Preserved Topic: the age old question Intel or AMD? (Page 1 of 1)

Well there it is, i've come into some money about $750 [lucky me] and i want to upgrade my system.
At the moment i'm running a celeron 333mhz with 160mb of ram. And to be quite honest it sucks. I'm kind of confused
as to which way i should go. Most of my tech head friends say AMD , but they only really use their systems for games and i don't play any games.
So basically will it affect how well 3d Max R3.1 if i get an AMD Athlon or should i get a more expensive [so does that mean better] pentium four/three? The way i see it if i get an AMD 1.2 ghz athlon, a new motherboard and some ram i'll probably be able to save up for a nice GeForce 3.
So there it is intel or amd and it'd be nice if there were reasons why is should go one way or the other.
oh yeah also, would there be any point keeping the celeron system going for network rendering?

Thanks for your help

real nice article on it

Intel is overpriced at the moment. Even the ram for a P4 is expensive (RDRAM). I'd suggest an Athlon.

I only went with a P4 because I had money to burn and I use a lot of high-end apps (Mental Ray, soon WorldBuilder, etc). They tend to lag in support for non-Intel CPUs.

If you plan on doing 3D...save yourself the headaches and go Intel. AMDs may be cheaper chips..but the software just isnt written for them. Not necessarily a P4...you can do fine with a P3 (maybe even duals)...

Thats just my personal opinion..but I do know for a fact that some software acts really funky on AMD's.

--now inc

www.now-incorporated.com

I definitely think you should go with Intel relain. I asked a question about AMD chips and 3D progs a while back http://www.ozoneasylum.com/Forum11/HTML/000167.html

and I think the consensus was that AMD chips just don't run the high end 3D apps well or at all.

It actually wouldn't be too expensive to get dual celeron 500's, which would be an improvement over your current system. Also, with 128 megs of pc100 or pc133 RAM going for less than fifty bucks, you could add a motherlode of memory to up the performance as well.

Check out www.pricewatch.com.



[This message has been edited by silence (edited 04-24-2001).]

If he were using Maya or Mental Ray or any other high-end app, I might agree. However, his post specified that Max 3.1 was the only app in consideration.

The Athlon works quite well with Max 3.1, and is very, very cheap for the power you get. The Athlon is a huge improvement over previous AMD chips in compatibility overall. I stick by my recommendation.

If someone were looking for a CPU for general 3D work, I'd suggest an Intel chip, but even then you're sacrificing cash for compatibility. $750 isn't much to spend on a full-system upgrade.

Das has spoken.

To back up my opinion a bit:
Tom's Hardware - benchmarks of Athlon vs PIII and P4 (second chart, partway down the page)

This is page 23 of a review of the P4. He's using 3D Studio Max 2.0, but the results for 3.1 would probably be comperable.

Of note on the chart is the fact that the Athlon 1.2 Ghz is nearly twice as fast as a PIII 1.0 Ghz. The Athlon is more than twice as fast as a 1.4 Ghz P4 (yes, the 1.4 Ghz P4 is slower than the 1.0 Ghz PIII)

Intel's latest CPUs (both PIII and P4) just suck at IEEE floating point. If Max ever supports the 64-bit floating point that Intel is pushing, the story will be different *shrug*

Note that Max shows the P4 in worse light than virtually every other benchmark Tom's Hardware uses in this comparison. In most, the P4 is a bit slower (or sometimes a bit faster) than the Athlon. Max generating a heavily raytraced image, however, is almost pure FP crunching, and shows the Athlon's superior FP capability.

Maybe I should buy an Athlon for Max and use the P4 for Mental Ray and such.

[This message has been edited by Das (edited 04-24-2001).]

thanks guys, i think im gonna get me an athlon. Somehow i think it will be a long time before i get my grubby hands on Mental Ray or Maya so in the meantime ill go cheap.
Can you run a dual processor set up with them? cos that'd probably be pretty sweet.

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Das has spoken.

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Hehe, sorry if I come across as arrogant. It's just the way I write. I'm not so bad in person, honest!

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Can you run a dual processor set up with them?

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Not yet, the dual-athlon motherboards are supposed to be out sometime this summer. Believe me, I'm waiting I had a chance to work on a dual-P3 866 on a contract gig and it was FAAAAAAAAAAST...

Chris

KAIROSinteractive

I once had the "misfortune" to use an SGI workstation for about an hour and it has jaded me ever since. Quad Sparc chips, people. 10 grand a piece. It was so fast real life seems slow.

Das: Hey man, I was actually saying the opposite. You sound like you really know your sh!t, pardon my french, and I'd take your opinion on good faith any day. The fact that you're even backing yourself up is even more evidence of the fact.

But, uhh, don't go tellin' people what I tol' ya. don't wanna ruin my rep, nah mean

I used to run Studio Max 3.1 on a AMD Athlon processor and the bloody program kept freezing on me. At the time I didn't know what was causing it, so I looked up the program specifics and it said a Pentium processor. In the end I changed to a Pentium 1.1Ghz and I've never looked back.....not yet.

-=Luxo Jr.=-

Doin' wierdassed animations since 1986

[This message has been edited by Luxo_Jr (edited 05-08-2001).]

My question is, if you don't play any games why would you get a geforce 3? For the same price you could buy a refurbished real video card.

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a refurbished real video card.

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cool, what would one of those be exactly, i mean its not like i play games, however i guess thats cos i don't have any cos i've got a comparitively slow p.c, but then what are consoles for, anyone else looking forwards to the x-box? By real video card do you mean the kind that retail for about £1000 and do lots of amazing things with open gl?

chris

Well, the power of the geforce 3 is the fact that it does so many things in hardware, as opposed to writing software. This, as you can imagine, makes things much faster.

As far as 3D applications go, I'm sure if new versions of these programs incorporate this into their code you will get a marked improvement in render time.

That's my theory, anyway.