can be used with most S478 boards :D

The P-M has on big Probleme and that is the bandwith. If there will be a MB wich allows lowering the multi and gives you >200MHz FSB, then the P-M will be a good choice.

Actually out of interest can FX preformance be achieved from a relatively cheap A64 winnie, we're not talking Phase cooling here, just air. I remember a while back some of the 3200+ chips reacting ~2.7-2.8GHz, how does this relate to the FX performance?

a winnie, right one, for instance a 3500+ is most certainly likely to hit more than 2.6Ghz, i'm gonna pick up a 3500+ winnie i think when they come back in stock in uk. if you hit 2.7Ghz you'll be almost equal, behind in 3dmark2k1 as cache makes a big impact there, 2.8Ghz and should be ahead in a lot of apps.

as for needing a 600W psu, the gskill guy, always forget the name, is running a overclocked fx i think with two overclocked ultras and 4 sata hdd's on a ocz 520W. a winchester will run fine in any sff box with silent cooling, as will an fx, doesn't matter if on same silent cooling they run at 25C or 55C, its still running and its still same noise level. also why would you want a £130-550 chip in a sff, sff = £30 chip and it will do everything it needs too, but then i have a personal hatred for sff, replacing dead boards in them at work all the time is such a pain in the ass. shuttle = devil company

a chip that could be really interesting to play with is the 4000+ winchester version. we really need to , all across the forum stop saying things like " at half the price overclocked it can easily match the more expensive cpu" whatever you might be refering to. its the same for almost every cpu you could mention, thats life, more performance at stock costs more, and its not a fair increase per Mhz the last 5% will cost you 50 times as much as the first 95% of performance, thats life.

drunkenmaster, which XPCs are giving you problems, i've used a host of them without problem?

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we really need to , all across the forum stop saying things like " at half the price overclocked it can easily match the more expensive cpu" whatever you might be refering to. its the same for almost every cpu you could mention, thats life, more performance at stock costs more, and its not a fair increase per Mhz the last 5% will cost you 50 times as much as the first 95% of performance, thats life.

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While I understand what you mean, and the last part of your statment is very true, the Dothan is a little different. Sure in days gone by if you strapped on a bigger louder fan, or watercooling then you got speed = the best there was on the market but at the price of a system thats either costed the difference ion cooling or is so loud your getting headaches just trying to use it. But he Dothan achieves these speeds with a stock cooler thats nothing special in itself. Its the fact that these uber speeds can be easily, quickly and, in the most part, uniformly across the board achieved regardless of what chip and stock speed you care to use.

Isn't the whole game hereto get something for less :D why pay the £580 odd quid for an FX when you can easily get it for £300. Granted in this example the Dothan isn't amazing at everything, as has been stated numerous times, but what it is good at is games and certian benchmark programs, which is what computerpro3 wanted from his system.

Anyway I'm rambling on here. While I can understand what your saying I think thats its still feasible to argue for a cheaper overclocked CPU vs more expensive stock CPU. What exactly will be bottlenecking CPU wise at the speed of an FX, and with the money you save on the CPU splash out on a fancy graphics card! :D

JB

dothans lack 64 bits, dual channel, ondie controller and their mobos for it suck. There good if you want a cool quiet pc but id personally get a winchester, perhaps a nice 3200+ at like 250x10 or whatever good its ondie controller is.

Get the P-M so when 64-bit apps become popular I can laugh at you!

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Originally Posted by Techmasta

Get the P-M so when 64-bit apps become popular I can laugh at you!

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By that time, he will be running a Dothan 4Ghz and you a FX70 :banana:

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Originally Posted by charlie

AND....

when benching is done, you can set up a sff uber-quiet rig with the Dothan.... ridiculously cool running!

C

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cmon an fx could do that as well

computerpro i recon that your decision is only about performance. in this case you should go with the fx

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Originally Posted by uclajd

Try surfing the Web and sending e-mail and listening to music while encoding video on any system, and you'll know what I mean.

FWIW, I am platform agnostic, and if the FX's had hyperthreading I'd likely have one under my Vapo right now. Could still happen...
. :rocker:

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You know, I never understood this HT arguement.
I thought all that hyperthreading did was install a new instruction in a stalled pipeline, which happens pretty often in P4's because of the length of the pipelines. Now if that's right then hyperthreading is, effectively, enabled permently on an FX system because the pipelines are much shorter and, comparitively, hardly ever stall .
Am I missing something here or has the marketing man won again?



EDIT: I think the FX will be faster, but the Dothan would be more interesting....

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Originally Posted by Rippthrough

You know, I never understood this HT arguement.
I thought all that hyperthreading did was install a new instruction in a stalled pipeline, which happens pretty often in P4's because of the length of the pipelines. Now if that's right then hyperthreading is, effectively, enabled permently on an FX system because the pipelines are much shorter and, comparitively, hardly ever stall .
Am I missing something here or has the marketing man won again?

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Ask anyone (anyone who is intellectually honest and isn't beholden to either platform) who has used both platforms. P4's multitask better. I'm not some tard who listens to "with HT technology!" on Dell commercials or QVC. Nor do I care about Intel (I do care about IBM and Apple, since my family owns lots of stock). ;)

Funny thing is, if you bench and game, FX is faster much of the time, but there actually are other things that people do with their PCs which Intel does as well or better. :p:

But in a lot of forums, there are some arrogant FX people (not referring to you) who think Intel users are dumb. Again, on both platforms, do some extensive video encoding, while doing 4 other things and playing a CD.

Some people actually use their PCs for things other than games or calculating pi! :lol:

Oh, and if I had the money, I'd run an FX (or maybe a Dothan, depending how the boards shake out) for gaming and benching and have a nice Pentium 4 for productivity - and stability. Not good to do work on bleeding-edge systems. :eek:

Well computerpro3 whats it gonna be??? :confused:

WTF? Dothan has some colossal performance flaws, A64 has the edge in most benchmarks I've seen and if you throw some science/engineering phys & math at them, the Dothan gets thoroughly trounced. I guess if you want to impress with superpi get a Dothan, if you want to do anything else and have full featured Mobo's get FX55

Thanks for everything guys, I've really been thinking about this.

It's tougher than you would think, since it's my money LOL.

With my mach1, I would hit around 3.1ghz with FX-55. I would probably be around 3 with a dothan, from what I can gather, considering the 2.1 hits around 2.7 boxed cooler. TAM got his up to 3.3ghz, but that was with dry ice i believe.

Obviously, the dothan would be faster at 3.1ghz than the AMD at 3.1ghz. Especially because it scales so well as it clocks. HOWEVER, the thing I just can't get past is the motherboard. If I had a hard press release about a full featured mobo from DFI or ASUS in my hands, I would go Dothan. But since I don't, I'm forced to go AMD. I'd rather go Dothan, but as of now, I'm leaning towards the fx-55.

I still have time to change my mind, however, up until the 15th, when I'm ordering no matter what. In case DFI is listening, REALEASE A GOOD DOTHAN FULL ATX BOARD THAT OVERCLOCKS WELL IN THE NEXT 7 DAYS!!!! :p:

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Obviously, the dothan would be faster at 3.1ghz than the AMD at 3.1ghz.

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lol Faster at what? superpi like that matters.

Have a look at this dismal performance.

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/l...91256/5839.png

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/l...91256/5861.png


Dude you don't even want to see things like CAD, Mathmatica, Winrar where Dothan would get it's ass handed to itself. There's a very good and embaressing reason Intel has'nt brought them to desktop. Get your self a Northwood if intel is your thing.. at least you get HT and better accross board performance.

first off, I don't run windos, and it is faster at gaming, which is what I do. SO I don't thihnk compiling a Linux kernel is relevant to my decision.

It is not faster in gaming. It's well with margin of error (5%) of these sites clock for clock when gaming. http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...gaming&page=10

Considering it sucks at everything else, no 64 bit support and lame expensive mobos I think you'd have to be a fool to get into Dothan.

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Originally Posted by Zebo

It is not faster in gaming. It's well with margin of error (5%) of these sites clock for clock when gaming. http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...gaming&page=10

Considering it sucks at everything else, no 64 bit support and lame expensive mobos I think you'd have to be a fool to get into Dothan.

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LOL, nice objective opinion. Show these benches with some of the clocks people have gotten here with Dothans, like 2.8 or 2.9 on air, not to mention when the Aviso boards come out and they can go over 200 FSB. Smoke City.

You know what man. Wait for FX-57 with SSE3 instructions. FX-57 should be out as soon as Intel releases their Exreme Edition 3.73GHz 1066MHz Quad pumped bus with 2M L2 cache. My guess is that AMD will need the FX-57 to compete with that CPU. Intel should release that with the 6xx series in February as some of those CPU's have already been sampled. Both AMD and Intel are playing a cat and mouse game, so my guess is that AMD promise of FX-57 in the first half of 2005 will come sooner than later to fight off Intel's EE 3.73 with 2MB L2 cache.

With FX-57 you will have a fully loaded CPU, that will do 3.0GHz easy on air and anything above that(Vapo LS or MachII) will give you insane speeds coupled with all the instruction sets (MMX,3dNOW!+,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,x86-64) and on top of that fast transistors using SSDOI(Strained silicon directly on insulator) which are ~5% faster than normal transitors at the same clock speed. They are also highly overclockable and stable.

As for dothan, sorry 32-bit and with the pace of technology, most games will eventually take advantage of 64-bit( 16 registers compared to 8 in 32-bit) and you will be left in the dust.

As for P4, even with 64-bit, the HT(Hypertreading) is only meant for it's horrible branch mispredition penalty due to it's long pipeline. It's a hit or miss, for some application you get good performance, 5-35% maybe, for some you will get no gain. Couple of million transistors have to be included to implement the HT and the result you get is heat ala Prescot.

The 2-3 moths wait will get you a lifetime property that you will always be happy to see. AMD shock 'n' awe is a beefy FX-57 with SSDOI and SSE3.

Zebo I think your mising the point somewhat with the Dothan. Its basically a souped up P3 thats able to hold its own against chip designs two generations more advanced when playing games/certain benchmarks. It was never designed to be "the next big thing" and certainly we shouldnt expect it to blow the competition away. I must confess I for some reason didnt pick up on the fact that computerpro3 had already bought a mach1. In light of this I see no reason to go down the dothan road, simply because he'll be able to overclock with ease ANY processor! The valid point of the current dothan desktop mobos has been aired and if you need all the latest bells and whistles then thats cool, personally I dont have that kinda cash lying around so I'm more interested in the "poors mans FX" because it'll allow me to run at FX speeds in games, which is really all that matters :D. Computerpro3 I honestly doubt that anything better will be comming out soon for the Dothan, mobo wise, I personally am waiting for the aviso based systems to make an appearence to guage if DDR2 will help or hinder performance OC wise. In the meantime get a FX whatever as you sound like you need more than DFI or Aopen can offer in their current mobos.

Happy shopping :toast:

JB

When they release the Alviso, the Dothan will give you FX-like performance at half the price (or less) of an FX-55 in games. It already does with single channel memory. To say otherwise is a lie.

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Originally Posted by uclajd

Ask anyone (anyone who is intellectually honest and isn't beholden to either platform) who has used both platforms. P4's multitask better. I'm not some tard who listens to "with HT technology!" on Dell commercials or QVC. Nor do I care about Intel (I do care about IBM and Apple, since my family owns lots of stock). ;)

Funny thing is, if you bench and game, FX is faster much of the time, but there actually are other things that people do with their PCs which Intel does as well or better. :p:

But in a lot of forums, there are some arrogant FX people (not referring to you) who think Intel users are dumb. Again, on both platforms, do some extensive video encoding, while doing 4 other things and playing a CD.

Some people actually use their PCs for things other than games or calculating pi! :lol:

Oh, and if I had the money, I'd run an FX (or maybe a Dothan, depending how the boards shake out) for gaming and benching and have a nice Pentium 4 for productivity - and stability. Not good to do work on bleeding-edge systems. :eek:

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I'm not trying to have a go at you, I was just pointing out that hyperthreading has nothing to do with the multitasking ability of Pentiums. It's probably simply down to raw mhz.

personally i'd get a 3.4 Northwood under that prommie and overclock to 4.5+ we all know northwood faster than prescott clock for clock, and also alot cheaper than dothan or an FX55.

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Originally Posted by TheTrebleKing

personally i'd get a 3.4 Northwood under that prommie and overclock to 4.5+ we all know northwood faster than prescott clock for clock, and also alot cheaper than dothan or an FX55.

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Actually, once the Pressy exceeeds 4gigs, it begins to overtake the Northy at similar clocks.

But you are right, 55's cost over $800 US. Funny how all the AMD people always come into these type of threads and tout the FXs, but you look at their sigs and it seems not one of them actually have them. :lol: I wonder why that is. $$$

I agree with the motherboards not beeing great at all on the P-M platform, but there´s just something to it having a even slower (in terms of Mhz) beating / on par with the grandfather model in the AMD army.

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Originally Posted by uclajd

but you look at their sigs and it seems not one of them actually have them. :lol: I wonder why that is. $$$

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:hehe: Otherwise it could be people not updating sigs often.

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Originally Posted by uclajd

LOL, nice objective opinion. Show these benches with some of the clocks people have gotten here with Dothans, like 2.8 or 2.9 on air, not to mention when the Aviso boards come out and they can go over 200 FSB. Smoke City.

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It's not subjective. They are within 5% of one another. Read Margin of error. Especially from some commercial site I've never heard of. Add in the fact you are overclcoking the bus on Dothan in these test and not the A64's I think it's safe to assume it's a wash. My 3000 @ FX-55 speeds is much faster than the 55 itself because of OC bus and mem. If we going to compare Dothan to A64 in gaming we need to do apples to apples. Not stock against OC.

i.e take a 1.8 Dothan vs. 1.8 A64 then start clocking them.

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when the Aviso boards come out and they can go over 200 FSB. Smoke City.

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That won't help Dothans colossal performance flaws which is inside chip iself, see above a few posts.

even then, 1.8ghz vx 1.8ghz wouldn't work either. It would be something like AXP 1.8ghz vs 1.8ghz P4. I know not that extrmeme of a difference, but you get the point. They don't have the same arictechure. You would need to do something like AMD, find a model number system. saying something like a 1.8ghz processor=2000 rating or something.

jjcom

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Originally Posted by uclajd

Actually, once the Pressy exceeeds 4gigs, it begins to overtake the Northy at similar clocks.

But you are right, 55's cost over $800 US. Funny how all the AMD people always come into these type of threads and tout the FXs, but you look at their sigs and it seems not one of them actually have them. :lol: I wonder why that is. $$$

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You'd never hear me tout FX, it's a frekken rip off. But since he asked between those two I answered within those limits set. A64 FX simply has better all around performance and much better motherboards than Dothan.

No ones' asking but, I'd either get a northwood 3.0 or a 3200 if I had prommy. They have excellent multipliers for crazy OCing and offer best bang for the buck.