PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi!

I'm new to this forum, and there sure is a great discussion going on here.
I'm buying a new PC next week, and after reading few times each topic concerning processors and mobos I still find it hard to decide between Athlon64 and P4.
I'm not worried about socket changes because I'm not upgrading systems. I buy the best configuration possible and going for a totaly new system 2-3 years later.

Which processor is best now - Athlon64 3200+ or P43.2GHZ (I understood that Prescott is not recommended in it's current stage...)
It sounds like Athlon64 has more potential and will still be kicking when softwares will start using 64bit (would today's P4 disadvantage be obvious then?).

But the big question is of course stability!
considering available mobos - what would you recommend? P4 is mostly reported stable in this forum with P4P800 and D875PBZ (but still some reported problems...) and Athlon64 is recommended with VIA K8T800 chipset (but not enough reports verify that - seem like despite AMD's adtantages, most users choose Intel - why?)

Are these systems stable?
Is something else should be considered? (I'm not thinking about Opteron mostly due to price)
and if both are stable - which is best for DAW (that stands for Digital Audio Workstation, right?)

As for me - I'm a Pulsar-1 user (since 1998 - Go Creamware!). are there any problems I could have becuase of that (besides lack of DSP... (: )?

ThanX,
Raniel

It's an outdated and groundless rumor that pentiums would be more stable than present AMD's. My AMD XP2400 + Asus A7N8X is the most stable and reliable PC I've ever had. And I've had many of them, several pentiums before changed my jacket.

If you are looking for fastest PC at the moment, Opteron would be it. Well.. Personally I'd never buy a pentium again, but what comes to speed, in some tasks pentium is faster and in other tasks AMD is faster. Depends on how the program code is optimized. Perhaps you could consider that a 64bit CPU will be longer usable
I can't comment VIA KT-800, but I've read very positive judgements about it's speed and stability.

Hi there,

Well for me personally I had a XP2500+ with an Asus A7N8X and with my DSP cards (ScopePro, UAD-1, TC Powercore) there was pops and clicks I just couldnt get rid of no matter what I tried.

I just built a P4 3.2c with a D875PBZ and a gig of PC3200 ram and things are gravy now, system works great and also a side note about the new system.

In the Athlon system, I was "ONLY" able to get reliable midi timing by installing under Standard PC, if I tried to use ACPI it would pretty much explode, where asd the P4 system is installed in ACPI mode and running great, and a bit more aswell is that Hyper threading is a touchy one with CW cards and I have it running perfectly fine on my P4 system.

I guess it comes down to preference and how far your willing to go to make a stable system, I belive the Athlon system work just aswell as the P4 systems these days, but in my case with 3 high performance DSP cards in the same box, the P4 system just worked better.

I also like the fact my system runs alot cooler now, with the athlon system I had to purchase special cooling solutions and use artic silver on the CPU to keep things happy, where as the P4 is just like throw it in and enjoy

Not exactly what your looking for, but just sharing general info on different systems I have been using.

Cheers!

well, with the 2-3 years time scale you can be pretty shure that you won't see much software benefit from 64 bit optimizations.

There are some possibilities, but those would require so deep rewrites (imho) that it's unlikely to happen.
Of course this doesn't apply to server and database processing - but that has few with a DAW in common.

Nevertheless you CAN benefit immediately from improved Mobo-designs. Since manufacturers are interested in pushing these CPUs there is something to expect (from the AMD direction) and probably a 'counter-attack' from the Intel side

So the '64-bit-advantages' will finally be side effects - I'd mainly focus on reliability and (effective!)data throughput, but those are the most difficult items to compare - unfortunately
I stick with Intel only because they can be cooled by barely nothing...

cheers, Tom

I was thinking of going 64 bit but I think the improvement in performance would be minimal at this point. The time is not right. If you want to truly increase performance use 2 computers linked together. That's what I plan to do. Get twice the performance of a standard PC. No single home computer can do that.