What is best for LW 7.5&8...AMD or P4 CPU?

[Trolly]

Hi..I am new to the LW world. I am trying to put together for a coming schoolyear a new PC. I have some difficulties to make a right decision. Where does LW run best..in a AMD based PC or in a Pentium 4 based PC. Looking the benchmarking results in tomshardware.com...well...AMD performs really bad there. An Intel platform is much more expensive but if it means that it is more stable more professional to run apps like LW then I dont mind giving out my hard earned cash for a system what performs well.
Thank you...

[mattclary]

http://www.blanos.com

[Trolly]

Very interesting...thank you.
Looking these results...seems that Intel platform performs really much better in LW. Altough seems that LW does not benefit from the Hyper Threading technology. No difference if u use a 533fsb cpu or an 800mhz fsb cpu.
One more question, it also goes a bit off-topic. Is there a good network renderer, as I am working I could use a power of second pc with that...
Thank you.

[mattclary]

Hyperthreading does increase performance, at least on my machine. I've tried it with and without, and there is definitely a difference. No numbers handy.

[Nakia]

I have a XEON 2.4GHz with HT. I see an increase in speed when Rendering with Hyperthreading turn on and multiple threading increased.

[MiniFireDragon]

I guess I am kind of missing how the Intel is faster then the AMD on blanos site. Looking at clock speeds, scroll down to the XP 2200. It has a faster render time then faster processors. When you see an XP keep in mind that the true clock speed of the processor is atleast 400mhz slower then what it says, like the AMD 2200 XP actually runs at 1.8 ghz. The MP processors are the same way. Keep that in mind when viewing the speed rating.

Some additional notes are the XEON processors have twice as much cache on the processors then the P4's and are twice as expensive.

[mattclary]

Do a search with this criteria. If a value isn't specified, leave it set to "Any". The first Athlon pops in at number 28. It's showing up as 2453mhz, right next to PIV 1800~1900s. In order for the pIV to shine, it has to be a scene that uses SSE2 instructions.

LW Scene: Rad. Ref. Things
# CPUs: 1
Max Results: 50

[-EsHrA-]

Check Flay.com for Spider, a free network renderer.


Cheers,

-EsH-

[Trolly]

OK...I got tired about all the numbers and what is best compared to what. Decided to go with Intel this time...well my first Intel platform;)
It runs cool and quiet and stable...I am happy and I guess thats all what counts.
But I were wondering...what does give to Intel such a big perfomance gap over AMD cpu's? Is it just the SSE2 or something more? As much I know...the Athlon 64 will also have support for SSE2 commands. If this is the only thing what helps Intel to perform better in LW....then I guess interesting days are ahead of us. The war between AMD and Intel....seems it is going to be interesting:D

[js33]

Yes it would seem this is AMD's opportunity to gain market share as they will have 64-bit going forward and Intel as yet doesn't have a desktop 64-bit CPU. They have Itanium 2 which is very expensive right now ($4400) just for the processor. It would seem like SSE2 combined with the higher clock speeds give Intel the edge right now but if Athlon 64 and Opteron support this now and get their clockspeeds up it should be interesting indeed. I haven't been a big AMD fan up to this point for the speed reason mainly but I'm keeping on eye on then for the near future.

Cheers,
JS