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Intel AMD Upgrades Hardware

New Intel Chipset and Extreme Edition CPU Tested 202

Posted by timothy from the smell-of-burning-ndas dept.
Steve writes "Today sees the launch of both a new CPU and chipset from Intel. The CPU takes the form of a 3.46Ghz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, running at 1066FSB, and the chipset is the i925XE, the first Intel chipset to support this new FSB. HEXUS.net have a review of both. It looks like AMD still have the lead when it comes to performance, despite Intel's attempts to counter the Athlon 64 FX-55." Hack Jandy links to more reviews at AnandTech, HardOCP, and ExtremeTech.
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New Intel Chipset and Extreme Edition CPU Tested More

New Intel Chipset and Extreme Edition CPU Tested

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  • Nobody ever got fired buying (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:15PM (#10682023) Homepage
    I think AnandTech summed it up nicely "So there you have it folks - the 1066MHz FSB does absolutely nothing for performance, [...], But with the move to the 1066MHz FSB we have a platform launch that, in the spirit of the 925X and 915 launches, does virtually nothing for performance."

    However the real question is, how many decision-makers are reading these review/benchmarks, or do they just buy Intel because it's Intel, or that's what xx-business weekly says?

    • Re:Nobody ever got fired buying (Score:5, Funny)

      by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:18PM (#10682045) Homepage
      The Extremely Expensive Edition CPUs aren't targeted at PHBs -- they're targeted at gamers. The PHBs are still buying 915 chipsets like Intel told them.
    • You missed one thing, now you can keep your whole house toasty warm with your intel system instead of just one room!

      Sorry I couldnt resist, I have to admit my athlon based system is a pretty good heater too :-(

    • Re:Nobody ever got fired buying (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Silverlancer ( 786390 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:29PM (#10682093)
      Interestingly enough many, including myself, were expecting quite a leap with 1066mhz FSB, especially considering the huge leap from 533 to 800. However, it seems as if the P4's bottleneck now isn't bandwidth at all, but latency, like the Athlons always have been. In other words, DDR2 (more bandwidth, crappy timings) is going to do shit all for the P4.

      • Not really... (Score:5, Informative)

        by cbreaker ( 561297 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:39PM (#10682138) Journal
        Athlons have always been fairly LOW latency chips, and the memory used (fast DDR memory) is low latency too.

        The P4's on the other hand have used Rambus memory for awhile, although that's not really the case anymore. But when they did, they always excelled at memory THROUGHPUT because Rambus runs at high frequencies. Rambus memory however is fairly latent - it's the trade-off.

        DDR2 RAM won't be "fast" until we see it in much higher speeds - DDR2-800 most likely. Of course, it will always have more latency then DDR because it uses four banks of DRAM instead of two.. I'm sure you can research all this via google if you're interested in learning more.

        • Re:Not really... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Silverlancer ( 786390 )
          Thats exactly what I was saying--Athlons benefit not from higher bandwidth but more so from low latency, so for example DDR2 would suck for Athlons. And what I was saying is that P4s seem to be moving towards what Athlons are--chips that benefit more from lower latency than higher bandwidth.

        • Athlons have always been fairly LOW latency chips, and the memory used (fast DDR memory) is low latency too.

          The scary thing about these Opteron results is that the Opteron is bitch-slapping the P4EE at 32-bit performance, AND THAT'S NOT EVEN WHAT IT WAS DESIGNED FOR!!!

          The 32-bit circuitry in the Opteron is almost an afterthought - the raison d'etre of the Opteron is 64-bit operating systems.

          You gotta figure there's some sweating of the palms and some grinding of the teeth amongst the suits in Santa C

      • "Interestingly enough many, including myself, were expecting quite a leap with 1066mhz FSB, especially considering the huge leap from 533 to 800."

        You may have forgotten the memory bandwidth. That leap from 533MHz FSB to 800MHz FSB was accompanied by a huge leap in memory bandwidth from single-channel DDR266/333 (845PE chipset) to dual-channel DDR400 (865/875 chipsets). There were no memory bandwidth increases to go along with today's leap to 1066MHz FSB.

        Also, the Anandtech article notes that Pentium 4

    • Re:Nobody ever got fired buying (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ewe2 ( 47163 ) <ewetoo@gmail . c om> on Sunday October 31, 2004 @10:34PM (#10682349) Homepage Journal
      ...but you'd be crazy to invest. Intel is in deep trouble unless Microsoft's next big thing convinces the Intel-lovers they need to upgrade. Microsoft is in deep trouble unless they convince the AMD-lovers they're not going to discriminate against them with said next big thing. R&D budgets are almost untenable. People are looking for ways to conserve their hardware, not madly buy more because Intel had a rollout.
    • Most businesses go with Intel because they have always done so, and it's what most vendors like HP, Dell, and IBM push.

      They might have some Opterons in their line-up, and they might be faster boxes, but when it comes to a production environment most bosses would rather go with what they've been buying and what has been working. Even if it's more expensive and doesn't run as fast.

      It takes an IT manager that's well educated in the current state of technology, as well as the technical people under him or h
      • Funny you should mention the point about IT managers. A friend of mine is an IT manager at a small company here and used to be a huge fan of Intel. Once he saw the performance vs. price of an Athlon system, he was intrigued. 10 workstations and 3 servers later it's an AMD shop. It's all he'll build now. Laptops are still Intel-based Dells, but every new machine built is an AMD.

        We'll see what he does when he builds a serious Asterisk server. We're running Linux Mandrake on it now on an Athlon XP3000 with
        • You won't find dual Athlons, but you can find Dual Opteron systems. If you build your own systems, the major motherboard vendors all sell multi-cpu Opteron boards. If you're looking for pre-fab, Sun makes them, and some others do too.

          You'll get more bang for your buck with a 2-way Opteron then a 2-Way Xeon, that's for certian. And if you run Linux, you can run 64-bit versions of your distribution, squeezing more performance out of the thing (depending on the application, you can see 30% or more performa
          • From what I've seen of 64-bit Linux distros thus far, they need time to mature. It's always some weirdness with the kernel or gcc or whatever that has lots of people complaining of lockups and crashing. That kind of rumor mill makes going 64-bit a tough sell. Perhaps later this year or early next year I'll start to hear good things about 64bit stuff.
            • Really?

              I'll have to read up on it. I haven't observed any more issues with AMD64 users over anyone else - it's seemed like a fairly smooth transition so far.

              People will always have trouble using their computers, but they might be talking a little louder since they're running AMD64, and thus everything wrong with their machines MUST be caused by that.
    • Many people and companies buy Intel because its Intel. Friends who are building computers for themselves asked me to browse motherboard combos, but it should be Intel. Asked why, they couldnt really answer beside "theyre well known".

      I remember when the K5, K6 and the K6-2 had issues with certain motherboards, and running Windows95 was a pain, to an extent that you had to swap the CPU with an Intel or Cyrix. That reputation had a lasting legacy on AMD. Later the Athlon came which was awesome for the price/
      • This just goes to show that people are more likely to go with the option they know, as opposed to the best ones. This is true with hardware, software (how many computers run Windows?), clothes, music, etc. Mod me Offtopic, Flamebait, Troll if you feel it is necessary.

  • I liked the previous version ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:15PM (#10682026)
    where I clicked it and it said "move along, nothing to see here"

    Seemed more accurate.

  • But is it 64bit? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by CrashPanic ( 704263 )
    Great clock speed and all but is it 64bit?

  • I wonder if it includes... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:18PM (#10682043)
    Intel Extreme Graphics! W00t!

  • improvement (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Coneasfast ( 690509 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:18PM (#10682044)
    anandtech [anandtech.com] shows a 1% increase in speed over 800mhz fsb in most cases, is this really something to get excited about? will this difference open up in the future?

  • If I wanted the fastest... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:20PM (#10682054) Homepage
    ...I'd be twice the sucker I actually am.

    Thank god for the ponces and their fast stuff obsession making things cheap for me :)

  • Price / performance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `l3gnaerif'> on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:21PM (#10682060) Homepage
    Honestly, who is buying these things? At a price of 999$ US (1000 units lot) and a marginal performance increase compared to other, far less costly solutions (3500+ AMD anyone?), I just don't see a market. Is it just for the performance crown, which they didn't even get to win this time around (or should I say, in the past 2-3 years)?No word on heat, nor power consumption.

    AMD all the way. Intel is alive just because of Dell (among others) and a large reserve of cash. They cost more, do less, and heat your bedroom to boot. But it has 'Intel Inside', so I guess it must count for something...
    • I'll buy one because I can get an Intel motherboard without RAID/audio/etc on it taking up resources and confliting with the RAID/audio/etc card that I want to use. Well in truth I'm looking a dual Xeon system right now, but the reasons the same. I can do without a bit of performance if I can get the stability that comes with not having a bunch of crap on the motherboard.

      • Re:Price / performance (Score:4, Interesting)

        by PitaBred ( 632671 ) <slashdot&pitabred,dyndns,org> on Sunday October 31, 2004 @10:41PM (#10682377) Homepage
        You do realize that a) you can disable all the 'bunch of crap' on the motherboard in the BIOS, and it won't take up any resources and b) much of the 'bunch of crap' on recent motherboards is actually rather good hardware? I used to be a snob like you, but then I realized that the onboard stuff really isn't always dog poo. There's a reason it's on there.
        • In many cases you cant. Often a PCI RAID card will conflict with an on-board RAID even if its disabled. And since no one seems to list the degree to which you can turn off the on-board hardware I've found its best just to avoid the whole problem. Granted it has gotten better then the early days of the Athlon and Via chipsets, I had one system that wouldn't boot if you had both a PS/2 mouse and a SCSI card hooked up at the same time. In addition, I have yet to see ANY motherboard with on-board parts that are
        • You do realize that [...] much of the 'bunch of crap' on recent motherboards is actually rather good hardware? I used to be a snob like you, but then I realized that the onboard stuff really isn't always dog poo. There's a reason it's on there.

          I take a slightly different view; back when I started dealing with PC hardware in '95, much of the on-board hardware was "dog poo" and was also poorly supported by Linux. Things started improving a few years ago (about '98/'99 ish) and my last two motherboards have

          • I take a slightly different view; back when I started dealing with PC hardware in '95, much of the on-board hardware was "dog poo" and was also poorly supported by Linux.

            Out here in the real world, we say "dog shit"
    • AMD all the way. Intel is alive just because of Dell (among others) and a large reserve of cash. They cost more, do less, and heat your bedroom to boot. But it has 'Intel Inside', so I guess it must count for somethin

      I don't see this as true. To the people that read reviews it might seem obvious that AMD is currently in the especially for gaming benchmarks, but people will still buy intel because
      1.they heard amd runs really hot
      2.Wtf is amd?
      3.Intel has way higher mhz and a bigger fsb it can't be wrong
    • "Honestly, who is buying these things?"

      These guys are, for starters. [futuremark.com]

  • Another, older review of 925XE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:21PM (#10682061)
    Right here [tomshardware.com]. Though, I must admit that I found some of the results to be a little wonky, along with the test bed. How'd they get a FX-51 running on a socket 939 board? Underlocked a FX-53?

    • Re:Another, older review of 925XE (Score:5, Informative)

      by MightyPez ( 734706 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:43PM (#10682153)
      Because Tom's hardware is notoriously biased towards Intel. Photochopped P4 cores, funky timings on AMD rigs, and of course; editorials like this [tomshardware.com] from staff writers which say the following:
      There is nothing finer than raising the hackles of delusional AMD lovers. However, today I do so with a heavy heart. This is no time to take aim at the pompous, self-righteous head-in-the-sand-ostriches of the alternative chip lifestyle. One must embrace them, hug them and wipe away their tears.

      • Re:Another, older review of 925XE (Score:4, Interesting)

        by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:54PM (#10682195)
        I've heard this complaint many times, but I'm beginning to think that Tom's Hardware may simply feature insane reviewers and article authors. The results in the benchmark suite to which I linked are a bit odd(in particular are the rather stunning Doom III results which are wildly different than the ones features not long ago in Anandtech's Doom III CPU shootout [anandtech.com]), but what is most noteworthy is that the author is not at all enthusiastic about the 3.46 ghz P4EE in his conclusion. If he truly was biased towards Intel, or if everyone at Tom's was thusly biased, you'd think he'd try to spin the benchmark results as a major victory for the EE.
        • I don't even think he has a given bias as such. He'll just say or do anything that brings clicks.

          Whether that means trolling a certain user group (e.g., the insulting editorials about AMD fans), trolling about other popular (and far more competent) sites, or saying what the majority wants to hear, or some cheap lame publicity stunt. (E.g., the video about an Athlon burning horribly without a heatsink at all. Except what he won't tell you is that it only happens without a heatsink at all, so outside of such
    • other sites have a much more experienced staff than tom's hardware, and a much wider dataset to compare against. eg anandtech.

      when reading tom's hardware i often feel like i'm reading press releases rather than a hardware review.

  • Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heli0 ( 659560 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:22PM (#10682062)
    http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjgyLDY= [hardocp.com]
    I think Intel knows that they are not going to get a lot of kind press today.


    I think Intel has put this launch where they think it can do the least amount of damage by actually being noticed.

    Intel's new Pentium 4 3.46 Extreme Edition processor touting its 1066MHz FSB and supporting 925XE chipset bring nothing new to the table in terms of real-world performance.

    "Is this a paper launch?" Quite frankly, I don't know, and I don't see any real reason to care.



    http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2261&p=17 [anandtech.com]
    So there you have it folks - the 1066MHz FSB does absolutely nothing for performance.


    We can only wonder what Intel is thinking, releasing an entirely new chipset just four months after they released the original. Either the 1066MHz FSB is going to make its way to CPUs faster than we have anticipated, or Intel has just introduced the world's first useless FSB improvement for the next 9 months.

    But given that Intel isn't planning on ramping clock speed up too high anytime soon, we'd say that the 1066MHz FSB is best left for late next year, when more useful implementations of it will appear.

    • Re:Ouch (Score:2, Funny)

      by crazy_monkey ( 708922 )
      Remember when DDR first came out?

      then...
      Dolts said: "DOUBLE the bandwidth, yo!"
      Reviews said: %5 real world increase of performance.
      Dolts went out and bought, bought, bought.

      now...
      Dolts said: "Broken the 1GHz FSB, yo!"
      Reviews said: %1 real world increase of performance.
      Dolts go out and buy, buy, buy

  • Will they ever beat intel (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kff322 ( 752112 ) <linuxsuperuser@gmail.com> on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:23PM (#10682072) Homepage Journal
    no matter how fast the clock speed the pipline is sooooo long for P4 chips causing a sever preformance degradement. This is why G5 and AMD chips are faster at lower clock speeds because of there shorter pipline. Intels high clock speeds just look good

    • Re:Will they ever beat intel (Score:5, Informative)

      by evn ( 686927 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:48PM (#10682169)

      If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.

      Pipeline length has some impact on performance and until recently Intel has been able to perform well by jacking up the clock speed. Sure it ate tons of power, and heated your room but it didn't really matter provided Intel's chips could perform as well as the AMD, IBM, Motorola, etc. competition. Think of a trip to the drag strip: if my 5.7L corvette runs the quarter mile in 12.5 seconds and your 1.6L civic does it in 13 seconds I still win the race. In a race to be the fastest you can't lean out the window and yell "You won, but I was almost as quick and I did it with 75% less motor!": you'll look like a fool. The performance crown is about being the fastest. period.

      For the last 9 months or so Intels small-block Corvettes have not only been losing the races, they're getting beaten by Subarus that produce more power, get twice the gas mileage, and cost less.

      You might want to read some of the ARS Technica articles that cover CPU design and illustrate some of the differences between the various architectures:

      • If only it were that simple! Cache sizes, prediction facilities, execution units, register count, etc. all play a significant part in CPU performance and to reduce this to an argument about who's pipeline is bigger ignores many of the important issues.

        So size really doesn't matter?
    • Long pipelines have a few bad side effects. Of those directly impacting performance: longer latency, worse branch miss penalty.

      Now for the first one I will tell you: You do not care how latent (that is, laggy?) your processor is, as long as it is not extremely high. A lack of throughput is what slows down an application, not how long any individual instruction takes to go through the processor. This may change with multi-processor systems where something as fast as the processor (another processor) i
      • The p3 was a hell of a processor. A 1ghz p3 will make a p4 nearly twice as fast feel like a raw deal, but intel decided they had to crank the mhz even while talking about all this multicore stuff.

        Too bad they didn't just spend that money figuring out how to cram more PERFORMANCE into the chip instead of more mhz. A four core 1GHz P3 with 2MB of fast (shared) l3 cache deployed on 90nm tech would probably still be smaller and cheaper than any of the P4s they've introduced this year... and it would also, quit

  • Catching up (Score:5, Informative)

    by thedogcow ( 694111 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:26PM (#10682083)
    Intel is slowing catching up. But the fact is that my DP 2.5GHz G5 is at 1.25GHz Frontside bus - per processor.

    • Not only that, but your G5s actually use it -- this new Intel processor doesn't.

    • FSB speed is basically irrelevant when it's fast enough to keep up with the memory bus, as Intel has demonstrated for us. The only thing the chip ever does (with some VERY RARE exceptions) is access memory.

      Even on a two processor system, the speed of the memory bus is the bottleneck. Since the only thing the processors ever do is access memory, and there is only one memory bus, the extra speed doesn't help anything.

      One assumes that IBM has a good reason for pumping up the bus speed, but it has nothing to
    • the bus on Athlon64/Opteron is better. On G5 (and Intel-land as well) all memory-access goes through the FSB. And that consumes ALOT of bandwidth. On A64 and Opteron, the CPU talks directly with the RAM, leaving the FSB (such as it exists on A64) entirely dedicated to I/O and the like. And that design reduces latencies as well.

      I much rather have 800Mhz of the A64 than the 1+GHz FSB of Pentium IV EE or G5 (only of the faster models, however. Slower G5's have slower buses as well).

  • Hey, slow down! (Score:5, Funny)

    by dsanfte ( 443781 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:29PM (#10682095) Journal
    Do you guys think we could, like, halt the march of progress for a year or two? 1066FSB already?

    You know, some of us over here have Athlon XPs with 333FSBs, and we're crying our eyes out. Please, think of us. Sometime? Maybe?

    Fuck.
    • Give me a marker and I'll 'upgrade' your chip. No charge.

    • Re:Hey, slow down! (Score:4, Funny)

      by cortana ( 588495 ) <sam@[ ]ots.org.uk ['rob' in gap]> on Sunday October 31, 2004 @10:35PM (#10682350) Homepage
      I'd be willing to bet that the 1066 MHz that the FSB runs at are actually "bullshit marketing MHz" rather than an actual measurement of the speed at which the chips cycle.

      Remember when the number your RAM was sold at actually indicated its speed? PC100 was 100 MHz, etc. It was simple. That 333 MHz FSB you sport is really only 166 MHz, but with two transfers per clock cycle. Of course, PC166 DDR isn't sexy enough, so the marketers randomly inflate the number to PC2700. :)

      I recon that Intel are smearing the the same bullshit over their specifications: 1066 MBMhz == 266 MHz "QDR" (oh sorry, Quad Data Rate isn't sexy enough, we can call it QUAD PUMPED!! YEAH!)

      I'd search for more reliable info, but I've given up trying to find any decent information about hardware on Google these days; it's all comparison shopping sites, as far as the eye can see.

      Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. After we kill all the lawyers, everyone in advertising will be next to go.

  • price/performance (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sensible Clod ( 771142 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:33PM (#10682113) Homepage
    AMD still have the lead when it comes to performance

    And even more so when it comes to VALUE. Intel just seems to have a problem making the P4 fast but not expensive. I suspect they just need to toss it and come up with a completely new design. Like Pentium M, only better.

    Just my sqrt(4) cents.
    • AMD chips used to cost very little, yes, but nowadays they're pretty much on par with Intel.

      E.g, since we're talking about the P4EE, a fair comparison would be the Athlon FX. A quick look at an online shop here (www.alternate.de) says:

      Athlon 64 FX-55 ... 899 Euro
      Athlon 64 FX-53 ... 849 Euro

      Not exactly a budget chip either, eh?

      But let's look at something more mainstream:

      Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 754, 2 GHz) ... 174 Euro
      Athlon 64 3000+ (socket 939, 1.8 GHz) ... 184 Euro

      Pentium 4 3000 GHz (Northwood) ... 1

  • Think of the drivers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by poptones ( 653660 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:51PM (#10682176) Journal
    I use an AMD box now - I have for some time. It's not even a powerhouse, it's an old XP1800. I've used this CPU on three different motherboards now, and so far I'm still looking for a reason to consider AMD when I finally replace it. I've had an S3 motherboard, a via motherboard, and TWO Nvidia motherboards. The closest I came to having decent chipset support was with the S3 and that's only because the guy who wrote the 3D drivers was able to basically con S3 out of the information he needed in order to do it (ie if you get a mainstream distro his drivers won't be in it due to potential legal issues).

    The first Nvidia I bought to try out, then decided I wanted that great whajamacallit sound support so I spent weeks looking for a miniATX motherboard that had this feature. When I finally got it I discovered it has TERRIBLE sound - I mean atrocious, like the crap you would expect from a five year old emachine. Overtones, quantization noise - just horrid. And this is using THEIR drivers, which I cannot use along with THEIR 3D supporting video drivers because of random lockups the two together cause on my mandrake system.

    If I get an intel system I at least get decent drivers. So here we have an intel motherboard that offers basically the same performance as the top of the line AMD, meaning "it can be done" and a lesser system (as I would buy) will also be proportionately less expensive. So for a premium of just a few bucks I can get similar performance AND I get open drivers that will work with my linux system?

    Where do I sign up?
    • This is the same problem that I have too.. AMD has good chips, but very poor chipset support.

      Intel has shitty chips, but their chipsets are good.
      • Just good SUPPORT. Provide the fucking documentation we need to support these devices within the community. With rare exception intel has been good about this, but those that provide AMD-centric chipsets have not.

        I'm really amazed AMD has such a good rap around here considering the only chipsets (if you want even halfway decent graphics) supported by their CPU are all wrapped up in proprietary (and generally terrible quality) linux drivers.

        I don't frag, I don't care about "squeezing out" two or even ten p
    • Well, on the flipside, I have an AMD 3000 and an MSI nForce 2 Ultra board and I haven't had a single problem that you mentioned. It works wonderfully in Windows and Linux (Linux finally got support for the on-board ethernet a little while ago with the forcedeth driver).

      I've only tested it on a few linux distros though (RH9, FC1, FC2, Suse 8.2, 9.1, Ubuntu 4.10). The ethernet didn't work with 8.2 or RH9.

      I have never experienced the sound problems you refer to. In fact, I think it sounds better than my ro
    • Why do you want onboard sound.

      And who did ever convince you that onboard sound can be good enough for anything?

      Even if youre a little bit of an audiophile, you'd be looking at Audigies and Yamahas, and Grado or Sony headphones and the likes. Even the best motherboards out there have sound crappier than a measly Soundblaster Live available for $15 on eBay.

      Go figure.
      • A) the MCP-T also provides 1394 connectivity. I wanted a motherboard I could use in a very low profile system and didn't want to have to use a PCI slot as I already had one in use by the tv tuner card and, because it's low profile and all, it's on a riser card laying flat across the other slots.

        B) That "on board sound" is controlled by a pretty powerful DSP. Problem is it's completely closed, the drivers suck, and because Nvidia think the sky will fall in if they allow us "lusers' to add features WE want t

  • Dear god... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tyler Eaves ( 344284 ) on Sunday October 31, 2004 @09:52PM (#10682186)
    The FSB on that thing is clocked faster than my CPU....

    • Re:Dear god... (Score:2, Informative)

      by DrMrLordX ( 559371 )
      Are you sure? Remember, this is a P4 FSB we're talking about here. It's "quad-pumped". The 1066 mhz rating is the effective speed. The actual frequency at which the FSB operates is 1/4 that, or 266 mhz. However, if you're using a Pentium or one of the early Klamath Pentium 2s, your CPU still might be clocked lower than the FSB of the 925XE platform.
    • Same here although Ive had no issues with XP running on my PentiumIII 800MHz. Ive played counterstrike source with my geforce4ti card, and dont think I'll need to upgrade till Athlon64 becomes cheaper.

      Will I spend $999 on the new Intel chip? Only if they give me a rebate of $999

  • What??!!? (Score:4, Funny)

    by JamesTheBard ( 755485 ) <jamesthebard@exciteSTRAW.com minus berry> on Sunday October 31, 2004 @10:03PM (#10682225)
    C'mon. This has gotta be useful for all the bachelors out there. Nothing like surfing the net at home while warming the house at the same time. You know that Intel is just waiting for the right time to unleash the hot-plate add on so I don't even have to leave my computer to cook the vast stores of Top Ramen.
  • While I think all these benchmarks that are being used on the big sites like [H]ard|OCP, Anandtech, and Extremetech are a big part of an overall score when it comes to deciding what to buy and what not to buy; but when it comes to the people that use Photoshop, Premiere, and the other numerous digital content creation applications out there, they're pretty much left in the cold, and then buy a Mac because they know Macs perform these functions excellently. Is it possible for Adobe to make a benchmark based
  • But does it make the internet go faster?!?!
    • You're joking of course, but I recall a while back my gf's little brother (11 years old) asked what are the fastest computers on earth. So I decided I'd try to be educational, showed him the list on top500.org, and tried my best to explain what Gflops mean. And what does he ask?

      "How fast would a machine like that load the front page of Google?"

      I was speechless.

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