newcastle > clawhammer :?

[cr0nick]

i've ordered all the parts needed to start building a computer except for the processor, last night i was franticly searching for an AMD 64 3200+ with a clawhammer core, newegg and zipzoomfly no longer stock them since apparently AMD has discontinued the production of the 3200+ with a clawhammer core and switched over to newcastle, the new chips bump up the processor speed 200mhz while cutting the catche in half, im wondering how reducing the catche size will effect the overrall performance of the chip

[ferret]

New Castle is so much better (Assuming socket 939) that they could afford to cut the cache and still beat the clawhammers. In fact, the Athlon-64 3800 with 512kb cache is only slightly behind the Athlon-64 FX-53 with 1mb cache. They fixed a great deal of issues that made the cache a lot less important.

[blue]

ok, im looking at chips online. what does "FSB: Integrated into Chip" mean?

its on the chip description.

also what is the diff between a scoket 939 and 754?

[ferret]

754 is older and will probably be retired within a fairly short time frame. 939 is the newest socket from AMD, released about 2 months ago, cutting edge and all that jazz.

I'm not sure what they mean by "FSB Integrated into Chip" unless they mean the memory controller, which is part of why the Athlon 64s are so fast. They have the memory controller on die instead of external, so it can handle the RAM much faster.

[blue]

ok, so socket 939 it is! :) how do i know what the fsb is of a chip? i mean, how fast can i run it? for example: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=19-103-463&depa=1

[ferret]

Here for a full article on 939:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040601/index.html

Here for the CPU chart:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040601/socket_939-06.html#amd

The 3500+ has a 400FSB

[blue]

good reading, thanks ferret.
looking at this mobo too...
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-128-254&depa=1

seems like a nice one :)
(review)
http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=248

[ferret]

I'd have to agree with the one review..

Very noisy chipset and DPS fans, Uses a Marvell PCI gigabit chip instead of the integrated Nvidia Gigabit, primary sata connectors are in a horrible position right above the AGP slot, memory slots are right next to each other rather than alternated per channel, so dimms tend to get very hot in dual-channel mode. Not a very good design.

That memory thing in particular bugs me, but the SATA slots really are in a piss poor position. Dual-channel RAM is what the A64s are all about so..

[blue]

so this is a bad board and would get very hot?
asus makes the other one that is listed as compatable.. hmm.. will read into them more.

[blue]

this one looks better, nicer reviews too.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=13-131-499&depa=1

[ferret]

I like that one a lot better. ASUS makes premium motherboards, tons of features and rock solid hardware (Though the occasional software issue..)