any improvements if i upgrade to A64?

[bombledmonk]

You would not see enough to warrant spending that amount of money.

[sup3rcarrx7]

Hi guys. I was wondering if there will be a noticeable improvement in terms of encoding my movies into DVD's if i upgrade to a Athlon 64 CPU. I'm currently still using an Athlon xp 2500 overclocked at 2.3ghz.

[johnnyis42]

Originally posted by bombledmonk
You would not see enough to warrant spending that amount of money.

this is quite a blankedted statement that seems to be missing some very valid considerations....

you can get some of the lower clocked 939 pin A64 processors for considerably less money than a pentium 4 775 LGA processor at an 800 MHz front side bus. the memory bandwidth on the socket 939 A64 chips is comperable to the pentium 4 800 MHz front side bus ships running 400 MHz dual channel ddr2, and in most cases it out performs it even when running in 533 MHz configurations.

the "short/fat" piopeline of the A64 chips give it a considerable advantage in many encoding operations, though aplications which support the pentium 4's instruction sets fully will have that performance advantage by default. on the other hand, gamming and heavy compression activity has a severe advantage with the A64.

if you are using the graphic workstation enterprise level aplications they usually support the pentium 4 instructions, which includes many 3d graphics production aplications. on the movie and video compression side, the A64 has the advantage with the majority of the aplications. when i say advantage, i'm talking 10-20% performance increase.

when compared to the athlon XP chips, the A64 chips kill them with no contest. the price for an upgrade to an A64 system for memory, motherboard and processor runs average 300-400 dollars US. if you already have a pair of matched ddr400 modules, you're looking at 280-320 dollars US. considering we're talking about upgrade, starting at a pentium 4 system either 533 FSB or 800 FSB, or an athlon XP system, i would say it's worth the price if you're upgrading from the XP system, but you have to weigh your options with the pentium 4 system. if you have a pentium 4 system that does not support dual channel on your motherboard, by all means the upgrade is worth it. otherwise, ask yourself where you want to see performance and make the decision from there.

[sup3rcarrx7]

Ok thanks for the tips!

[top222]

it would not improve enough to pay that much money$$$

[johnnyis42]

i just saw an add for Frys for an A64 3200 and motherboard for 200 bucks.... this isn't THAT much money for the increase in performance over a athlon XP... which is considerable. i make the plain case for the consideration of when to upgrade and when to hold back depending on what you have now..... the an athlon XP 3200 is considerably outperformed by an A64 3200, and the A64 is a mere 10 dollars more. it becomes no contest when you are upgrading from an athlon XP in the 2xxx range of model numbers, not to mention you will most likely need to upgrade your motherboard anyhow to get the full performance of the athlon XP at the highest range of that processor (or the semperon for that matter)