Athlon 64 Venice&Diego, P4 Ghz, questions!

[woot7800GT]

Okay, some questions here: Is an Athlon 64 3700 going to provide a noticible difference in performance from a P4 3.4? Also, I see that the 64's run at about 2.4 Ghz whereas my P4 runs at 3.4 Ghz. What exactly does this mean? Do the Ghz mean anything? Finally, theres alot of hype surrounding Venice and San Diego. What exactly are these? Can someone refer a link or explain please? Thanks everyone.

 

[Elbatrop1]

The AMD 64 chips have been proven to be better for gaming. The AMDs use an architecture which differs from Intel's, so to compare the actual clock speed of the chips isnt a good comparison.

P4s are still great for gaming, just that a price-equivalent AMD will game a little better.

Have a look at this to compare AMD and Intel:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/index.html

 

[Sport1031]

The GHz mean nothing when comparing Intel to AMD. A 3700+ means that it was made to compete or be similar to and Intel 3.7GHz.

Venice cores are the same as the original (Winchester), but they have SSE3 instructions. This means that their archeticture is a litte better and is capable of running newer software faster.

San Deigo is the same as Venice, but with a 1024KB L2 cache. Venice has only 512KB.

(Venice and San Deigo will also be able to overclock a heck of a lot more.)

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

It's more than SSE because the venice's are getting 3.0GHZ on air


From an AMD guy, your PC still has alot of like left in it, you went intel too bad. Next time, get whatever one is better.

 

[woot7800GT]

Yeah, about the L2 Cache, how important is that? I notciced most of the AMD64's have only 512 kb whereas my P4 has 1mb.

 

[Nubius]

Well the cache is what it accesses before going to the memory so more cache technically = better performance but you're not going to notice anything drastic between 512 and 1mb

The only thing venice cores have in common with winchester is the 90nm structure. As been said it has the SSE3 instructions added but beyond that it has a new architecture and way of layering the silicon.

This is why the AMD64 3000+ venice cores (stock 1.8GHz) have been hitting generally atleast 2.8GHz right out of the box

 

[woot7800GT]

So, is there a big performance difference between a Venice and a non venice CPU?

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Yea, you can overclock the Venice very easily to higher speeds with stock Vcore and stock cooling.

 

[Nubius]

Well more sets of instructions will make it be able to perform better in certain areas, depends on if the bench or program makes use of it.

Otherwise it's marginally better than a winchester but what really makes it shine is it's ability to OC quite high

 

[woot7800GT]

But the OCing depends on my mobo bios right? If I just overclock the CPU a bit, do I have to worry about any other components being affected? Also, what are the risks of OCing? just overheating right?