[HotSnoJ]

Found this site, they do custom PC's!!

http://www.mavericpc.com/systems.html

[Ghostavo]

cof cof cof cof cof...

[Kazan]

never buy anything in the graphics card market with an nVidia chip on it - their R&D cycles are horrendous and almost every chip from them is overclocked from the fab - and if it';s not it'll soon be overclocked by a driver update.  

There is a reason why they needed a vacuum cleaner to cool their chip that barely compared to the Radeon 9700

i hear their motherboards aren't bad - but it'd still got with Via chipsets for athlon mobos (this cominmg from a guy who used to hate Via with a passion, until they cleaned up their act)

[Antares]

I've decided to go ahead and pop for the 256 MB Radeon 9800 XT.  I'm waiting for Intel to finish up their latest revisions to their shaky "Prescott" series of P4s, and a power-optimized version is due sometime in May.  Intel says they'll only have optimization for chips up to 3.2 Ghz at that time, before they start work on chips with higher clock speeds.  This means I can forego getting a 3.4 entirely, and take about $200 off the price of my system in the process, bringing the cost of the Radeon alone down to about $300--something I think is a good investment in a computer I want to last for the next several years.

[Grey Wolf]

I sincerely doubt that Intel will do much with Prescott to make it a decent chip for quite a while, especially as they just announced a delay of the 3.0GHz part, most likely due to heat concerns. If you want a top of the line computer that'll last you a long time, get a Newcastle-based AMD64 processor in April or so, probably with a K8T800 Pro-based motherboard and a Radeon 9800 Pro. The performance will be at least equal to any Prescott-based system, and it'll run quite a bit cooler.

[Kazan]

I wouldn't go with a P4 anyway - especially not the new prescotts - they have very long stage lengths and that is an immense overhead problem and sums up to be a terrible Ghz to Gips ratio

[aldo_14]

Intel have been playing silly buggers for years at this sort of thing.....

NB:  Kaz, what are you referring to by 'stages'?

[Kazan]

aldo_14: it's a Computer Engineering thing --  points at google

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Kazan
aldo_14: it's a Computer Engineering thing --  points at google

Oh, for christ sakes.  It's not a hard question, and google's a load of pish for this sort of thing (see http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22stages%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&meta= - pain in the arse).  And Computer Organization and Design (Patterson & Hennesy) doesn;t mention 'stages' as a standalone keyword in the index either.

I'm simply curious if it's another pipeline problem, or the ole' one from the P3.

EDIT; 30+ stages?  fer Christ sake.............

[Kazan]

yes it's a pipeline problem

[aldo_14]

Sound's like the same basic pipeline problem as the P3.... that had about 20 IIRC, presumably to increase the MHz & fool the consumers..... now, we never did hyperthreading when I did CAD (wasn;t around then), but I'd be surprised if they haven't shoved in those extra 10+ largely for the magical 3GHz rating.

[Kazan]

i though the new prescot had something like 35 stages

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Kazan
i though the new prescot had something like 35 stages

I dunno....saw 2 sites, one said 30, one 39.  35 seems excessive, regardless (even with possible parallelism - I'll have to check that out sometimes), because IIRc the P3 had something like 20?  (16 in the x-box version - presumably MS saw past that particular trick).

I'm actually looking justnow at a graph* showing the maximum reltaive performance for pipelining peaking at 8 stages..... and dropping thereafter.  Which kinda puts intels' little tricks in context.

*based on one from a paper called "Optimal Pipelining in supercomputers" (Krunkel & Smith) from 1986, natch.

[Grey Wolf]

Wouldn't go for a Dell for that matter. Dell is joined at the hip to Intel and will probably never get around to releasing a chip made by any other company.

[aldo_14]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1478837,00.asp

little thing on the new Intel chips that may be of interest.

[Grey Wolf]

Hmm... seems Dell may end up making computers with Opterons and A64s: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14426