Motherboard Recomendation
 

I have a AMD 2800XP with a Asus A7N8X-E Motherbaord and I want to upgrade to a pentuim 4 3.0 and I'm not sure what motherboard to get. I have read so many reviews and all that makes me more confused. I guess I want a board that has PCI express but then I want it to have a agp slot because I have a Powercolor 9800pro video card and I just bought it last summer and don't want to get rid of it yet. This is the cpu I will be getting intel Pentium 4 630 Prescott 800MHz FSB 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor . I use Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and starting to learn vegas. So if anyone has any Recomendation's I would very much appreciate it.

Thank's
Chad

I recently got talked into buying 2 MSI KN7 Delta boards. So far, everything works ok, except the floppy drives. I went to their tech support, and they deny any bugs. Of course, I suppose it is just a coincidence that there are a hundred other folks posting the same problem on the message boards. There is really only one way to install a floppy, making it next to impossible to flub up.

As far as Asus, I will never buy another product from them. I bought one of their boards a few years back, and it had a dead USB. After several unanswered emails, and even a long distance call to the HQ in Taiwan (nobody answered the phone, not even an answering machine), I gave up. If tech support sucks, so will the product.

I have had good luck with Abit, and their techs are on the ball. Next time I upgrade, I'll be going back to Abit.

Chad,

Going from an AMD 2800XP to a Pentium 3Ghz is a such a very small jump in speed I'm not sure I'd recommend spending the money on it. I would either recommend getting a faster chip (perhaps 3.6Ghz), or if you don’t want to spend that much, it may just be better to add more RAM to your current computer.

Keith,

My experience with Asus support was the opposite of yours. I thought I had a problem with my Asus motherboard last summer, and I had no problem at all arranging an RMA. In fact, when I first submitted my problem online I got an e-mail response in eight minutes with some troubleshooting tips. I then contacted them a little later that afternoon by phone and arranged the RMA, no probleml.

(They replaced it, but as it turned out, I don't think there was actually a problem with the motherboard after all. As I discovered, it's just some quirk with my RT.X100 where I have to disable my USB ports to capture/export to avoid some intermittent blockiness).

Whoops, I didn't realize the Pentium 4 6xx series were Intel's new 64 bit chips. That, combined with the 2MB L2 cache, would give you a boost, though I'm still not sure how much over the Athlon XP 2800+. I'd still recommend going higher if you can. What is your budget?

You also might want to consider one of the new dual core processors from AMD or Intel. See http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1788685,00.asp. Right now the prices are high, but if you are willing to wait some they will come down.

Thank's guys for the replies. This setup I have now seems very slow maybe it's how I have it setup but it always seems slow to me. I thought going with a pentuim Hyper threading cpu will be a big difference in rendering times and editing. I already have 1 gig of ram I guess I can always use more. My XP2800 isn't the speed allot less like a 2100 they just mark them that why and the Pentuim 3.0 is the true core speed? Thank's again for the replies.

Chad,

If you compare the core speed of the Athlon XP 2800+ (2.1Ghz) to the speed of a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 on paper you would think the Pentium was much faster. But in the real world the Athlon performs just as fast, if not faster, than the Pentium 4. I think Intel finally started acknowledging this by naming their processors with numbers (e.g., 630).

Hyperthreading helps some, especially during multitasking and/or if a program is optimized for it, like Premiere Pro is. Even with that the Pentium 4's don't necessarily run faster than an AMD processor. It depends on the task and program.

If you give us a detailed breakdown of your system we might be able to help with recommedations on how to improve performance. Maybe some upgrades to your existing system could help.

Just read the article it was a good read. I love to get a Duel core but thats a little out of my budget at this time. I guess if I was doing this as a business I would spring for it but it's a hobby at the moment.

thank's
chad

Thank's for helping out I really appreciate it. here's what I have

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe ACPI BIOS REV 1008
512 Crucial Memory 3200 Dual Channel
2-80 gig wd 7200 Drives
Nec 2500a DVDRW Drive
2800 Athlon Barton CP
POWERCOLOR|RADEON9800 PRO 128M

My last computer was a 1400 Athlon and I didn't see much of a jump when I built this one. I'm not to good at Bios stuff and what I should set it at I don't overclock it's beyond me lol. There is just so many settings in the Bios especially the cpu and memory page I think I have it set at aggressive now.

Chad

Your system looks pretty good. I'm not sure why it would feel slow to you. Does it feel slow all the time, or only during certain tasks? I could maybe understand Premiere Pro being a bit slow, but Vegas should hum along just fine on your system.

Do you have a lot of extraneous programs installed? E-mail? Antivirus? If at all possible you should avoid surfing the Internet and installing other programs besides your editing programs. Some people manage to get along fine doing all those things on their editing computers, but it's only asking for trouble.

And I assume by “512 Crucial Memory 3200 Dual Channel” you mean two sticks of 512MB RAM, since you said earlier you had 1 Gigabyte of RAM. Am I right?

Yes I have 1 -512 and 2-256

What about the other programs? Do you have other things installed (antivirus, etc,) besides the editing programs? Does it feel slow all the time, or only when editing? If when editing, is it just Premiere Pro, or is it Vegas as well?

Yes I have anti Virus running and the computer just don't feel fast like it should be. I was at my aunts last week and was on her computer and it flew I'm not sure what it was and she wasn't sure what she has but it was very fast. Like adobe Photo on my computer when I go and open up the browser and view my raw files and it's slow I would think it would be allot faster then it is. I made a backup copy of one of my kids DVD last week and used the cce method it took almost 24 hours to render it when most people on this one forum says it should take 4 to 5 hours. I reinstalled everything and made sure much of nothing is starting up when windows reboots. I don't mind upgrading I will hand this CPU motherboard combo to my son and his to my younger son. So they are just waiting lol.

chad

Your motherboard supports up to a 3.2Ghz AMD Athlon XP, so one option would be to upgrade the processor you have and keep your current motherboard (which looks to be a nice one, from what I saw on the Asus site). You could also get a couple sticks of 512MB PC3200 RAM from Crucial to upgrade your RAM to 1.5Gb.

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ ($150, OEM): http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16819103391
Crucial 512MB RAM ($55 each): http://www.crucial.com/store/PartSpe...64Z40B&cat=RAM

You could sell your old components on Ebay to help recoup some of the costs.

If, on the other hand, you decide to go the route of a both a new processor and motherboard, I would definitely recommend getting something faster than the 3.0Ghz Pentium 4. If you didn't think the bump from your old Athlon 1400 to your Athlon 2800 was much, then you certainly aren't going to be much impressed going to the 3Ghz Pentium 4.

Either the AMD or the Intel 64 bit processors would be a good choice. Whichever you choose, as I said earlier I'd recommend at least a 3.6Ghz. If you plan on doing a lot of work with Premiere Pro you might want to lean towards a Pentium 4, since Premiere is optimized for it. That said, many people are happily running Premiere Pro on AMD processors.

Your motherboard will depend on whether you choose AMD or Intel. I haven't kept up with motherboards so I'm afraid I can't give you any advice there. I'd recommend looking at the reviews on Extreme Tech (http://www.extremetech.com/category2/0,1556,285,00.asp) and Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/index.html). Maybe someone with more knowledge can give some recommendations here. Be aware that the newer motherboards use the new DDR2 RAM.

And of course get plenty of RAM, at least a gigabyte or more.

I'm still puzzled by the poor performance of your current setup. It seems like it should be running better. Perhaps someone with a similar computer could chime in with their experience/recommendations.

If you go the route of the new processor/motherboard (basically a new computer) then check out this recent thread we had on the subject of building a new computer: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=43484. You'll get some good information on the subject.

AMD's numbering system:
From about 2100+ and below, and AMD xxxx is about equivalent to a Pentium of x.xxx ghz clock speed. Above that, Intel kept getting faster while AMD didn't really catch up. However, Intel came out with a 3.2ghz processor (with hyperthreading and faster front side bus) and AMD responded by releasing a "3200+".

Anyways:
A- Ghz is an excellent way to compare relate speeds of processors, provided that you are comparing within the same processor line with the same features and everything. Among Intel, you have Celeron, Celeron D, Pentium A, B* (where the top 3.06ghz has HT whereas the rest of the B line does not), C, E, and EE and more versions and now it's the undescriptive numbering system. You can't compare those processors against each other.

B- Intel is definitely faster than the Barton AMD processors. At MPEG2 encoding, they have SSE2 (and now SSE3) optimizations which give them quite a boost. One benchmark I saw showed Intel was ~3X faster. AMD64 processors narrow the gap considerably and are in the same ballpark. They support the SSE2 instruction set and the dual cores will support SSE3.

At Vegas, Intel and AMD have always run neck to neck at rendertest.veg (intel with a slight lead in most cases). Hyperthreading may slow or improve performance with Vegas 6, so for that particular program it doesn't help. HT does improve MPEG2 encoding times (by 20% or something with the Main Concept encoder DVD architect supposedly uses... I don't know about CCE).

C-Norton Antivirus may be slowing down your computer. Try turning real-time scanning off? (You can still have it scan your system every night. And be sure to scan emails.)

NAV happens to be one of the slowest-scanning AV programs out there... it may explain why your computer takes a long time to boot and why programs take a little longer to open. It may not explain other behaviour though (i.e. slow rendering speed).

D- Are you drives over 85% full? If so, try defragging.

E- For dual channel platforms (all Intel, some AMD64, AMD XP is supposedly dual channel with some chipsets but dual channel doesn't actually do anything), optimal memory configuration is pairs of the exact same model + capacity RAM. This may make a small difference in rendering speed (a few percent... on other applications maybe as high as 20%?).
If you benchmark your new system against others and there is a small discrepancy, this may be why.
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...id=37831<br />
AMD64 is a different beast than Intel... it may be picky about RAM (i.e. certain RAM just won't work?; haven't been following this stuff close enough) and may not be as sensitive to having an optimal memory configuration as the Intel platform is.

F- If you want to use your old RAM, avoid boards/chipsets that only take DDR2 RAM.

Thank's again all for the help. I really appreciate it. I have another month or so before I start buying the parts so I will keep reading and maybe the higher end Pentuim cpu's will come down in price. Right now the 3.4 up are over 400.00 for just the cpu and I don't want to spend that much money on a cpu. The Motherboard I have been looking at is the

REFURBISHED: GIGABYTE GA-8I915P DUO PRO Socket T (LGA 775) Intel 915P ATX Intel Motherboard - OEM


It's takes both DDR and DDR2 memory and has allot of features. I'm just waiting on and answer about my Graphic card working in it. Thank's again for the help.

Chad

Ouch, that's expensive. Must be because they are so new. Not trying to talk you out of the Pentium 4, but I was looking at the AMD chips, and an Athlon 64 bit 3700+ with 800MHz FSB and 1MB L2 Cache can be had for $323 at NewEgg. http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16819103464

I didn't realize there was such a difference in price between the Intel and AMD processors until I saw that.

You think that AMB chip is faster then this pentuim chip

(Pentium 4 3.0 630 Prescott 800MHz FSB 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor)

I read some reviews on that AMB chip and everyone says it's blazing fast. So maybe I will go that route. There seems to be allot more Motherboard's to choice from. The only reason I was going with pentuim is because everything I read about rendering and adobe premiere says to go with the pentuim Hyper threading technology so thats why I was more looking at that cpu. I'm not to concern about gaming just editing and rendering times. I have the FX1 Sony HDV camera and I want to be able to work with editing HDV in the future. You gave me something to think about I appreciate the help.

Chad

Tom's Hardware did a huge test comparison between many processors. In the MPEG-1 to MPEG-2 encoding test (using Pinnacle Studio 7), the AMD Athlon 64 3700's time was 2:23, while the Pentium 4 630 3.0Ghz was 2:34. So the AMD is faster. And cheaper.
You can see the report at http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...charts-18.html. Like I said, there is a large number of processors listed, so it will take a little while to pick out the one your after. They go all the way back to a Pentium 100!

By that benchmark, it would make sense to get a Pentium 3.4E? (Prescott, 3.4ghz, 200mhz FSB, i875p chipset, DDR400)
$297+$2 ship at newegg

Or you could get the Pentium4 550 Prescott (LGA775, 3.4ghz, uses DDR2 RAM), which is cheaper and slightly faster but uses more expensive DDR2 RAM.

But then again, can you be sure you can trust their benchmark?
Few people on dvinfo.net will transcode from MPEG1 to MPEG2. As well, what encoder does Pinnacle use?

EDIT: xbitlabs.com has a roundup of Pentium processors versus AMD at the Main Concept MPEG2 encoder:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...m4-6xx_15.html
Vegas and Premiere apparently use versions of the Main Concept encoder.

It looks like AMD will lag behind until dual core processors come out with SSE3 support? (SSE3 does seem to make a difference in this benchmark. anandtech and techreport.com have dual core benchmarks.)

2- Intel processors generally consume more electricity, which adds to their cost a little.

Glenn,

I would be the first one to say that the Pinnacle Studio 7 MPEG-1 to MPEG-2 test wasn't ideal, but it was the closest thing I saw on the Tom's Hardware review to a usable video rendering benchmark. The review you found is definitely better, and in light of it one of the Pentium 4 3.4Ghz processors would be a better choice. I can confirm that Premiere Pro and Vegas both use the MainConcept MPEG-2 encoder.

Sorry Chad! Hopefully we’ll get this sorted out sooner or later.

Thank's guys for all the help. It's very confusing looking at the specs of all the CPU's and motherboards. There is so many different ones it's hard to figure out what to get. The one thing I'm staying away from is the PCI express boards. maybe next time I upgrade I will go that route but at this time I want to keep my Graphics card being it's only 6 months old. If I go Pentuim I might go with this board ASUS P4P800-E DELUXE Socket 478 Intel 865PE ATX Intel Motherboard, they have new ones for 111.00 and refurbish ones for 69.00. Would you guys go with a new one our a refurbish one? The only thing about the refurbish one is it comes with the board only no cables or manual. The Manual is no problem I can get that and I have the cables from my last board and thinking that the refirbish one has been looked over so I'm sure to get a working one. What do you guys think? Thank's again for the help.

Chad

AMD cores with SSE3 are available for purchase right now. I got 2 of them this week.

Look for revision "E" Cores, also known as Venice or San Diego. Newegg and Monarch plus a few others all have them in stock.

One CPU mentioned here a few posts back, A64 3700+ with 1mb cache are the new revision E San Diego cores. Sand Diego is noted by having 1mb cache, Venice have 512k cache.

Besides the SSE3 on these chips, they also sport an enhanced memory controller that has proven to improve performance quite nicely.

So far, 3000+, 3200+ 3500+ and 3700+ have been released.

EE Times is reporting that AMD is shipping X2's to vendors already, those are the desktop versions of dual cores for socket 939 boards.

xbitlabs did a review of the AMD Athlon 64 with the new "Venice" core. There was only a little improvement on the MainConcept and other video encoding tests. The Pentium 4's still held a clear lead. Link: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...venice_10.html

Chad, here is a review that lists what accessories come with that Asus motherboard if you bought it new: http://www.digital-daily.com/motherboard/asus-p4p800-e. It's a little hard to read, but the third party software looks to be WinDVD 5 Platinum, WinDVD Creator 2 Platinum, and WinRip 2. Note that they reviewed the wireless edition that includes a WiFi module. That version is about $10 more than the normal one.

(goes back to the original post - for anyone else looking)

$.02

If you actually want to do work with a computer instead of spend most of your time tweaking or troubleshooting, etc... Intel CPU = Intel board.

Not a dig on overclockers/tweakers, etc.. I used to be one. It's a lot more fun actually being productive with a tool than maintaining the tool though.

$.02

Sorry dude but in all honesty that is just FUD.

Setting up and running a stable and reliable AMD system isn't any different that doing the same with Intel.

AMD + nVidia motherboard = stable. it just plain works.

Having personally use the following setup:
Matrox RT.X100 & PPRO 1.5 and just PPRO 1.5.

I have had the following configurations in the last year:
AMD 64 4000 / Asus A8V MOBO (1GB DDR400)
Intel P4 2.8GHZ / ASUS P4P800SE (1GB DDR400)
Intel P4 3.0GHZ / ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe (1GB DDR400)

Now I settled in on:
P4 3.6GHZ / ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe

This has been my most rock solid setup to date. It's also the only setup where I have experienced no problems.. Don't get me wrong I loved my AMD 64.. I game 50% of the time in leagues and events.. So leaving the AMD 64 back to the P4 was hard.. However in my OWN experiences the P4 was much more stable in Premiere Pro and background rendering while working in CS2 or Encore..

So I am on the P4 team when it comes to rock solid editing.. I think my Matrox works better because it was designed around the P4.. I use all SATA drives as you don't need a seperate drive for your export/renders like IDE in alot of cases. I also upped my ram to 2GB on my 3.6.. So it's stable.. As far as performance.. 140-160 frames per second gaming with the AMD 64 now I average 90 with the P4..:(

So in the end at work I have two editing machines now with 3.6's and the matrox cards.. At home I just use PPRO and no matrox with the 3.6 now.. I am an avid overclocker tweaker and have been building computers for 15 years.. Mainly for gaming, so I went through alot of real world experiences building a stable system for editing. We probably all have a different definition of stability, I mainly look for Voltage regulation, temps and finally overall system performance. I used to read benchmarks, but they don't mean squat to me anymore since I don't use half the programs in those benchmarks so I build systems that perform with the stuff I want to use..

Just my 2 cents..

One thing people who make claims of Intel or AMD stability don't realize is that it the problem might be the chipset.

Follow any Intel forum/fansite/whatever and you will see people complain about the stability and quality of VIA chipsets, SiS chisets etc.

Fact is, any system can be unstable or flaky at specific tasks if it uses a flaky chipset.

Your board used a VIA chipset, and I wouldn't suggest VIA to anyone. Not to mention, Matrox has issues with VIA chipsets. For that matter a LOT of hardware has issues with VIA chipsets.

AMD and nVidia chipsets are every bit as stable if not more so than Intel chipsets. Some tiem back, Tom's Hardware did a stress test where they put workstations under heavy load and AMD actually won the comparison.

I run nVidia based systems 24/7, using AVID HD Pro, Digital Fusion, Maya, Lightwave and Mental. Absolutely ZERO issues. I wouldn't be able to say that if I was using a VIA chipset.

You put a good CPU on a bad quality MB and you will have problems no matter who made it, AMD or Intel.

Very true.. I can't even remember how many different chipsets I have tried over the years.. For me at least bottom line with performance for what I do and the board maintaing it's voltage I'm sticking with the P4 now.. Although I am building a new Counter Strike box..:) AMD 64 FX-55..:)

Chad, to hold you over until you get a new machine, I'd go back to your resident software apps (how full is your system tray, etc.). I'm on hardware much older than your existing machine, and I get along just fine (MPEG-2 encodes are usually overnight tasks), but it's because I run a minimum number of background programs. I'd recommend checking out AVG instead of Norton Antivirus as it runs much faster (I only had Norton installed for about a week as it was really slowing down my system). There's a free version available, with updates typically released 1-2 times per week.

Also, I don't recall seeing what OS you're running mentioned anywhere. I'm guessing WinXP Pro?

P.S. I'm using an AMD processor with an nVidia chipset.

Have you done any speed tests on your hard drives and made sure DMA is enabled.. Sometimes windows likes to somehow disable that..:)

Pat,

I've got the same Mobo with a 3.0 P4 and also find it to be very stable. You mentioned you bumped up the RAM from one to two gigs. Did you notice a considerable increase in performance or a marginal increase in performance?

Windows will slow drop your hard drive interface speed down (from DMA mode 4/5 to the craptacular PIO modes) when it sees your drives getting errors. Hard drives shouldn't be getting errors.

Optical drives will get errors when you insert a scratched CD.

There's a way to stop windows from doing that.

Patrick, the speed boost you get from a RAM upgrade will depend on the combination of programs you run at once. With heavy multitasking or programs that can potentially use lots of RAM (photoshop with large files, video editing programs) then you may need more RAM than other people. Some video editing programs also use more RAM than others (i.e. with Vegas you can set it to not use all that much RAM).


Having 4 sticks of the exact samel model 512MB sticks will increase memory bandwidth and give performance a few percent boost though, on that particular chipset.
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=37831

How did you manage to get a Pentium 4 socket 478 3.6 GHz? According to Intel they only went up to 3.4 GHz. And Asus says the P4C800-E Deluxe only supports up to 3.4 GHz.

Thank's all for all the info. Not sure which way I'm going probley a pentuim because it's been awhile since I owned one so I might give that system a try. Thanks again for all the info you all have given.

Chad

I will throw one more at you....

If youre going to get a new board, I would whole heartedly recommend the ASUS P5AD2-E Premium. Couple that with the P4 550 chip. The 550 is the fastest chip you can get ahold of without having to spend several hundred more $ for a marginal performance gain. It is THE sweet spot chip with regards to bang for buck. You can then pick up 2 GB of Patriot DDR-2 RAM for a little over $400, which gives about 5.6 GBS throughput. It is a rock solid, screaming setup. But youd also want to re-invest in storage, as that motherboard uses SATA drives, primarily, which also are faster. You can pick up some Western Digital 250GB SATA's for $130 bucks apiece at NewEgg. Go ahead and get 4 of them for a TB. You'll not be needing much more for a while to come. And, it allows for very easy and very stable overclocking using some simple BIOS preset profiles. You can take the 3.5 to 3.75 with no issues whatsoever, and if you get a decent CPU fan to keep it cool, you can go to 3.9...no troubles. I actually rendered at 3.9 just fine, but it was very close to max temp....didnt have a problem, just made me nervous.

I would not overclock unless you know what you're doing. If you do want to overclock:
A- Get a good heatsink. The Zalman 7000alcu (may be newer version out now) and Thermalright Xp-120 are considered among the best bang for your buck heatsinks.
B- Test your system for stability! Prime95 + CPUBurn (not CPU Burn-in) I found stresses your computer the most. Leave prime95 running overnight to test RAM fully too. You should probably test at a more overclocked state than the one you want to run at (so there's safety margin).
C- Figure out maximum overclocks for the chipset, CPU, and RAM. On Intel/Pentium platform, you may not be able to figure out the maximum for the chipset. You can drop the memory divider to underclock the RAM... this lets you test the CPU. Test RAM by using 1:1 divider and memtest86, usually it hits a limit before CPU does.
AMD64: http://www.seriousmagic.com/dvrmonitoring2.cfm#p0
D- Be aware that your system still may not be stable. My machine passes prime95 and memtest fine when overclocked but it will randomly freeze or reboot every other day or so when overclocked.


Overclocking does offer very tangible speed increases though! For video editing, CPU speed is the biggest component in your system's overall speed. To guestimate the performance increase for rendering, divide the clock speeds and knock off 10% of that increase.

Hard drive speed doesn't make any practical speed benefit in my opinion... My own tests can be seen at http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...id=18784<br /> "hard drive speed on rendering".
SATA is only faster than IDE because newer drives tend to be faster, and newer drives tend to be SATA. Sometimes the newer SATA version of a drive is slower though.

Normally, I would agree with that, but times are changing and it's getting to where you dont have to worry about all that detail, since the engineers at ASUS have done it for you by creating the easy overclocking BIOS profiles. One need not know the individual aspects of it, just choose 10% and the BIOS makes all the neccessary adjustments to the chip/FSB/RAM timing, and youre good to go. All you really have to worry about is how hot youre getting.

BTW, does Zalmon offer an LG775 compatible fan? I couldnt locate one after they were recommended to me before. You'd think theyd be cranking those out right now.

Thank's Daniel for the recomendation that sounds like a great system but I don't want to spend that much money.Plus I want to use my memory I have and my drives. I will upgrade to sata drives soon but right now I just want to invest in a faster Motherboard cpu combo. I'm still looking and going to buy soon once I make my mind up which to get.

Thank's for the help