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gonkeboy
15-02-2007, 01:33 AM
I've been given a time computer and was told it had a 2600 AMD Athlon processor. I presumed this was gonna be faster than my compaq 1.7GHz pentium 4. when I check my computer/properties under general it says AMD Athlon (tm) 1.25 GHz please enlighten me as to wich is the faster processor

y2krog2000
15-02-2007, 09:07 AM
AMD Athlon dont work the same way as intel, an AMD Athlon 3200 will have a speed of 2000 but will operate the same as a 3.2ghz pentium 4 it is set at 2000 to keep it cooler and make it easier to overclock your new processor should be 2.6ghz but show a slower clock speed. Find out more details about your processor then look it up on the internet.

crm
19-02-2007, 01:46 AM
mate i fell for this also but regardless i would always use a amd over an intel just the way i am i suppose

evilclive
19-02-2007, 02:25 AM
I've been given a time computer and was told it had a 2600 AMD Athlon processor. I presumed this was gonna be faster than my compaq 1.7GHz pentium 4. when I check my computer/properties under general it says AMD Athlon (tm) 1.25 GHz please enlighten me as to wich is the faster processor

The chip you have is supposed to run at 2083MHz with a 166MHz motherboard speed. At the moment, your chip is running at 1250MHz with a 100MHz motherboard speed.

Athlon (socket A) processors all come with a default CPU multiplier (in your case 12.5: 12.5 x 100MHz = 1250MHz; 12.5 x 166MHz = 2083MHz). You may be able to change the multiplier (by adjusting your motherboard settings), or it may be locked (to stop people changing it).

One thing Athlons don't do, which Pentium 4 CPUs do, is specify what motherboard speed they want. You have to do that for the computer.

When you switch on the computer, it will display a brief message saying how to get into the BIOS Setup screen. You have to press a key - usually it's F1 or Del - before the computer starts to load Windows / Linux.

You'll then see a blue screen with a number of options. You need to select the one that says something like "SoftCPU Setup". You will then have an option allowing you to specify which of three or four possible speeds you want:

1250 / 100 MHz
1666 / 133 MHz
2083 / 166 MHz
2500 / 200 MHz

If you need any more help, please post details of which motherboard you have. If you don't know, press the Pause key as soon as the VGA display lights up, and copy down the string of letters and numbers that appears at the bottom of the screen. I can identify your motherboard from that code.

(I suppose I should say that if the motherboard battery goes flat, not only will the date keep resetting to January 1st, the motherboard speed will reset to 100MHz as well. But this shouldn't be a problem just yet - coin-sized lithium batteries last 7-10 years.)

evilclive
19-02-2007, 02:43 AM
mate i fell for this also but regardless i would always use a amd over an intel just the way i am i suppose

Out of interest, what CPU do you have? Is your motherboard speed set correctly?

All modern CPUs do something called speculative execution. Back in the old days (e.g. with the Z80 CPU that was found in the Sinclair Spectrum), each machine code instruction would take several clock ticks to be processed.

Modern CPUs work in pretty much the same way, except instead of just having one instruction going through at a time, a new instruction is banged through on every clock tick, so there are several different instructions in various stages of execution inside the CPU, all at once.

This works well some of the time, but when the computer program needs to change what it's doing (for example, branch or loop), all these half-completed instructions are the wrong instructions. The CPU needs to throw them away and start again, with a different set of instructions somewhere else in memory.

If I remember correctly, the Athlon XP has a ten-stage pipeline; the Pentium 4 has a twenty-stage one. So programs, which by-and-large are not optimised to run without branches or loops on a Pentium 4, cause bigger delays to a Pentium 4 processor than they would to an Athlon XP at the same clock speed.

And that is why AMD are confident to claim that their Athlon XP 3200+ (at 2.2GHz) can hold its own against a 3.2GHz Pentium 4. On average, once you've benchtested a wide range of different programs, the two computers perform more or less equally well.