Venice vs. Orleans

[pc_boy]

How does the Orleans core stack up against the Venice in terms of overclock-ability and temperature/energy consumption?

Thanks!

 

[Apokalipse]

the orleans falls slightly behind the venice. if you want to get an AM2 CPU, wait until AMD irons out some bugs. especially with the memory controller (which is a tweaked DDR1 memory controller basically)

 

[turtile]

I've been hearing that the AM2 CPUs are actually overclocking even higher due to better production.

 

[Nitestick]

I've been hearing that the AM2 CPUs are actually overclocking even higher due to better production.

what do you mean by "better production"?

any way i would imagine there wouldn't be a significant difference as they are essentially the same core with an altered memory controller. although apokalipse does seem to have looked at some results so i would go with his answer

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

There is no difference if you ask me.... I think I am currently the only TF member with an AM2 socket orleans processor... There are no real bugs with the memory controller as long as you use stock DDR2 800 instead of the odd combos.... What I don't understand is you can have 800 and set some crazy divider up to make it as slow as the ram thats glitchy with this in some reports and it will run just fine... Anyways not that easy to overclock with current boards that are around which are mostly MSI/Abit/Biostar, I have the K9n Platinum and it has some serious bugs.... One is that the temp sensor for the CPU doesn't work, allways reports 0C/32F, another bug is once you hit 1.5Vcore or higher on the K9n Platinum your system will want to power down and stay powered down for an extended period of time then you can turn it on...

 

[turtile]

The die is 20% bigger. So it is different.

 

[Nitestick]

What I don't understand is you can have 800 and set some crazy divider up to make it as slow as the ram thats glitchy with this in some reports and it will run just fine... Anyways not that easy to overclock with current boards that are around which are mostly MSI/Abit/Biostar, I have the K9n Platinum and it has some serious bugs.... One is that the temp sensor for the CPU doesn't work, allways reports 0C/32F, another bug is once you hit 1.5Vcore or higher on the K9n Platinum your system will want to power down and stay powered down for an extended period of time then you can turn it on...

fortunately those sound like BIOS errors so you should be able to get fixes for it in the future.

thanks for clearing that up turtile

 

[Apokalipse]

it is a close match between Venice and orleans. the higher memory bandwith puts the orleans in front in some areas, but DDR1 has lower latencies (which is a bigger advantage on K8 CPU's), and the Venice has a lot fewer bugs, so it performs better in the majority of cases.
overall, the venice gets about 5% better in performance.

AM2 CPU's and motherboards are about the same price as socket 939 ones, but it will cost more to get DDR2 memory
so overall, I'd say it is not worth it to get AM2 yet, unless you plan on upgrading your CPU in future and don't want to get a new motherboard.

the memory controller on the orleans is basically built off the DDR1 memory controller on previous chips, so it's not really optimised for DDR2 yet.

one of the bugs with the memory controller is because of the odd numbers of DDR2 (533, 667). the problem is not the ability to reach the higher speeds, it's the multiplier and HTT speed used that just don't get those exact numbers.

I think that's why AMD decided to use DDR2-800 as standard. that number kinda agrees with the memory controller.

if socket AM2 will support DDR3 (which I think it will), then I think DDR2 is kind of a stopgap for AMD anyway.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

I dunno... I hope they do something about it soon... Only reason I upgraded was because I was on 754 and didnt wanna go to 939 which is only shown to last till next year...

 

[Running]

you should've gotten a biostar board. saw the review at AT oc's very well and not that expensive.