Author: Joachim Rang
Date: 09:49:31 06/09/03
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It's easy: P4 - Mhz is worth 0.7 Athlon - MHz: so a 3 GHz P4 is as fat as a 2100 MHz Athlon XP. Cache is not worth the money and probably gives less than 10 % speed- increase. SDRAM or DDRAM is not that important. As Bob said, latency is the issue, but I wouldn't spent too much money on a bit quicker latency. AMD Athlon XP (Model 8, Thoroughbred, 0,13 µm, 256 KByte L2, Sockel A) XP 2700+ (2,17 GHz, FSB333) The XP 2700+ with real 2,17 GHZ gives the best performance for the lowest price. It is as fast as a P4 3.06 Ghz but much, much cheaper. Spent the saved money on watercooling and good RAM and you may probably overclock the processor by a few percent. regards Joachim Rang On June 07, 2003 at 22:05:14, Russell Reagan wrote: >I'm am going to build a new machine for the purpose of (mainly) running computer >chess programs. What specs are important to computer chess programs? > >Areas I'm pretty sure about (correct me if I'm wrong): > >Processor speed - I think everyone agrees this is the major factor >RAM - I've heard people say that SDRAM is better, then DDR, the RDRAM, because >latency is more important than throughput. > >Areas I'm not sure about: > >Frontside bus speed - My first thought is that this isn't a major issue, because >it sounds like it only helps the throughput. >Cache - Is it better to spend the extra money to get the processors with larger >caches? Go for the 512/128KB, or is 256KB ok? >Hard drives - Does this matter outside of EGTBs? > >The prices of Athlons seem to depend a lot on FSB and cache sizes, so if a >certain spec isn't very important to chess programs (ex. memory throughput), I >can save some money :) > >Thanks for your help, >Russell
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