Author: Aaron Gordon
Date: 00:00:43 04/25/02
Go up one level in this thread
Typical Intel BS. Striving for quantity (money & mhz) instead of quality. Feeding off the ignorant. I feel somewhat sorry for the Intel lovers that had a P3-1GHz or something similar and "upgraded" to a Pentium4 1.5Ghz. I would have loved to see their face after they saw their old system beat the P4. "Where is your hero now?" I think to myself. It's a good temporary marketing strategy to BS people into thinking more MHz = more performance if your that kind of (greedy) person. I've said it before and here it is again -> You can only trick people for so long. They are going to talk to their guru friends or friends that talk to guru friends and the word will eventually get around that the chips are slow & overpriced. If some of you are thinking, "But the P4-2.4 is faster than any of the XP's!". Lets consider something for a moment. For a while I was creating some optimized DLL's for Quake3 for AMD and during testing I found out something quite interesting. They sent a system out to me for development/testing reasons. Now, I ran a few test & sent them back to the engineer. He says they are 'too fast' (this is stock MHz). Well, I asked him what bios settings does he use. He told me they are REQUIRED to use the default (bios cleared, slowest) options. I wasn't even allow to select "use default options" in the bios for testing as it enables one or two things that increase performance. Why can't I enable those options you may ask? I was told that Intel would hound AMD with their lawyers because the testing would be 'unfair' and AMD didn't want to deal with any of that. Intel believes it's unfair because their boards don't have all the tweak options the AMD boards do. IMO this is completely fair. If you want a pure processor test those options won't make much of a difference (and Intel loses by a landslide in those tests). Most places however test the entire system (video card, memory bandwidth, etc) where those options make a MASSIVE difference. Setting the memory interleave from none to 4 way increases bandwidth 20% alone. In the Quake3 test I did an AthlonXP 1900+ with the lowest settings got 229.2fps. Pentium4 2ghz got 238.6fps. Now, after enabling the normal tweaks in the bios (takes less than a minute and anyone can do it) the AthlonXP 1900+ got 248.3fps. Modest 8.3% increase in speed. Went from 4% slower than the P4 to 4% faster. With my DLL's the fps was increased further to 296.7fps. Almost a 20% increase. With a properly tuned Athlon box there is no competition. :) I have to say though.. there are still 2 things about Intel I still like. The compiler & Celerons. I had tons of fun (and got some good experience)overclocking celerons. Nothing like pushing a 300a to 644, 366 to 735 or a 566 to 1202. :) Pretty slow chips but fun anyway.. At least until Athlons hit the scene. :P
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