Athlon users - advice needed

CDM wrote on 11/26/2001, 11:40 AM
Hello -
I have always used Pentium processors but I am hearing a lot of stuff out there that's making the Athlon (especially a dual) sound very tempting. I hear it's much faster than the P4. Could some users out there make some recommendations as to motherboards, ram and cpu for a dual proc. system? What are the things I need to consider for compatibility with programs, etc.? Is it a royal pain? Cheap, expensive? I'm thinking of using this as a "rendering box" for Vegas so I can do other things while large projects render.

any advice would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance.
Charles.

Comments

ThomasATL wrote on 11/26/2001, 12:32 PM
Charles, DSE runs a forum (on my other computer - but cow something). His system is based around the Thunder K7 (S2462). Expensive. I know the link to the forum is on this site somewhere.

Here's the Tyan.
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk7.html

If you follow the "Where to Buy" links you'll run into a place that actually has complimentary products (RAM, CASE, etc.) to go with it.

Let's keep in touch about this because it sounds like we are doing the same thing. Also, there is another dual board from Tyan, the 2460. If you can help me scope the differences on the two boards, that would be great. It's almost half the price.

DSE said that the board gets hot so you have to pay special attention to the fan situation.

Thomas
CDM wrote on 11/26/2001, 12:56 PM
Yeah, the one thing I heard was that it can be very noisy because of all the fans to keep it cool (especially the dual) but it sounds like it might be worth it.

Thanks and I'll keep you posted.

cdm
jmpatrick wrote on 11/26/2001, 2:52 PM
I fought with an Athlon-based Delta 1010/Vegas system for 6 months before throwing in the towel. I built it using a 1 gig Athlon on an Asus A7V M.B. What a nightmare. I went thru a dozen BIOS flashes, VIA driver updates, new CPU's...Nothing seemed to work for me. I had all sorts of trouble getting the Delta card working without static. There are entire websites devoted to troubleshooting the A7V, something I didn't discover until it was too late. Everyone was having the same problems: sound card nightmares, USB headaches, IRQ hassles...mostly related to the VIA drivers. I really wish I could have gotten things sorted out because it really was an economical system to build, and it was very fast. However, I was losing money with all the downtime, so it was back to Intel and the P3. I haven't looked back. The P3 system was a breeze to install, and has worked flawlessly since the day I first fired it up. I haven't had a single BSOD...not one.

Lots of people have had great success with the AMD CPU's, and I have a system based on an Athlon 850 that I use for desktop publishing. I just couldn't seem to get my audio stuff to work.

I'm interested in hearing about others' experiences. I'd also like to build a low-cost dual Athlon-based rendering station at some point in the future.

jp

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winrockpost wrote on 11/26/2001, 4:15 PM
Using an "off the shelf HPxt878"
Athlon 1.3G . Factory fire wire, 256ddr ram,(which I have since increased). This machine came out of the box and on to an edit station installed Vegas and has never so muched as burped. It was a steal!!
Canon Xl1 in ,out through a sony converter into a Beta uvw-1800. Blows away every Pentium we have .
No I Don't work forAMD. Just pleased when something works the way I think it should.
mountainman wrote on 11/27/2001, 11:35 AM
I built a dual athlon system to use in a new toaster system. It was taking forever at Newtek so I picked up a copy of Vegas 2.0H . With a few exceptions the system works great. Occsional problems w print to tape, these might stem from win 2000 IRQ problems. Anyway the system is a dual athlon 1.2 gig palamino chips on a tyan mobo (they only made one at the time I built the system) 450 watt power, 1 gig of ram, cd-rw, sb live. It takes from 3 to 5 min to render 30 sec. spot with bars and tone, cg's and a few EFX thrown in. Caution if you use thsese chips you must use a specialy certified ram, other wise Big Problems.
As I understand it v.2 uses one chip for vid and one for audio. I hope v3 makes better use of the dual setup.
Win 2k has a way to monitor system usage and I've never seen the processors used more than about 50%.

That's all I can tell you about athlon. Hope it helps.
YellowSmileY wrote on 11/27/2001, 3:34 PM
Defenitely get an motherboard with the KT266A chipset.

They R the best out there (right now)
and compliment the AMD CPUs nicely.
Cheesehole wrote on 11/27/2001, 9:41 PM
if you want to see your processor utilization go up, try the following:

get some video and audio going with some effects, and then play the time-line. then try zooming in on the time line (middle scroller), or dragging the scroll handles... you should see the proc-util go up to 90% in some cases.

so the dual setup gives you more of a benefit while you are editing your project. it helps to keep the interface responsive even while you are playing, so you can do a lot of editing on the fly, or while looping a section.

- ben (cheesehole)
stickstr wrote on 11/29/2001, 8:54 AM
I have had fantastic luck with my custom built Athlon system:

Thunderbird 1.4GHz
Iwill KK266+ (VIA KT133A-based)
512 MB SDRAM

I seem to remember hearing in these forums somewhere that VV makes pretty extensive use of the floating point registers, at which the Athlon kicks butt. I don't work for AMD either but have done some pretty extensive audio tracking with full effect processing and rarely have I seen the CPU usage get much above 35%. (Make sure to use fast drives as well - SCSI if you can afford it, UDMA 100 if not.) I am using Windows 2000 and am very happy with its performance.

If you go for an Athlon I would heartily second someone else in this thread who recommended a VIA KT266A based motherboard and DDR RAM. Barely more expensive, with pretty significant performance gains. The new Athlon XP processors now have (from what I recall) a thermal diode that will prevent meltdowns if the heatsink loses contact with the CPU.

And the price simply can't be beat! Feel free to e-mail me if you would like some more extensive hints or details on how I "rolled my own".