Which is faster? [Sempron v. Pentium 4]

[Fragadelic]

I was wondering which one you folks think is faster of the following?

Intel P4 524(EM64T) 3.06G on an MSI PM8M3-V motherboard

or

AMD Sempron64 2800+ 1.6G overclocked to 2.4G on an Asus K8N motherboard.

Same 2x512M ddr400, same video card, same harddrives with same OS,etc.

I did a radar timedemo benchmark(which I found on the internet somewhere) in Enemy Territory which is CPU intensive and was rather surprised at the outcome.

The P4 averaged 63.2 FPS.

The Sempron averaged 89.9 FPS.


This was on Linux Mint 2.1 which is a modified Ubuntu 6.10 distro.

I had a feeling the Sempron would beat it since it feels faster in everyday use but the numbers qualify the feeling.

I have been trying to decide which to use as my main system and the Sempron has won out. Both systems are in the other thread on hardware.

I could never find a proper benchmark for the P4 524 and it seems nobody ever compares the Sempron to anything other than Celeron.

It would be nice to see a benchmark table of some standard benchmarks for a range of CPU's from Sempron to X2 and Celeron to Core 2 Duo.

Not everyone needs to have the latest and great CPU's for most everyday work and this kind of table would help average folks make buying decisions.

[Michael]

I did a radar timedemo benchmark(which I found on the internet somewhere) in Enemy Territory which is CPU intensive and was rather surprised at the outcome.

The P4 averaged 63.2 FPS.

The Sempron averaged 89.9 FPS.

Those results are surprising. Do you have Hyper Threading enabled on the Pentium 4 and a SMP kernel?

Did you do any compilation benchmarks?

[Fragadelic]

Yes, HT enabled and cat /proc/cpu shows 2 cpus.

I would have thought the P4 should have been at least a bit closer if not better but the results showed different.

When I benchmarked in Windows with Sandra the cpu benchmarks for the sempron are right in line with other 2.4 G Athlon64's.

The sempron I have is the one with sse3 and 64-bit instructions although I run a 32-bit OS.

What would you have expected it to be?

[Fragadelic]

I also saw similar benchmark results in Windows with Sandra and the P4.

Might be something with the Motherboard. This is my first MSI motherboard and I'm not terribly impressed by it.

The bios date shows 1906 for the year so I have to append acpi=force to get the system to even boot into linux. PCLinuxoS and Fedora don't need this extra force command but Ubuntu does. When I use liveupdate from MSI, the newest version of bios is older than the one that the board came with and I can't find the proper bios through any of their websites. I will never buy another MSI product. I'll stick with Abit and Asus for my mobo needs since I've never had a single problem with any of those manufacturers motherboards or video cards.

The strange thing is that when I put in an ATI card, the post memory check is fast and with an nvidia card the post memory check is noticeably slower. Like 4 or 5 times slower to count up the 1 Gig.

I never tried the ET benchmark with an ati card though but knowing the slower frame rates with the fglrx drivers it wouldn't have made much difference. I can't run the ATi card on the sempron in Linux since the kernel doesn't setup the agp port properly and direct rendering is disabled as a result.

[Fragadelic]

I just benchmarked my kids' system.

AthlonXP 2400+ with 512M ddr266 asus nvidia 6600(non gt)

It benched at 54 FPS.

much slower CPU, slower memory, way slower video card - 9FPS difference.

This would lead me to believe that something is really amiss with the motherboard/cpu/memory combo on the P4 system.

I opened up a tech request with MSI about it and will be waiting to hear back about it. Might spend a few bucks and get an intel based mobo for the P4 and see if that works any better but I'm waiting for the response from MSI.

[Fragadelic]

I did some more benchmarking and here are the results:

ET Radar Demo

P4 3.06G = 63.4
Sempron OC 2.4G = 89.9
Sempron stock 1.6G = 63.9
Sempron 10% OC = 69.5
XP2400+ stock 2.0G with 6600gt = 63.2


Ramspeed

P4 = AVG 1300 approx
Sempron OC 2.4G = AVG 1800 approx


Freebench

Sempron OC 2.4G beat the P4 3.06G by a minimum of 25% on all benchmarks.


Kernel Compile 2.6.19 stock

P4 = Real 66 Minutes, User 51 minutes
Sempron OC 2.4G = Real 49 Minutes, User 30 Minutes

So I can say with absolute certainty that the overclocked Sempron 2800+ socket 754 processor is faster than the P4 3.06G socket T(LGA775) processor with all the same hardware except for motherboard/cpu for obvious reasons.


The Sempron is overclocked 50% on the stock cooler from amd and has been OC'd since day one which is almost 8 months running 24 hrs a day 7 days a week so it is stable.

While the P4 CPU itself may be decent, the MSI PM8M3-V H ver 4.1 with Bios 3.2 must be a lemon. It runs stable and all but it just seems to be a bad combo. Looks like it will end up in the MAME machine running win2k and mame32 replacing the P3 600 I have in there now.

I have to say I am really disappointed with the performance of the P4 setup and shocked at the same time.

Does anyone have any ideas or possible reasons for the poor performance?

[Fragadelic]

I'm not one to easily give up - lol.

Michael - do the benchmarks seem to make sense to you?

The mobo is definitely single channel only for the memory.

I still have not received a response from MSI on it though.

Gonna give it another go but use the onboard video and audio this time to see if it makes a difference.

[Michael]

The numbers do mostly make sense now, now that I know you are running in single channel memory as well as knowing more of your system hardware specs. Though I would have guessed that the Pentium 4 would have performed slightly better.

[Fragadelic]

For a non-gaming rig it works well and sandra benchmarks seem to indicate it is performing as it should.

It just seems to not like nvidia based video cards for some strange reason. I even tried turning off all the extra agp stuff to see if it helped but it made no difference.

[Fragadelic]

Received a response from MSI basically saying AMD is better in gaming and intel is better in processing. No comment on why the post is so slow with an nvidia based video card. They provided me a link to the Toms Hardware CPU section. Pitiful response in my eyes especially considering the cpu charts on TH only show stats with ddr2.

I have gone back to the sempron system with the 7600gs as it performs great. Not much slower than a really high end system for most things I do anyway.