Quickest rendering processor athlon 64 v p4

[spikemann]

Hello,

FYI I've just tested an athlon 64 3000+ 512mb acer aspire laptop versus my p4 3.0 800Mhz FSB Hyper threading 1Gb ram (PC3100) Gigabyte (8KNXP) based pc SATA HD's

for the same model with exactly the same install of Revit

athlon 6min 2 secs
intel 10min 34 secs

both using win xp

i've tried the amd in win 64 also on the same model it was slightly slower
this time taking 6 min 38 secs

I expected it to be close with the p4 just shading it but was very surprised at the result. Is my p4 messed up? Can anyone else verify the athlon 64 is much faster at rendering than the p4 ?

If there is a std rendering file that I can use to benchmark the two then please let me know

I'd be interested to know if others have found the same thing
Anyone else found these results or is my p4 misbehaing?

[Roger Evans]

Very gratifying to hear I'm about to receive a 64 soon and want to carry out similar tests against my current machine.

What Graphics cards are used in your tests?

I think Steve Campbell is preparing a standard render file for general comparison and may be available in the next week I hope.

Roger

[Nickdp]

Hey Spike - great news - thanx for the update. Slightly off topic - does your lappy come in a 17' screen [yes I'm in the market for a Revit scream machine laptop BUT its gotta have the 17 incher.] If the Athlon performs I'm happy to ditch the Intel.

[beegee]

Athlon's are still the benchmark record holders for rendering speed, however they do run hot and therefore potentially noisy ( which doesn't much worry Gamers, who are their strongest customers ) and are apparently more prone to possible problems as a result.

[Wes Macaulay]

Athlon's are still the benchmark record holders for rendering speed, however they do run hot...and are apparently more prone to possible problems as a result.

Athlons scare me. I don't like the fact that they do crash more often, and no kidding on the cooling issue. But those results are pretty compelling... and the Athlon is running on a LAPTOP!

[PeterJ]

I had thought that the cooling issue had been resolved now. I run an Athlon in my desktop machine and its fine on that side, though I must admit that the dealer replaced a burnt out one after a couple of months of use first time around.

[hand471037]

The issue with Athlons and cooling is a bit of an old one, and one that's largely fixed, but it gave Athlons a bad rap about heat issues.

Namely, an old Athlon will fry itself in seconds if it didn't have a heat sink. Intel chips throttled thier speed down automatically so that this didn't happen. AMD made Athlons the same way now so that they won't burn out so quickly.

However if you don't have a properly cooled Athlon you *will* get lockups. My old dual Athlon box used to lock up in hot wheather until I figured out that one of the two processors wasn't getting cooled properly. Once I got better fans/heatsinks the issue totally went away...