AMD is three times as hot as Intel and more AMD bashing



  • A bit minor, but I have a very interesting coworker. At least, his opinion on AMD is.

    A user asked what the best way was to fix her broken home pc: "You have an AMD processor. It must be broken. There's no way to repair an AMD processor so you'll have to buy a new one. It's probably molten because AMD's generate 3 times the heat of a intel"

    I was a little offended by that, so I asked if he'd rather touch a working Intel Core 2 Quad than a sempron. He said: "Well it's still crapware. They just use intels blueprints. The only reason they exists is because IBM wanted an alternative.".

    Even when pointing out to him that this was true 20 years ago, that todays Athlons are not based on 286 and that AMD Athlon XP's and Athlon 64's were superior to Pentium 4's he thought I was lying. Even after I had shown him some benchmarks/heat production charts from sites like tomshardware and anandtech, his only comments were that AMD buys out all reviewers so they don't give the bad reviews they deserve. "After all, why else would no PC manufacturer or server builder use AMD?"

    I didn't think it was worth the effort to show him the opertons usage statistics or for that matter show him a few HP PC's that use them. Not that that last would matter tough, he is convinced Dell is the only reliable business manufacturer.



  • I had an AMD fanboy friend in high school who bough into the Athlon > Pentium hype.  Then he bought a cheap Athlon faster than my Expensive Pentium.  Then his proccessor fan broke.  ANd I say, surely the processor turned itself off instead of melting down.  And he say, "no."   And I say, "that bad," and he say, "Also it spasmed and corrupted my hard drive in the processor,"  and I say, "my Pentium turned off when my fan broke,"  and he say, "I never buy AMD again."

    True Story.



  • Isn't it a bit weird to get religious about a processor manufacturer?  Windows/Apple/Linux wars I can just about understand, but this seems odd to me!

    We've got a load of HP DL385s with AMD Opterons, I always thought they were great but since nobody uses these processors I guess they must have acutally have processed cheese in there and I'm hallucinating. 



  • Reminds me of that old video from TomsHardware that shows what happens when you take the fan off AMD and Intel CPUs while playing Quake. This was around the time of the 1.4AMD Athlon. The Intel processors would slow down or freeze. The AMDs simply went up in smoke. That said I've been using AMDs since my P75 without a problem although lately I've been running my old 1.4AMD on watercooling and I wonder what would happen if the water pump one day broke down. Will it power off in time  (I've got an auto-shutdown script hooked up to the CPU temperature) or will I have to toss out the whole comp...



  • I had an old HP laptop (around 1999-2000) with an AMD K6-2 CPU in it. All the fans were in working order, as far as I could tell. If I tried to sit and play Worms Armageddon for any length of time, it would overheat and turn itself off after about 30 minutes into the game. I had to take a little desk fan, set it next to the computer an position it to blow full force across the rear portion of the keyboard in order to play the game without the system tanking.

    I've kind of avoided AMD-based laptops since then. But in fairness, we've got a DL580 database server with dual Opterons that runs very nicely.



  • I have had 4 AMD machines lately.  Of them one (an old Athlon 1GHz) gave issues with overheating.  The motherboard did shut down the CPU for me every time it overheated (eventually during BIOS bootup).  I scrapped that one.

    My other 3 are working without issues, my Windows desktop PC rarely goes above 25 degrees C.



  • @DOA said:

    The AMDs simply went up in smoke.
     

     

    i hate to say that, but it's true. I've tried it (unintentionally) with my own CPU, and it was not even running quake... I was just booting up (with fan, and... mind me... passive cooling taken down). It fried in about 10 seconds. Well, maybe it would make it into emergency shutdown, if it had the passive cooling, not sure... Would it? 



  • I've had a similar experience in an indepentant computer store. A friend of mine and I went in to the store to check it out, and ended up talking to the guy who owned the place, a bearded red-faced man in his 60s. We then happened to mention the faultering Hauppage TV card that was recently installed in my friends computer.

    The guy then literally took off! "Is it an AMD machine? It's AMD isn't it? That's why it isn't working!" admitedly it was and AMD machine, but considering the problems it was extremely unlikely to be the root cause; it was just a duff card. But the foroscity the guy took on as soon as we dared to say that AMD wasn't the problem, we felt compelled to leave the shop very quickly. I think my friend's parting words were "I'll bring in the stats to prove AMD is better." although we never did return.

    I've never understood the fanatisism over processors, to me it's entirely down to whatever will do the job best, for the cheapest price.



  • I never managed to do that. For a while I ran a watercooling system with flawed tubing - if for some reason the pump didn't run (for example because I forgot to turn it on) the CPU cooler would get hot enough for the tubes to melt. This has happened to me twice before I installed better tubes.The processor happily marched on, despite locking up due to overheating.

    Not all AMDs die easily. My XP1700+ didn't and the Thunderbird series was notorious for being hot enough that someone actually fried an egg and some bacon on one - and as far as I know the processor survived.

     

    AMD is actually doing pretty good considering how much bigger Intel is. I usually buy them because they are cheaper while still appreciably fast and because I don't want Intel to be alone in the ring. Any company without serious competition will devote 90% of its attention to sitting on its ass and I prefer my CPU vendor to be fiercely innovative.



  • @j6cubic said:

    I usually buy them because they are cheaper while still appreciably fast and because I don't want Intel to be alone in the ring. Any company without serious competition will devote 90% of its attention to sitting on its ass and I prefer my CPU vendor to be fiercely innovative.

    I've done the same. I've tried to work with ATI as well, but I had such trouble working with Radeons that I've gone back to nVidia.



  • @j6cubic said:

    the Thunderbird series was notorious for being hot enough that someone actually fried an egg and some bacon on on

    Did he take a pic or get it on video ?



  •  AMD's low end chips have been the best performance per dollar you could buy for years.  If you want to build a cheap box, it's the only way to go.

    Additionally, while there was a generation of AMD's that didn't have a SpeedStep-esque feature, and thus happily gave up the magic smoke the instant your cooling failed, I'm pretty sure all of their modern processors feature Cool'n'Quiet, which should cause the chip to gracefully clock down if cooling fails.

     

     

    On the mid- to high- end, the Intel's core 2 series is beating the crap out of AMD, though.



  • @merreborn said:

    I'm pretty sure all of their modern processors feature Cool'n'Quiet, which should cause the chip to gracefully clock down if cooling fails.
     

    CnQ is more there to throttle down clock speed when the system's idle, though the thermal monitoring and throttling plugs into it.

    The original "quake meltdown" video was made to show how ineficient AMD's thermal monitoring was - the older Athlons didn't have a thermistor built into the cpu package. It was up to the motherboard makers to put in somewhere under the socket. SInce it wasn't on the cpu package, it couldn't detect an overheating situation quickly, as the whole cpu package had to get hot, plus heat up the small air gap between the cpu and the sensor, by which time those particular Athlons were smoking. Intel, by comparison, had the thermistor built into the cpu package and could detect overheating far faster and react accordingly.

     

    That being said, my personal preference for CPU brands is based more on bang per buck than fanboi-brandism. I was loyal to AMD for a while, because Athlons kicked Intel ass all over the market, but my current desktop is an Intel (Core 2 Due E6600), and for the forseable, any future computer purchases or upgrades will be Intel as well, unless AMD manages to come out with another Athlon-style beast. The upcoming Nehalem cpu from Intel sounds like it's going to not only kick AMD's ass, but wipe the floor as well. But we'll have to wait and see if the hype and early benchmarks hold up once it actually hits retail.



  •  i don't get the fanboism with processors either -

     was very pro-intel/anti-amd in preference (but not flamewarage) during the P3 days - because the P3 was superior to AMD's offering

    P4 Came out.;. intel shot themselves in the foot and I have been an AMD guy since.

    Now the Core2duo vs Athlon 64 x2s... very close with intel holding and edge but i like the pricing on AMDs better

     

    now video cards is understandable - they don't always implement the alogrithms correctly even in silicon and 90% of the crashes i've seen in 3D applications i write are because of nVidia's facking driver incompetance.



  •  @DOA said:

    ...The AMDs simply went up in smoke...

    ....Will it power off in time....

    I'm pretty sure all motherboards have built in killswitches to keep processors from overheating nowadays. I've built many AMD computers, and none of them have ever fried a processor. Although I've noticed on my Phenom that the stock cooling fan isn't screwed into the heatsink, it's held on by plastic brackets. This makes for some serious vibration if the fan starts going full blast, but I've only had that happen once.



  • @pitchingchris said:

    @j6cubic said:

    the Thunderbird series was notorious for being hot enough that someone actually fried an egg and some bacon on on

    Did he take a pic or get it on video ?

     

    I found this.



  • @pitchingchris said:

    @j6cubic said:

    the Thunderbird series was notorious for being hot enough that someone actually fried an egg and some bacon on on

    Did he take a pic or get it on video ?

     

    Well, on the spot I just found an egg: http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~htsu/humor/fry_egg.html

    However, someone also managed to build a still around a K6: http://www.exaflop.org/docs/x86still/

     

    As for AMD pricing vs. Intel pricing: The gap is made wider by the mainboard; Intel-socket boards usually are a bit more expensive than AMD-socket ones. Depending on how much you are on a budget this can be the deal-breaker.



  • @Kazan said:

    90% of the crashes i've seen in 3D applications i write are because of nVidia's facking driver incompetance.

     

    I hate to call you out on this (actually I don't).   Bullshit!



  • @tster said:

    I hate to call you out on this (actually I don't).   Bullshit!
     

    Yeah really, I have always used nVidia and have never had an issue that I could really attribute to them.



  •  try working on a 3D rendering engine sometime.

     

    not bullshit in the slightest.

     

    just take a gander at what their drivers to do vista (as if it wasn't garbage enough already) http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsible-for-nearly-30-of-vista-crashes-in-20/



  • @Kazan said:

    vista (as if it wasn't garbage enough already)
     

    Your trolling is not welcome here.



  • TRWTF is that you're arguing over which obsolete processor is better.



    I'm not one to talk, though. The fan on my graphics card broke a couple years ago and I haven't bothered dealing with it. The only problem is that a bunch of artifacts start showing up if you play a game for more than 10 minutes or so.



  • I built a ton of machines with Athlon XPs back in the day, the only problem I really had with them was the fact that there was no metal cover on the core like you find with most modern processers.  So they were easy to destroy if you messed up putting on the heatsink.



  • In the past few years I've moved over to the fanboyisms myself in the last few years, mainly due to the lacking quality in most items i've bought over the last decade. Intel has been my favourite for any high end system, only one machine I own now has an AMD processor and that is just a file server. And the whole ATI vs nVidea thing, yeah nVidea for me (although I would go for an Intel graphics chipset for any low graphics system), and thats mainly due to drivers in Linux, AIGLX support has only come in as of late (basically since AMD took over) and even then the graphics power is only a small percentage of what it sould be on my laptop or any machine I have running an ATI graphics card(compared to that of in windows), oh and for some strange reason some of my ATI cards only report a small fraction of the built in ram actually available to the card in linux as well, but shows normally in windows... but my fanboyisms doesnt stop there... seagate for hard drives, corsair or kingston for ram... MS for OS... should I continue?



  • @tster said:

    I had an AMD fanboy friend in high school who bough into the Athlon > Pentium hype.  Then he bought a cheap Athlon faster than my Expensive Pentium.  Then his proccessor fan broke.  ANd I say, surely the processor turned itself off instead of melting down.  And he say, "no."   And I say, "that bad," and he say, "Also it spasmed and corrupted my hard drive in the processor,"  and I say, "my Pentium turned off when my fan broke,"  and he say, "I never buy AMD again." 

     

    Your friend isn't very smart.  Pentiums melted down almost as rapidly from fan failures before ther powerdown feature was added, and AMD added it themselves in the next generation of Athlons.  That being said, I have used Atlons and Athlon XPs on two different motherboards and none of them has run under 62 degrees C.  I even broke one down and took extra care to clean the heatsink, reapply new thermal grease, and perfectly align the heatsink on the CPU with absolutely no improvement.



  • @operagost said:

    Your friend isn't very smart.  Pentiums melted down almost as rapidly from fan failures before ther powerdown feature was added, and AMD added it themselves in the next generation of Athlons.

    Or perhaps his friend bought the Athlon before the feature was added to Athlons, in which case he had quite a legitimate complaint.  Learn to read. 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @operagost said:

    Your friend isn't very smart.  Pentiums melted down almost as rapidly from fan failures before ther powerdown feature was added, and AMD added it themselves in the next generation of Athlons.

    Or perhaps his friend bought the Athlon before the feature was added to Athlons, in which case he had quite a legitimate complaint.  Learn to read. 

     

    You first.  I said that it was added to the next generation of Athlons.  AMD had it in development but Intel was quicker to market (and Intel's implementation was better).  Neither did I say that it was not a legitimate complaint; I said it was foolish for someone to swear off AMD just because of a missing cutting-edge feature that was included mere months later.


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