AMD's Athlon XP 2700+ 310
kraven_73 writes "According to some Taiwanese sources, AMD will officially reveal its Athlon XP 2700+ processor on the 7th of October. Most interesting is that this CPU will have a 333 MHz FSB. The first implementation of this increased FSB on Athlon platform. It is expected that the novelty will be based on the latest Thoroughbred core stepping 1, just like the current Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+, and will work at 2.17GHz."
Re:Wtf is with this? (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess it's just a slow news day for
Not a troll, just a question ... (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I'm curious about what people are using these super-fast processors for. Apart from upgrading so that you can play the immiment Unreal Tournament 2003 demo ("Only two weeks away!") and hoping to get the jump on a Doom 3 system -- what exactly are people doing with their super-high powered rigs?
I just upgraded to an Athlon XP 2000+ (from a PIII), and while I sorta dug the impressive 3DMark2001SE scores (over 10,000 with a Ti4600), I'm still not exactly sure what I need all this speed for.
For gaming, yes.
But for what else? MS Word still opens in a split-second.
OpenOffice 1.01 still opens pretty quickly.
IE, Netscape, and Opera still open in a split-second.
And, yes, now I run Quake3 with all the settings cranked.
But this sorta of "gee whiz, that's cool" wore off in a couple of days.
Now I'm left with a pretty powerful system, but I'm at loss as to what it has actually improved. Maybe if I were doing a lot of coding, then the compilation speeds would jump significantly, but I guess since my main coding right now is writing a fairly small (only around 6,500 lines) text-adventure in INFORM, I haven't really seen the jump in compilation speeds I'd see if I were compiling hundreds of thousands of lines of code
So, I'm curious. I haven't tried NWN yet, so maybe that's the sort of high-powered cybercrank I need to get myself hooked on the slickmercury speeds of AXP 2000+ and Ti4600.
There's always the new Neocron (sp?) beta 4 out
Anyone?
Re:WTF you talkin about willis? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's true the ram doesn't need to run at the same frequency than the FSB, but it doesn't help if it runs faster (DDR 333 ram has a bandwidth of 2.7GB, but the FSB at DDR 266 only 2.1GB). So, the FSB is not the bottleneck if you have DDR 266 ram, but it definitely is with DDR 333 ram. (There is an exception to the rule that higher-bandwidth-than-fsb ram won't do much for performance, this is if agp texturing is used, but this really only matters if you have an integrated graphics chipset.)
That said, tests with the higher (333) FSB show decent, but not really large performance increases - the Athlon XP doesn't seem to be that much memory bandwidth limited today.
I also disagree with the original poster about just using DDR 400. Not only a JEDEC specification for DDR 400 ram doesn't exist (and DDR 400 ram is needed to get really a performance improvement out of a DDR 400 FSB), but first boards which support such rams have some stability problems obviously at that speeds (the new asus kt400 board only allows one (!) dimm at DDR400 speed, and 2 at DDR333 speed). So, this would most likely be a nightmare for board manufacturers.
mczak
Re:Glad they chose to up FSB (Score:2, Interesting)
AMD only has a 'double-pumped' architecture, where the flip-flops trigger on both the rising and fallig edge of the clock signal.
Unless AMD licenses Intel's technology, they really can't compete in that arena for awhile. There are other strengths to the AMD platform that help bridge the gap, for example.
Re:Not a troll, just a question ... (Score:2, Interesting)
yes I'm serious. At times it's still the only application that can actually make Winamp skip. (That's with an athlon 1700)
Re:How about they release the 2400+/2600+ first (Score:1, Interesting)
THG and anandtech have said conflicting things about the availablity of the 2600+ (and 2400+). I personally haven't had any problem with getting them yet. Heck, I've ordered three of them in the last week.
- Davey "Muskane" Maller
http://www.overclockers.com.au
Re:The move to 166mhz bus is nice but (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought for a while that I'd do that, but I started getting tired of 12-hour SVCD encoding jobs (which is what you get with a 1.0-GHz Athlon when you use TMPGEnc at some of its highest-quality settings). Besides, a single-processor Hammer setup looked like it was going to be more expensive than the dual-processor Athlon MP that I just put together. With 12-hour jobs cut down to just 3 hours, life is good. :-)
(Whether a single Hammer would be faster than a dual Athlon MP is still an open question, especially with 32-bit apps. I've heard Hammer is supposed to be 10-25% faster at the same clock speed when running 32-bit apps, but one processor would still need to be damn fast (probably 3500+ or better) to keep up with a pair of Athlon MP 2100+s.)
Re:I am not trolling, this is an honest question. (Score:2, Interesting)
Consider the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz [turtlebeach.com] instead of Creative Labs cards. While Creative has fixed most of their issues with VIA chipset motherboards a long time ago, there are still some people that have issues. The Santa Cruz is less expensive (I just got one off eBay for $55 + $7 shipping) and a great card if you don't need the optical in-outs of the Audigy. Plus, you don't need the Audigy's FireWire, the ASUS A7V333 already comes with FireWire. The audio quality of the Santa Cruz is outstanding and it can even record itself. (Just don't tell Microsoft, they'll probably not allow it to be used with WiMP 9.)
As for the video card, the Radeon 9700 has all the markings of a true speed demon, but I'd wait for Nvidia's answer to it. As a general rule, (and speaking as an 8500 owner myself) ATI cards have certain annoying-yet-tolerable "issues" with various games and ATI usually gets sidetracked writing drivers for a new product instead of fixing bugs. ATI does have the best DVD player support and the TV-out quality is unmatched, so if you prefer movies over games, ATI is the way to go.
Re:why? (Score:3, Interesting)
My point is that people are running older software which was made for older systems. In the 1990's software was evolving faster then hardware and this is why many people hated Windows and found Windows3.1 as slow as a dog. I remember only using Windows for the world wide web and used the dos compuserve for everything else. Today its vice versa. Games and office suites mostly used today are old. Of course I am sure OfficeXP would fly on my old machine and its only games or speciality apps that would require a new systems. I bet as cd burning software gets more popular and the latest games come out, that people will once again be upgrading. Infact this might be Microsoft's only hope for OfficeXP migration. Mainly from people buying new pc's altogether.
I plan to buy one soon because I use Gentoo Linux which requires beefy hardware for its package management, as well as run UT2003.