Price Guides September 2003 IDF Edition: CPU, Motherboards and Video Cards
by Anand Shimpi & Laura Johnston on September 18, 2003 2:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
With all the upcoming fun going on with AMD, Intel has not been sitting around. As the title implies, IDF (Intel Developer Forum) kicked off yesterday with some pretty big news. Not only did Intel announce their new Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor, but new announcements such as Prescott die sizes have spurred a renewed interest in the consumer. As you may have read, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition is the same 3.2GHz 800FSB P4 from before, but with an additional 2MB of L3 cache. For most of us, this additional boost in cache size really wont matter. However, if you use your machine as a render station, or perhaps excessive amounts of MATLAB, the 2MB cache will boost performance significantly.
P4EE will probably take about 30 days before showing up on our price guides, so we doubt its announcement will start affecting prices yet. One thing we have noticed is the upward trend in prices for all 533FSB processors. There was a similar correction back when 533FSB replaced 400FSB, so this was expected. 800FSB processors continue to drop a buck or two per week, and will eventually price the same as 533FSB solutions. When P4EE finally does hit store shelves, insiders speculate it will cost about $740 in quantities of 1000. Considering this would price the processor $150 over the already expensive P4 3.2GHz, it is going to be a hard purchase to justify. Inevitably, prices of the 3.2GHz and 3.0GHz P4 will be affected.
Don’t forget to check our RealTime Price Guides. We recently added VIA’s EPIA line to our processing lineup! Stay tuned for our Computex as there will undoubtedly be more announcements on the EPIA and C3 line.
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Kristopher, #16 again. These quotes were taken from the original AnandTech reviews of nForce2 technology."Remember the 12% boost in bandwidth we saw on the nForce2 by going to DDR400? That 12% increase in bandwidth comes at the cost of a 22% increase in latency! The increase in latency is not only due to the slower memory timings DDR400 modules run at but also because the memory bus is no longer synchronous with the FSB when running in DDR400 mode whereas DDR333 matches up perfectly with the new 333MHz Athlon XP FSB."
"There's no increase in latency when going from a single channel DDR333 to a dual channel DDR333 setup on the nForce2 platform. There is a slight increase when making the same transition with DDR400 because we had to increase some of the timing delays in order to run two channels of DDR400 with the nForce2 while maintaining stability."
"As we proved in our original review of the nForce chipset, the bandwidth gained from going to dual channel DDR doesn't help unless you're sharing main memory bandwidth with an integrated GPU. In this case we're not and we'll be focusing on IGP performance in a later article, so we can disregard the two 128-bit nForce2 solutions for the rest of this comparison. We also have a balanced FSB/memory bus setup, meaning we have as much bandwidth going to our CPU as we do to main memory, so increasing memory bandwidth without similarly increasing FSB bandwidth would inherently yield poor returns as we're FSB limited at that point."
Thus, unless the board is capable of running dual-channel in full synchronous mode at 400MHz+ at tight timings, there does not seem to be any advantage. And then again, how many boards that can do this fall into the "half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards" category?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Kristopher, in answer to your question in #12, how about "official" support of 400MHz front side bus.Anonymous User - Sunday, September 21, 2003 - link
yeah nforce 400 (single chanel) are good performers.I also have a soltek sl-nv400-64 and by some benchmarks they performe better than a dual channel bord.
So please dont advise not to buy them...
Anonymous User - Saturday, September 20, 2003 - link
Where's those 9800np's? Can't find them, can you? (Are you gonna link to Best Buy?)Anonymous User - Saturday, September 20, 2003 - link
Don't dance around the subject if you yourself want to come out as substantiated.KristopherKubicki - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
#10 (and #3): That is a ridiculous and totally unsubstantiated comment. What (in your opinion) does the NV400 bring to the table that the other half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards dont?Kristopher
Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
Don't buy a single-channel NForce 2 400 board after Anandtech themselves reviewed the Soltek NV-400 as one of the fastest Athlon solutions?!?!Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
Perhaps a reason for all this dual-channel advocacy is that quite a few reviewers are actually Intel oriented and fail to see the picture clearly about current AMD system boards.Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
#5 I want to know that myself. I'm holding off strickly to buy the 9800XT as soon as it's released, but it's getting tough to hold off. I'm dying for information about this card and scour the net daily now looking for new info.TheSnowman - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
i saw plenty of 9800nps at best buy the other day.