AMD Barton

http://www.bit-tech.net/review/180

Comments and questions?

 

comes out as i suspected....


/me will be using new P4s in his next two systems


until AMD give us raw power, I'll have to go back to the intel boys....



Nice G4 btw....

/me has been eyeballing the new 17" ones for an upgrade

 

AMD v Intel

Forgive me for commenting (and I'm REALLY not trying to start an Intel v AMD flame thread), but you seem rather biased towards AMD in this review even though you point out that the performance isn't what you expected.

I'm honestly impressed that AMD have done well to bring heat down in their current chip and still maintain a close parity with a chip clocked almost 1 gig faster. However, calling a 2 fps lead by AMD in flyby and a 10 fps lead in botmatch 'caning' would be inaccurate. The 10 point loss to Intel in CPURightmark is by almost the exact same margin (84-74), and yet is dismissed as a small difference.

I noticed you fairly pointing out that the Intel is currently slightly better value for money on a chip to chip comparision, which I appreciate.

To answer any questions before they are asked, I am an Intel owner and have been for a while. I am also a domain admin for a large corporate network and wouldn't dream of using AMD for fleet solution due to unreliability compared to Intel (my bias is revealed = ) I have however setup a number of my friends and family with AMD XP processor based systems due to cost per performance. I believe each processor has significant application in certain area's.

Otherwise, an excellent review. Congrats on getting your hands on the hardware (I'm jealous as). The only other thing to do would have been to use the same vid card to cancel out another source of error.

Regards (and hopefully you won't think I'm an arrogant git for criticising)
Asmodai

 

Good review...

(Grr.... holding back......)

 

"Barton" - That was the best name they could come up with? Where they watching Simpsons at the time

"I was really hoping we would see a return to the good old days of AMD caning Intel clock for clock". But it's not clock for clock though is it? Wouldn't you have to compare it to the P4 2.1ghz cpu

Hmm - IMHO too little too late, think my next system will be Intel again!

 

Re: AMD v Intel

Cheers for the constructive criticism. the answer is probably as simple as this : trying to find something positive to say about Barton. At the end of the day, it's still a fast processor, and that a 2.2gig chip can get to the performance level (or thereabouts) of Intel's 3gig is quite something. I don't want to sound like I'm completely slating the Barton because it will be a good chip when we get some faster clockspeeds. Thanks for the input

Sorry, that probably should have read 'PR for clock'

 

Its about what I imagined it would perform at. It might be a little expensive tho

Oh and nice powerbook

 

reading a few reviews of it and stuff from the register it seems no one found the barton to be that impressive.

back to the drawing board?

 

It seems to me the reception the Barton got has a striking resemblance to how the GeforceFX got recived by the online media.* Too little to late maybe?

The thing that was always in AMD's favour was the price/performance ratio, this might still be the case with the lower end CPUs but the top of the line Barton is a little pricy in my opinion.

Next thing you know that AMD will dump it and push the Athlon 64 out


Note* Just no ware near as bad

 

Fascinating....

Your review seems to revolve entirely around Synthetic benchmarks (sandra), which anyone who knows anything about processor architectures knows are pointless (and can, in fact, give a higher score to the slower performing processor).

In the few application (read game) benchmarks that you ran, the barton was faster than or on a par with the P4. I'd say that calling the barton a disappointment on the basis mainly of synthetic results is a fallacy. Note that the application benchmarks are rarely optimised for SSE2 (which gives the P4 a big advantage when it is used), and hence pimark and the game benchmarks show the results they do. The media encoding is one of few applications which IS SSE2 enabled, hence the result there.

So surely your conclusion should be that if you're encoding with SSE2 enabled software you should use a P4 (because it is faster in this discipline), whereas if you're gaming you should buy a barton?

And how about some more major application benchmarks? Office suite benchmarks, Photoshop benchmarks, 3d rendering benchmarks? Even the application benchmark parts of 3dmark (rather than just giving the overall score, which is more indicative of the power of the R9700 only, due to its weighting of the synthetic tests).

Flawed. Deeply flawed.

 

(EDIT: Took my comment out, due to the Red Mist.. Mrhaz has replied covering my opinions..)

 

Sure, I used synthetic benchmarks. Yes, Sandra may be wrong (I said this in my conclusion). Yes, real-world performance may or may not be closer (I said this too). But what you gloriously fail to grasp is that, at Bit-tech, we don't believe in White Paper bull****. It's not use going through photoshop tests or whatever rubbish you propose, because, in the real world, who the hell benchmarks using photoshop? You ask anybody on here what they benchmark their system with, and your answer will be Sandra, 3DMark and a game. The whole point of a Bit-Tech review is to enable your average user to understand the performance and the technology, not be lectured on theoretical physics. Good reviewing, as you clearly fail to understand, is not just about being technically bang on the money : it's about providing an article that people can relate to with results they can understand. If you want white paper bull****, go and read Hexus.

As fr the media encoding, I will hold my hand up and say that I did not know that was SSE optimised, and I will edit the review accordingly. I suggest that if you want to see a review suited to your tastes you approach AMD and get one for B-H. Good luck.

 

coem on now calm down clearly soem fethers ahve been ruffled

issac does have a poitn that synthetic benchmarks do not show real world performace but they are all that mrhaz had at ahdn in the short period of tiem for the review that was very well put together considering you didnt have a lot of time, there are a fiar few peopel on this board that do do graphic work so would have liked to have seen what advantage running photoshop or another image editing suite ona processor liek this may achieve

but seriousely there is enough power there for anyone

i think we all jsut need to calm down a bit



its scary when im the voice of reason init & mr haz you have way too much stuff

 

tasty mac , wot spec is that

Nice review as well

 

Who uses photoshop as a benchmark? Anyone interested in photoshop performance, which is a large number of people involved in photo editing or digital image creation. The popularity of sites such as dpreview, photo.net and digital blasphemy attests that this is a large number of people.

A great many people work in 3d, using packages such as 3DS MAX, Bryce, etc. Obviously enough people that tom's hardware guide regard benchmarks in these applications as important, although tom's hardware guide is certainly far from perfection as I've stated many times before.

Photoshop and 3d rendering applications are extremely cache-intensive operations, and they will show big differences in performance between two processors of the same speed and architecture but with varying amounts of cache.

My apologies for rubbing people up the wrong way. It was not my intention, and my original phrasing was poor. I will leave it be so that this thread makes sense.

My point is more that application benchmarks are more important than synthetic. With the 3dmark tests you ran, you could publish the frame-rates of the game demo sections (Car chase, dragothic, lobby and nature) which are the important, application-based parts of 3dmark. The rest (and the major proportion of the 3dmark score) are purely synthetic tests of the GPU. A great example of this is my machine which attains 7500 3dmarks, compared to a friend's which gets 8800. His machine is a Duron 800 with GF4ti (mine in sig), and mine gets much higher frame rates in the game tests and in real world games, despite the lower 3dmark score. That's because of the weighting of the synthetic tests within 3dmark.

Thus there's testing already done, data already collected of a much more significant and useful nature than that presented.

 

Well, I for one think MrHaz's review was pretty good. It didn't come across as being AMD- or Intel-biased, and it used pretty standard benchmarks. I was a bit skeptical of the different video cards in the systems at first, but when I saw that you'd used the 9700 in both systems for the benchmarks I was happy. Not quite sure what everyone's moaning about

 

nice review haz, we did a few more benchmarks on the site I write for <see no pimping from me > and the barton came out on top of the P4 a fair few times

 

Sounds like to me that if its gaming its barton! big full stop!

 

Comparing the AMD Barton vs. a same speec intel chip would be a fair review, but I beleave that mrhaz was comparing the best of the best.

I was suprised at the results, I honestly expected the p4 to get trampled over and stomped on, but it held it's ground, despite the ATA-100 controller

BTY, isn't Inel set to release some new chips soon, around march?

 

Can someone say.....SLAM....put that it your pipe and smoke it!! Well done mrhaz, i enjoyed the review very much, maybe this is why we all use bit-tech, because its something that we can understand and appreciate.