Not overly impressed w/ Gentoo on AMD64

skaven · Last edited by skaven on Sat Jul 03, 2004 4:47 pm; edited 2 times in total

I recently ordered an AMD64 3200 and an MSI NEO FISR2 from Newegg with the intention of using them with Gentoo. I had been running Gentoo on a P4 2.8G with an Abit IS7 motherboard, but gave that box to my fiance since her computer was so slow it caused me physical pain to watch her use it.

I first set up the system with winXP so that I could see if there was any difference playing FarCry (there was .... huge difference ... versus my AthlonXP 2800 and Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe gaming box), then wiped XP and put Gentoo on.

Booting seems faster, but I don't really notice any improvements anywhere else. Compiling times, which is where I had expected to see a boost, seem about the same as they were on the old system. Both the old and the new have the same memory: 2x256G Crucial PC3200. After reading the posts here about performance gains others have seen, I'm rather disappointed with the performance so far. In fact, I'm thinking of using the AMD64 system for windows XP and gaming and running Gentoo on the AthlonXP system; I did notice a considerable increase under windows, which is rather depressing. I could dual-boot and get the best (such as it is) of both worlds, but that seems to be a waste of perfectly good computer.

Any thoughts on why I'm not seeing more of a performance increase? Did I just set my expectations too high? Or is there something I should have done during installation of Gentoo? I followed the Gentoo AMD64 Handbook. :cry:

EDIT: I should add that installation went without a problem, even easier than some of my 32bit installations of Gentoo. And Gentoo does seem to run well on the AMD64, I'm just really seeing much improvement over 32bit.

EDIT of previous EDIT: Errmmmm ... that should have read, "... I'm, just not really seeing much improvement ...". Sorry

gilesjuk

It's early days yet, the optimisation settings used by some ebuilds are very tame.

I did notice a performance increase over my previous CPU (Athlon 2100+), frame encoding with Avidemux is about twice the speed.

The setup of your kernel might be important, as well as X windows and your make.conf.

If you're playing games on Linux it won't run too well at the moment.

But everything launches loads faster, graphic operations are at lightspeed.

Oh btw, you did download the AMD64 Gentoo CD and not just reuse the 32-bit disc?
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skaven · Posted: Sat Jul 03, 2004 2:52 pm Post subject:

I did get the AMD64 LiveCD and built from stage 1.

I don't really play any games on Linux, hence the windows gaming box. Maybe the occasional samegnome or something like that, but nothing that requires much in the way of massive CPU.

brankob · Apprentice Joined: 29 Apr 2004 Posts: 188

Emerge gcc 3.4 and switch on some serious optimzations...