AMD64 questions before buying

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infirit · Post by **infirit** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 11:39 am

I'm pretty sure i'll get a new proc and mobo. I just have 2 questions before i join all of you in the wonderfull wold that is AMD64

1) Does anybody see any major problems with running with the below mobo proc config. I searched the this forum and the only real issue i could find was getting sata-raid and sound setup. I'm not planning on use raid and the soundcard should be supported with the latest alsa release.

ASUS AMD SOCKET-939 A8V DELUXE/WIFI-G
AMD Athlon 64 939 3200+ 2000Mhz BOX
2 x DDR400 512MB ram
MAXTOR 200.0Gb 7200RPM 6B200MO SATA

2) I'm planning to run 64bit and some packages compiled 32bit because of 3rdparty plugins. If for example i want to use mplayer with the the win32 codec pack (which are 32bit) i can compile mplayer in 32bit mode giving gcc the -m32 flag. Another example is firefox and flash/realplayer plugins.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Infirit

zeb · Post by **zeb** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 3:10 pm

I have a very similar setup, and it works fine. However, make sure that you upgrade the bios immediately. There are some serious memory incompatibility problems in early bios versions, my board would not boot nor show any sign of life unless I put the memory in the 3rd and 4th slot. Even then memtest got so many errors that it crashed... The latest bios version (1008) resolved all that and I am now happily running a dual-channel config. Simply put the new bios with the name A8V.ROM on a floppy or cd (which is what I used) and press Alt+F2 when booting.

Also, the wifi card is not quite working on amd64 yet. The manufacturer has, however, released official linux drivers, so things are looking good on that front as well.

fyrcon · Post by **fyrcon** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 4:57 pm

hi infirit,

1) should work mostly

2) make sure you read the technotes(see first item in amd64 forum). There you can find various options to have 32bit compatibility

The Shadow Surfer · Post by **The Shadow Surfer** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 8:25 pm

Your HD is too slow for the rest of the system

On all the 200G Matrox SATA disk I can find, the avg acces time is 9ms+ it is gonne be a bottleneck! if you are gonna buy something as expenciv as this, you proberly wanne use som extra mony (or save it some where else in the computer) on a fast system disk.

Where to spent mony on a computer... well, spent it on bottleneck.... If you don't, then you spent mony on something you don't use a 100%

infirit · Post by **infirit** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 9:12 pm

Thanks for the help guys

Which HD are you sugesting?

malloc · Post by **malloc** » Sat Nov 20, 2004 9:53 pm

A WD Raptor 10k. Buy a 36 Gb one for installing the system and keep that 200Gb one for storage purposes.

ShakyJake · Post by **ShakyJake** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 1:28 am

Bleh, don't go overboard. The maxtor 7200rpm drive is fine. I've built several systems using those Raptor drives and the performance difference is negligible for ordinary use.

malloc · Post by **malloc** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 1:50 am

ShakyJake wrote:Bleh, don't go overboard. The maxtor 7200rpm drive is fine. I've built several systems using those Raptor drives and the performance difference is negligible for ordinary use.

You won't gain that much of a speed boost, that's for sure, however you won't lose any either under heavy disk I/O that's the beauty of it

infirit · Post by **infirit** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 2:21 am

Ok this is what it is going to be:

2 x DDR400 512MB
AMD Athlon 64 939 3200+ 2000Mhz BOX link (The boxed version is cheaper even though i will by my cooler separate )
Western Digital WD360GD link (The raptor )
MAXTOR 200.0Gb 7200RPM 6B200MO SATA link
ASUS AMD SOCKET-939 A8V DELUXE/WIFI-G link
ASUS 128Mb V9520 Magic link (To many dissapointment from Ati )
Antec Super Lanboy Specialty link
Coolermaster rs-450-alcy real 450W link

Thanks to all for the info and tips

Maybe a best buy topic should be started with some configs that are know to work

The Shadow Surfer · Post by **The Shadow Surfer** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 8:37 pm

That looks fine

Bleh, don't go overboard. The maxtor 7200rpm drive is fine. I've built several systems using those Raptor drives and the performance difference is negligible for ordinary use.

Thats rigth, you don't get exstrem performance boots... BUT the HD is in many systems the bottelneck... Elemineting the (or at least minimising the it) is the art of building computeres... If you use the your mony on something else then the bottelneck, you don't get so much extra speed as is you spent it on the bottelneck.

Travers · Post by **Travers** » Thu Nov 25, 2004 6:21 pm

Well with a faster HD, he could have something to cook eggs on! =) Ok, lets put it this way:
Some things you can spend alot of money on and get a small increase in performance. For instance, 4GB of RAM is very unnecessairy and would never ever be used. 512-1GB is a safe bet for almost everthing unless you're building a video or CAD workstation. So, you could spend all that money on your RAM and skimp on your processor. Fast compuer? I think not.

You have to consider the price to performance ratio. That is, how much you are going to spend for performance, and it is a curve, the higher you go, the less kick you get. A $1010 EE processor from Intel is just a bit faster than their far cheaper top P4's.

The major components in a computer that deal with speed (in the most important order): Processor, RAM, MoBo, HD.

You can spend a TON of money on one of these, see a small increase for the money you put in, and then have to spend not as much on the others. Price to performance. There is a certain amount of money that you can spend that will give you the most bang-for-your-buck. Any more, or less and you're not at the top of the curve.

As I said earlier, 512-1GB of RAM is a safe bet. A 7200 SATA hard drive is at the top of the price to performance curve. For a MoBo, look at some reviews and benchmarks. MoBo's do matter a bit, but not so much. And for the processsor, I would consider anthing at or below the 3700+ 64.

Oh, about your RAM, if you go socket 939, you can do dual channel, and you should. Since with the socket 939's, AMD cut the L2 cache in half and did dual-channel to replace it. (NewCastle core) The Clawhammer core has 1MB of L2 cache. Eiether bet is safe, just make sure you do dual-channel if you go 939 or say bye-bye to 5% of your power.

Travers

ewan.paton · Post by **ewan.paton** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 2:34 am

i would avoid a nvidia 5200 on sheer performance grounds, they arent much better than a geforce2mx and you can get stuff like the geforce4800ti for the same price

not sure if you are interested in overclocking but my amd3000+ went from 2000mhz to 2400mhz with a couple of taps in the bios no probs, that was the before they shrank the dies so i would guess anything you get could proabably hit 2600

the only time i have seen over 512megs ram get used was then i was compiling on a xeon with 4 active processes, unless you wish to think about less faster ram unless you use tmpfs and the like

tnt · Post by **tnt** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 12:43 pm

and is that kind of overclocking (2.6GHz with new 90nm cores) posible with VIA chipsets or just with NForce3?

ewan.paton · Post by **ewan.paton** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 5:04 pm

tnt wrote:and is that kind of overclocking (2.6GHz with new 90nm cores) posible with VIA chipsets or just with NForce3?

not sure, i heard something about via not having a pci/agp lock but i in no way the normal overclocker, its just that with a 20% overclock my cpu is currently sitting at 44degrees{1} and wanted to inform people of the capacity these chips have, ive heard of folkes who have there 130nm ones up to 2.53ghz stablely and was guessing

what i did was basicly buy my cpu and motherbaord with the intention of upgrading both next time, heres my maths. a 745 mb £60 3000+ cpu £105 = £165 or a 939mb £95 3500+{2} cpu £200 = £295 basicly i can keep the £130 and buy a faster combo in 6-12 months

{1} thats even without any case cooling as my box is massive and stock heatsink

{2} i know a 3000 vs 3500 but there were no 939 3000s localy so i didnt have an option

Jake · Post by **Jake** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 6:10 pm

ewan.paton wrote:
tnt wrote:and is that kind of overclocking (2.6GHz with new 90nm cores) posible with VIA chipsets or just with NForce3?
not sure, i heard something about via not having a pci/agp lock...

the nForce 3 250 and k8t800 pro have the lock, but not the nForce3 150 or VIA non-pro

LaNcom · Post by **LaNcom** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 8:35 pm

About the HDD issue:

I build a lot of computers, so I had the opportunity to test quite a few possible solutions: While SATA is nice, and the Raptor is indeed the fastest SATA drive I've tested so far, I found that the SATA controllers (especially the onboard controllers) are at least as much of a bottleneck as a cheap HDD. That's hard to understand for quite a few people, since an onboard SATA controller with a 7200Rpm HDD is often used as a baseline (then, the Raptor does seem a lot faster, especially in synthetic benchmarks). Anyway, if you compare even the best onboard SATA controllers with Raptors attached to an old Adaptec 19160 or 29160 U160 SCSI controller with IBM DDYS 10.000Rpm HDD's (those are slower than Raptors, at least in theory), it becomes obvious how overrated SATA really is, as the SCSI setup is quite a bit faster in real life - not to mention the better stability/ data integrity SCSI offers...

So, if you can afford it, go SCSI. It _does_ make a difference! I currently consider replacing the U160 subsystem of my AMD64 workstation with an Adaptec U320 controller and some Maxtor Atlas 15K2 harddisks (no RAID), as that setup is the fastest I've ever seen.

Travers · Post by **Travers** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 4:53 am

Old K8T800's don't support async. AGP/PCI clocking, and the SATA/RAID controller on the VT8237 southbridge usually fails quite quickly as well. I head that VIA was going to fix this, and I think the boards shipping to day are OK, but I'm not sure.

mooseboy · Post by **mooseboy** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 8:08 am

Travers wrote:Old K8T800's don't support async. AGP/PCI clocking, and the SATA/RAID controller on the VT8237 southbridge usually fails quite quickly as well. I head that VIA was going to fix this, and I think the boards shipping to day are OK, but I'm not sure.

I've owned two motherboards with the VT8237 SATA controller, and both have been quite reliable. In the same machine, I had a silicon image PCI controller corrupt data on me. As for the other things, I can't comment.

Travers · Post by **Travers** » Wed Dec 01, 2004 2:53 am

I was not concise: the VT8237's SATA/RAID has problems when you clock the FSB.

Travers

tnt · Post by **tnt** » Wed Dec 01, 2004 8:21 am

Is that problem still present or it was on first revisions of boards?

Travers · Post by **Travers** » Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:03 am

It was in the original revisions. I know that VIA had it in mind to fix it, but I don't know if they have done it yet. My SWAG (scientific, wild-ass guess) says they did. I'm assuming it's been fixed, but bear in mind there might be some old inventory still floating around.

Travers

tnt · Post by **tnt** » Thu Dec 09, 2004 2:55 pm

infirit wrote:Ok this is what it is going to be:
2 x DDR400 512MB
AMD Athlon 64 939 3200+ 2000Mhz BOX link (The boxed version is cheaper even though i will by my cooler separate )
Western Digital WD360GD link (The raptor )
MAXTOR 200.0Gb 7200RPM 6B200MO SATA link
ASUS AMD SOCKET-939 A8V DELUXE/WIFI-G link
ASUS 128Mb V9520 Magic link (To many dissapointment from Ati )
Antec Super Lanboy Specialty link
Coolermaster rs-450-alcy real 450W link
Thanks to all for the info and tips

Maybe a best buy topic should be started with some configs that are know to work

So? Any feedback?
Does that configuration work?
Any problems or aditional tips?

infirit · Post by **infirit** » Thu Dec 09, 2004 7:57 pm

Not yet, but will post something when i build the thing. The AMD64 is in high demand at the moment (at least where i ordered it) and has not arrived yet. Still hoping before christmas

In the end i did not buy the Nvidia card yet because Ati promissed xorg/amd64 drivers this month, after all the dissapointments i keep hoping

Travers · Post by **Travers** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 2:23 am

Go with a faster processor, rather than the raptor. You will see more performance with the former. Do you know the chipset on the ASUS wifi? You will probably be only to find windows binaries for it. That means no wireless, unless you use something like ndiswrapper, but that might not work.

ewan.paton · Post by **ewan.paton** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 3:08 am

Travers wrote:Go with a faster processor, rather than the raptor. You will see more performance with the former. Do you know the chipset on the ASUS wifi? You will probably be only to find windows binaries for it. That means no wireless, unless you use something like ndiswrapper, but that might not work.

yeh for gentoo compiles, almost every realworld app startup time is io limited, most people spend most of their time with cpuload sitting at 1% get a raptor