Was AMD really faster than Intel? AMD Athlon 64 x2 2.6Ghz vs Intel Pentium D 3.4Ghz

[@andreajofre5895]

Memory Issue: "The memory controller integrated on AM2 CPUs can support DDR2-533, DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 memories. The problem, however, is how the memory bus clock is achieved. Instead of being generated through the CPU base clock (HTT clock, which is of 200 MHz), it divides the CPU internal clock. The value of this divider is half the value of the CPU multiplier. For example, an AMD64 CPU with a clock multiplier of 12x will have a memory bus divider of 6. So this CPU will work at 2.4 GHz (200 MHz x 12) and its memories will work at 400 MHz (DDR2-800, 2,400 MHz / 6). Keep in mind that DDR and DDR2 memories are rated with double their real clock rate. The problem is when the CPU clock multiplier is an odd number. For an AM2 CPU with a clock multiplier of 13x, theoretically its memory bus divider would be of 6.5. Since the AMD64 memory bus doesn’t work with “broken” dividers, it is rounded up to the next higher number, seven in this case. So while this CPU will work at 2.6 GHz (200 MHz x 13), its memory bus will work at 371 MHz (742 MHz DDR) and not at 400 MHz (800 MHz DDR), making the CPU to not achieve the maximum bandwidth the DDR2 memory can provide." Source :

[@jims_junk]

Very interesting. Thank you for posting this!

[@PorscheRacer14]

@@jims_junk I can concur this. That old Athlon can do 2.8GHz all day at 1.35v. My older "Toledo" FX-60 has been living at 2.8ish GHz with 215 core clock it's entire life, if not more (240) for world records. Phenom CPUs will exhibit this as well as I had to go through this on my "Thuban" 1055T. After that, they more or less figured out the IMC and it became less of an issue with the divorced clocks like we have now with Ryzen. So in your case it's better to OC via multiplier and not core clock. I believe you lose out on Cool 'N' Quiet if you do, but as long as you have a decent cooler, it's not much of a worry minus the power usage.

[@xys007]

It seems like passmark memory test depends slightly on cpu cache performance, which is bound with cpu clock. Notice that Pentium D 3,6Ghz and 2,8Ghz are absolutely the same besides clock multilayer, but memory speed tests are different (should be they the same?). Also Pentium D 2,8Ghz is slightly ahead of Athlon x2 2,6Ghz (faster cache again?).

[@camjohnson2004]

The Reason the Pentium D was worse than the Athlon X2 was the fact that if the 2 cores wanted to talk to each other the Athlon did it though the shared cache, where as the Pentium D had to sent its request along the Front side bus to the chipset then back to the opposite core. I worked at AMD when these CPU's were new

[@blakegriplingph]

Were you at AMD around the time Bulldozer was released tho?

[@camjohnson2004]

@@blakegriplingph nope. Left when phenom was released. Saw the writing on the wall and left

[@Ivan-pr7ku]

The L2 caches in A64 were private to each core, just like in P4. The difference is that the cache coherency mechanism (cache probing) in AMD's implementation was done with direct link between the cores, because the memory controller was integrated in the CPU, thus the much lower turn around latency. On the other hand, Intel's P4 had to use the old FSB interface to the external north bridge for all transactions between the cores, incl. simple coherency messaging. Bear in mind, the FSB interface is half-duplex with limited capacity to carry multiple outstanding requests. This is on top of all peculiarities of the NetBurst architecture, but that's another story.

[@deathdoor]

But the individual ocres were still slower than the Athlon cores for most things.

[@Protoking]

@@Ivan-pr7ku thank you. I was hoping someone realized the “I worked at AMD” guy was wrong. they didn’t even have a shared cache and used the crossbar for cache coherence. Core 2 had the shared cache approach.

[@jcfb1470]

And what's funny is that this is the capped 65nm Brisbane version of the Athlon 64 X2 that has slightly lower IPC and half the cache of the 90nm Windsor version. The Pentium D would stand no chance against the 89w 90nm Athlon 64 X2 6000+ with 2MB of cache.

[@MichaelClark-uw7ex]

I have one of those Athlon 64 X2 sitting right here on my bookcase right beside my Phenom and Phenom II. Now I'm rocking a Ryzen 9 (upgrade from a Core i7) and have never been happier.

[@Protoking]

@@MichaelClark-uw7ex I really want a PC with an X2 6400+ Windsor an SSD and maxed ram as that would have been my ideal pc in 2007/8 as an AMD enthusiast that I never got to own. I had a Pentium D 925 which was well and good enough at the time for me and core 2 embarrassed AMD parts of the era but that didn’t stop me wanting one.

[@domainmojo2162]

The difference- no, the "chasm" in class and performance was downright embarrassing! I think that was the worst beatdown Intel's ever experienced.

[@domainmojo2162]

@@kingcab86 Your recollection is outstanding, sir!

[@rickjbradbury]

Brings back memories of my first AMD build based on the Athlon 64 X2. These days I am on AM4 3900X and it is crazy fast even with later gen being around.

[@SpeedisGOATofYT]

I still use the Athlon 64 x2, and I literally just got it but I wish I could afford a newer computer💀

[@dominicbeeson2610]

Great video, suggestion: keep the athlon/pentium on their own halves of the screen instead of having a blue arrow on a blue background pointing to them, it was slightly confusing for me initially

[@tj_2701]

I even forgot once later in the video and had the flipped lol Very unintuitive indeed.

[@xfgdf]

I thought the screen showing gta with the pentium is the athlon XD

[@rdcrezz]

Totally agree, good video and information but the editing could be better.

[@appusajeev]

Same here.

[@zach-Computerstuff]

I like what he's done with newer videos, made the arrow a different color and easier to see. By having both up there you can see the whole thing and not have half the side cut off

[@boktorinator693]

Super cool video, dude. I love watching old hardware compared :)

[@ArniesTech]

Gotta love old hardware in general. So exciting. Gonna do tons of reviews of all the stuff I have lying in the attic 😁

[@chrisoverton2759]

I remember trying to play League on a pentium D with an HD 3650. It was very bad. Fortunately, the board I had also supported first Gen (Conroe?) Core 2 Duos, and also had decent FSB support (up to 400Mhz) which allowed me to mid the c2d and raise the FSB from 266 to 300 and gave a nice clock speed bump as well. I miss the good old days of finding a free pc upgrade on the side of the road or near a dumpster, but I’m glad those struggle days are gone. Also, the first Athlon that I had was EXCELLENT compared to the Celeron D, and Pentium 4 that I had when it came to modding Xbox 360s. The software that I was using just seemed to run faster, and was consistent. The Intel setup, with either processor would sometimes give me corrupted dumps, and easily took 4-5times longer to dump firmware files. That could’ve been some kind of mobo or memory issue though, so I can’t really put that on the CPUs as a fact.

[@Turbobuttes]

iirc Netburst's architecture had a really long, streamlined pipeline which in turn enabled higher clocks (in 2000 they were promising 10 GHz at 1V by 2005 which of course would've never happened regardless) which performed pretty well when software tasks could actually take advantage of it (I think initially P4 well outperformed Athlon XP at stuff like compressing, decompressing, encoding and decoding), but Intel taking a gamble on software actually being optimized for it simply didn't pan out, similarly to AMD's gamble on high bandwidth memory in their Vega and Radeon VII graphics cards around five years ago

[@Protoking]

Intel had loads of devs optimizing apps and games for netburst. Much the same way nvidia enjoys the same for their Gpus nowadays. The arch simply was too poor for those optimizations to add up to much.

[@nunyabusiness4651]

I Remember going to an X2 from a P4 regular non D and was amazed at how much snappier everything was. Hands down the best CPU's of its era and cost Significantly less!

[@todorsamardzhiev144]

Right? I made so many PCs with these! People were amazed that they could give their PC some heavy load to crunch, and at the same time keep using it like it was nothing!

[@itstheweirdguy]

I remember playing GTA San Andreas on my athlon XP 2500+ with Geforce 6600gt AGP GPU. Ran great at 1024x768. I ran Windows XP until I built my athlon II x2 240 system years later, and got Win 7 on that.

[@jeff15]

Great memories. I still have this cpu build. Keep up the great work.

[@HazyJ28]

Great video, a lot of nostalgia for the Athlon 64 x2. I jumped ship from AMD at Phenom but came back at Zen 2

[@ilovemonkeyos]

It’s insane how much tech has advanced. The 65W and 95W measurements back in ‘06 are STILL applicable to most common CPUs from Intel and AMD… and at the same wattages today’s chips can computer exponentially faster and better with multiples more cores and threads. What a time to be alive.

[@another3997]

Very true, but usually, anytime is a good time to be alive. In 20 years time, things will have moved on so much, we would look back to 2023 and think how slow and primitive our computers were. Unless Putin starts a nuclear war... in which case the abacus will make a comeback and everyone will glow in the dark. 😉

[@todorsamardzhiev144]

What amazes me more is that our modern PCs run so much slower than they did back in the NT/XP days. It's like, for every step forward in hardware engineering, software "engineering" takes us 2 steps backwards. Back then, on a 600Mhz Pentium 3 everything was instant and you felt like a god. Double-click on the mIRC icon and start texting right away. Nowadays on a 16-core chip with 128MB cache (as much as the entire RAM on the 600Mhz P3), MS Teams still takes me 10 seconds to open, so I wonder what good it is...

[@CoolTI-Daniel]

I remember going from an Athlon XP 3000+ to a ultra budget biostar socket 939 with the first Athlon 64 X2 3800 @ 2ghz. The performance upgrade was absolutely impressive. After that I went for an AM2+ M2N-E with an Athlon X2 5200 @ 2.7, then later upgraded to the Phenom 9950 which I know wasn't a good chip, but it was still a good upgrade over the old Athlon X2.

[@todorsamardzhiev144]

I put together A LOT of 939/AM2 PCs with X2 3800+ back in the day. Such a great little chip!

[@ArniesTech]

My fist Desktop PC was an AMD Athlon 64 X2 and I still got it up in the attic. One day I will do a review and spin it up again. Oh, the memories (no pun intended) 😁

[@guspaz]

What's old is new again. The Pentium D approach is essentially the same as AMD's modern chiplet strategy. In fact, back in the day, AMD accused Intel of just gluing CPUs together, and more recently, when AMD introduced chiplets, Intel accused AMD of just gluing CPUs together. Of course, today the front-side bus used to connect the chiplets together is much higher performance than the front-side bus used by Intel in 2005, but there are still performance implications of inter-die communications, where it can sometimes be faster to schedule all threads on a single core complex (on a single die) to avoid the additional latency penalty of making a hop to another die.

[@BigCleverName]

Take into consideration that each modern CCD can essentially be a high performance CPU which can do many tasks before trading them with the other and you've got efficient parallel processing

[@jamesspinella7053]

People have short memories. When AMD was pushing Bulldozer, it seemed like everyone was bashing AMD and giving them 0 grace, jumping ship for Intel, et. al. even though AMD CPUs dominated Intel CPUs during the Windows XP era. There's also the matter of both companies engaging in cutthroat tactics to try to beat each other in the market. People seem to associate that behavior with Intel, but Intel was just the most recent one to do it.

[@stefannilsson2406]

But, the fsb doesn't exist anymore? Wasn't all it's functions integrated in to the cpu and chipset? Or am I dumb?

[@guspaz]

@@stefannilsson2406 there’s still an interconnect in place. For AMD these days, it’s called “Infinity Fabric”. It still does the same thing when you get down to it, even if the topology has evolved.

[@stefannilsson2406]

@@guspaz yes that's correct but calling it fsb feels wierd.

[@LawrenceTimme]

O yes this is a quality channel. Core 2 duos and phenoms. I'm subscribing.

[@idahofur]

When I got back into computers. Amd was kicking Intel's rear with these. I do remember a few things though. When a new amd machine was first built, it had an issue. It was not stable. (I was not in charge of building new machines at that time.) I looked around the internet and could not find a reason for it. Ram tons of hardware tests. Came back all good. To my years of working on computers acted like a memory issue. So we ordered some 5300 and issue was solved. It did not like the 4200. I also remember some programs would not run on an AMD. Mostly special programs. I could not believe that was still a thing. Including some benchmark programs. One final note is I hated how they did the model numbers. Thank goodness for the internet. Looking up benchmarks would tell you to say stay away from the 5000+ but get a 5200+ as a good jump from say a 4800.

[@jims_junk]

Lmfao. YES!!! The model number nonsense always drove me nuts. Not to mention how there would be a dozen versions of the same model and you had to go by the 'real' model number which was like 12 digits. Even then you had to look it up to find out what it meant.

[@Thee_Dr_Evil]

The days of an Opteron 165 on an AN8-SLI with the bus set to 333 and HT to 2.5, cheap big cache 2.7Ghz 64bit processing. (still have this setup) Fast AF Boy....

[@PorscheRacer14]

I still rock a FX-60 at 2.8GHz on an A8R32-MVP Deluxe, Scythe Mugen tower cooler, Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Platinum Champion and Mushkin Redline DDR500. Still playing BF2 on it haha!

[@Thee_Dr_Evil]

@@PorscheRacer14 yell yeah, that's a nice rig.

[@MasticinaAkicta]

Ah AMD64 x 2. I remember having one of those as my first dual core. It was the age of Windows XP and single core games. But, even then you already felt the effect of having one core handle the game/big application and the second core all background BS. For instance sound drivers, graphic drivers, system drivers, even yes Antivirus. Suddenly one core was there doing mostly, ...mostly, the main task instead having to keep switching in and out. It felt sooo smooth!

[@todorsamardzhiev144]

Yeah that was the biggest immediate boon for most. People didn't care (yet) about multi-threaded loads, but the ability to have your cake (PC) and eat it felt amazing.

[@JoshVennix]

Should have covered platform details. Motherboard, GPU, and RAM used. Try AIDA64 for a RAM benchmark.

[@joselemusjr6451]

agreed

[@jims_junk]

Will do in the future

[@marshal7969]

Great video bro! keep it up! you got yourself a like and a subscriber

[@deathdoor]

You could still overclock the Athlon a little bit for extra performance. Some older low end Athlon overclocked very well for what I remember.

[@LongTran-em6hc]

Nothing as crazy as the 65 and 45nm pentium though I remember pushing low end E2000s and E5000s near 4ghz on the stock intel cooler

[@sulev111]

@@LongTran-em6hc that was 2007. Before that AMD ruled.

[@MichaelClark-uw7ex]

The Phenom II X4 965 overclocked quite well too You could push them over 4 ghz with liquid cooling but 3.7 ghz was quite stable even with air cooling.

[@blebekblebek]

It's not that much, Intel Dual Core and Core2Duo crush AMD in overclocking match. The highest binning from AMD was launched as their "BLACK Edition" Series. Even with that, it doesn't really so high to begin with. My old Celeron E1200 could easily overclock 100% effortless(1.6ghz default to 3.2ghz, on stock cooler), and it outmatch my Athlon X2 4400+. The older version was Windsor, it's the same CPU but with bigger die (90nm vs 65nm), which arguably have better overclock ability than Brisbane.

[@MichaelClark-uw7ex]

@@blebekblebek In all fairness, the Celeron was just a stripped down Pentium without all the extra bellls and whistles, of course that means better thermals but it was still slower executing commands even when OC'd compared to a CPU designed for that clock speed

[@mykolapliashechnykov8701]

In 2006, we had Pentium D's at work. With the stock coolers. It was most traumatic PC experience I've ever had. It was horribly slow, especially in the enterprise Java apps we'd been developing. The stock coolers were howling and screeching like cats in a shredder and the CPUs throttled constantly. It was so dismal even my single-core Athlon64 was able to beat the shit out of these systems performance wise. Guess Intel was way too insecure to brand them as 140W CPUs Pentium Ds truly were. That Athlon64 was a fun to overclock. It ran at 1.8 GHz but 2.6 on a cheap Titan cooler was no problem, giving another huge performance uplift. However, after Core2 came out, it all became obsolete. We'd been given E6600-based systems at work and I bought a Q6600 in 2008, ditching AMD for good until Ryzens came out.

[@jims_junk]

Similar story. We had a client who had nearly a thousand pc's with either Pentium 4's or Pentium D's. This one lady's computer kept shutting down, opened it up and it was completely caked with dust. The plastic clips on the heatsink melted and the heatsink fell off and was hanging by its cord. Never before have I seen a cpu melt its own heatsink. The D's were so bad that it was comical.

[@mykolapliashechnykov8701]

@@jims_junk Yeah. Our sysadmin was a nice guy. He dusted our PCs once every few months, not that it helped much, but at least nothing had melted off :D I remember building a K6-2 system in 1998. They called me to take a look at it in 2011, told me it's janky. Shoveled the dirt out of it, unstuck the fan, here you go, not janky anymore.

[@todorsamardzhiev144]

@@mykolapliashechnykov8701 Got a similar story. Back in 2008 I built my uncle a budget PC - Intel Core 2 E2160, 2x1GB RAM, Radeon HD3850. He's still using that PC for old games and accounting. In 2017, he asked me to have a look because the computer is slow. Clean off the dust, change CPU and GPU thermal grease, install a new BIOS battery so that it remembers the 2.66Ghz overclock setting, and oh well, I guess uncle's good for another 10 years. The PC is still running to this day. I also still keep a 775 rig, just in case -- Xeon X5460, Scythe Mugen, Asus P5E @ Rampage Formula, Quadro FX 4600, etc. Reminds me of the old days, even though back then I couldn't afford such parts :)

[@300maze]

great comparisons! would like to see something like FX vs sandy bridge, maybe 1st gen Ryzen vs older AMD stuff Core 2 quads vs Phenom 2s

[@jims_junk]

On the to do list :)

[@dedr4m]

I remember upping the FSB as an overclock always gained massive RAM boosts and thus total system performance on AMD x2 platforms.... My thinking is, the "Northbridge" (integraded memory controller) of the AMD would usually have it's own multiplier, but would be double FSB by default on many platforms (so 400mhz, rather than quad-pumped 800Mhz of the intel version... DDR2 800 sticks). Sometimes just upping the "Northbrigde" frequency would work to some extent but sometimes it went slower than expected (The AMD had some internal ratio matching system fro what I recall, thus one could run the memory controller over 800Mhz with cheap sticks that only handled 200Mhz). Whereas, the ratio system disregards the FSB in how it governed the memory clock speed. Often times I'd up the FSB to 266 (Older Athlon X2 and Phenom X3 platform I had) and 233Mhz for my current AMD A8 based system.(AMD's A8/A10/etc era was the "Pentium 4 of the AMD CPUs"). This FSB change gave an overall smoother feel in general and certainly sped up memory bandwidth, though, there's always that brick wall where above a certain FSB, the gains are barely marginal on those old platforms.

[@dangingerich2559]

The reason the memory bandwidth benchmark scores varied as they did was specific to L2 cache speed. The Athlon has a constant cache speed at 2.0GHz no matter what the CPU clock speed was, while the Pentium D had a cache speed equal to their clock speeds. It was the same with the single core variants of each.

[@tj_2701]

Your labeling of which screen cap is from which CPU is unintuitive and I thought they where for the other ones until I noticed that single arrow that's the same color as the background. My recommendation, if you are going to label them backwards and use an arrow then make the arrow a different color from the background preferably a contrasting one so it is more noticeable. Otherwise, thanks for the video it was interesting and informative.

[@jims_junk]

I've done that on recent vids. Thanks.

[@Konkretertyp]

That brings me back some memories. Back then, i bought myself a Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with 2,2 Ghz, which was a huge improvement over my aging Athlon XP 2600+. My older brother however, had a Pentium D at that time (i think t was the 915 with 2,8 Ghz). At some point, when he started his architect training he realized, that it hadn't enough power for his usecase for work (and it had trouble running his ATI FirePro GPU properly). So he get my Athlon X2 system and i had to deal with his Pentium D. Oh boy, was i shocked, at how bad his Pentium D was performing at the same games, that ran well with my Athlon X2. It was a nightmare to use for me, after being used to my beloved Athlon X2, but i was greatful, when i found out, that his board supported Core 2 Duo, so i've got my hands on a Core 2 Duo E4500 (which was the cheapest option for me at the time) and it was a difference like day and night. I ended up having a slightly faster PC, based on his old one, than him with my old PC 🤣

[@Protoking]

Were you forced to swap pcs? If so I’d be seething.

[@Konkretertyp]

@@Protoking he asked me, if i could give him my pc for his usecase and we exchanged our PCs. In the end it wasn't to bad, after i got my hands on the Core 2 Duo later.

[@stefannilsson2406]

I am kind of curious how a dual socket xeon system from the same time would compare to the pentium D. Was it faster to have 2 dies on 1 chip than just having 2 sockets and 2 1 core cpu's?

[@RaimarLunardi]

I had an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.8Ghz) It was very good and I used it until 2010...

[@armandobardo6861]

Good test! I have a large number of orphaned Pentium 4 processors, mainly because the high current consumption ended up burning the motherboard and, together with the noise of the fans, caused those micros to be abandoned for quieter ones. However, I have none of the Athlon X2 processors left, they were all recycled on computers with Windows 8.1.

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Excellent video, like!

[@jims_junk]

Thank you!

[@XDymeStarX]

Would love to see a review of the Phenom II 955be vs some i7 920 / 940 / 965. Thanks for the video !

[@Loardofalltacos]

I wanted an Athlon 64 x2 so bad back in the day, but I was in high school and did not have the cash to upgrade to such a system, I ended up building a Athlon 64 x2 3800+ system for a family friend back in 2005 and that was the closest I got to one of these. On a side note when buiding that $2000+ system as a high shcool kid the parents footing the bill were warry of my ablilty to accualy do it with out breaking the expensive parts, as a result some "arguments" ensued over the wisdom of intrusting this expensive project to me, I got that news on assembly day, man did that help my nerves or what :P

[@bryndaldwyre3099]

I had the Athlon 64 x2 4200+. It was an upgrade from my Athlon 2400XP and wow! What a beast. I ran 4gb ram and an Nvidia FX5700 gpu and my gaming experience on Windows XP was awesome.

[@nelizmastr]

I used to have the 5000+ between 2008 and 2010. Great chip. Usually can overclock without too many issues to 3GHz, which made a decent difference back then!

[@fenixlolnope361]

Man I wanted an athlon x2 so badly when it came out. I remember the local shop being Intel partners and trying sooooo hard to get my to buy a pentium d around that time, good thing I didn’t have any money xD they couldn’t sell me anyways :3

[@milanius6283]

I had the Athlon X2 4800+ overclocked to just under 3GHz and it performed better in some games than the core 2 quad 6600 that ran stock at 2.4GHz as my roommate didnt want to risk overclocking it. Paired it with a Radeon hd 5670 1GB gddr5 and it ran Fallout 3 and later even Skyrim at very playable fps and graphics settings. 2x2GB of ddr2 800 was like optimal back then.

[@MrKillswitch88]

Thinking back to the period having had both Intel and AMD rigs at the time for gaming as well content creation in daily use with both being heavily overclocked. I remember the AMD procs of the period seamed to be weaker by a bit than Intel but more than made up for it with having a better overall platform with good memory performance to boot while 775 era systems always felt held back thus starved even though the cpus for the most part were solid. Both systems at the time were ran with some fairly expensive ram with some fairly aggressive overclocking especially on the intel side (xfx 780i) along with some mods for both cooling and voltage while AMD it was mostly just cooling. The Athlon dual core procs by the end of the decade were showing their age while both Generations of Phenom were solid provided they were clocked well and paired with good ram but personally I avoided the 140w furnaces for the usual reasons. I did enjoy running hacked SLI on the AMD rigs as the scaling was a bit better with fewer dropped frames.

[@zybch]

It was hilarious (and disgusting) that when the multi CCD Ryzens started gaining traction, Intel started what they hoped would turn into a viral campaign about how bolting 2 processors together was terrible and the world would end. Looking at the Pentium D...

[@jims_junk]

Lol yeah. They also did it with the core 2 quads

[@MrHeHim]

When the Athlon 64 x2 first came out the software at the time was only designed for single core CPU's unless you had Windows XP Professional 64-bit which was the only consumer OS built to use more than one tread for system tasks/scheduler. Heck, even Windows 7 was just good for dual core and it wasn't until SP1 did it get better but not until Windows 8 was multithreading a core function of the OS. This made the comparison much closer at the time, but AMD was still clearly in the lead 😅and since anyone buying a computer back then not only didn't have access to the internet before buying said computer they had no idea what to get. So TONS of false marketing was made by Intel and Intel even threatened all there vendors and server market if they even looked at AMD hardware with raising prices or starving them of chips, so it took a long time for AMD chips it get into servers and laptops.. by then Intel caught up and starved AMD's accounts leaving them with little R&D money and that's why you saw the FX actually regress in IPC in it's first generation and then stick around far too long. Back then they had such a hard time selling server chips they started selling them on consumer platforms, i even upgraded to an Opteron x2 and OC'ed it to 3.05GHz on the first Zalman tower cooler. Still have the CPU, board, ram, and cooler 🥰 ANYWHO many years later AMD sued and got Billions, they used that money for R&D on Ryzen. Now it's the other way around, consumer chips are left to get the scraps since yields are so good most the chips go to the server market. Let me know if I'm wrong

[@honkhonkler7732]

XP SP2 was patched pretty early on for better multicore support. It had a bug where the additional thread actually degraded rather than improved performance in a lot of situations. I had an XP dual core system in those days and it was awesome. Sure most of the software only used one thread, but I could tell in games that I was still much less CPU bottlenecked thanks to the second core handling most of the background junk while the first was free to power through Crysis.

[@arnislacis9064]

Now I understand, why my Dell Optiplex GX 620 motherboard died, it is because I upgraded from Pentium 4 520 to Pentium D 820. Anyway, for smooth experience in Windows 7, I use Core 2 Duo or something else on LGA1366 platform.

[@johnpaulbacon8320]

Nice comparison video.

[@mitch075fr]

The Athlon64 X2 was the reason why I switched to Linux : 64-bit OS and dual core ran sooo much bettter... The X2 3800+ overclocked quite nicely too. The 4Gb RAM limit was rather common back then, with Intel chipsets being unable to address more than 2.7 Gb of RAM. AMD chipsets could, but buggy BIOSes were a concern.

[@GGigabiteM]

The 2.7 GB limit you speak of is not a chipset limit, it's a Microsoft limit. While there were motherboards at the time that had a 2 GB RAM ceiling due to either chipset limitations, or slot limitations, Microsoft was artificially limiting machines memory via licensing. They didn't want their desktop operating systems like Windows XP eating into their lucrative server operating systems and licensing, so they kneecapped XP so it didn't support PAE. PAE allowed 32 bit software to address up to 64 GB of memory, with the exception that no single process could address more than 4 GB chunks of memory at a time, or 2/3 GB if the process wasn't PAE aware. The RTM release of Windows XP actually did support PAE, but Microsoft quickly patched it out with SP1 using the BS marketing "but drivers don't support PAE!", which was utter nonsense. Windows Server 2003, which was basically XP, has plenty of drivers that supported PAE, because Server 2003 supported more than 4 GB of RAM on its 32 bit versions using PAE. You can actually patch later versions of XP to get PAE support back. Having PAE on Windows XP would have been great, because the 4 GB limit was actually on the entire x86 address space. This meant if you had a video card with large amounts of memory, it would subtract system memory to make room for the video card memory in the address space. Other devices in the address space also ate into system memory, which could leave you way down into the 2 GB range of available memory, even if you had 3 or 4 GB installed. Linux didn't have this problem, the Linux kernel supported PAE way back in the late 90s, so you could cram as much memory as your board would support on a 32 bit Linux and have all of it available, just with the 4 GB per process limitation.

[@mitch075fr]

@@GGigabiteM no, I do mean buggy BIOSes - I often test machines with a bootable Linux distro, and when one of these reports "1.3 Gb hardware reserved" eventhough it's a 64-bit Debian derivative that runs on it,, then no, it's not a Microsoft limitation.

[@GGigabiteM]

@@mitch075fr There are many causes of "hardware reserved" memory, bugged BIOSes are exceptionally rare. - Machines with an IGP can reserve large chunks of system memory and report that as hardware reserved. - Misconfigured/unsupported memory configurations can cause it as well, with the unusable portion of memory being reported as reserved. - Some workstation and server motherboards with active memory error detection can automatically mask memory chunks that test bad, or drop entire modules, which can report as hardware reserved. - Some BIOS/UEFI schemes only support a 32 bit device configuration space, even on a 64 bit system. Large chunks of memory that would otherwise conflict with the device memory map can be masked off to avoid being used. - Although rare, there are some chipsets that have a hard memory limit of something absurdly low like 2, 3 or 4 GB, even though they support 64 bit CPUs, and you can have hardware reserved memory for the remaining unsupported amount. The only truly "bugged" firmware I've seen was when Intel released a 32 bit EFI for their early Atom and Core 2 Mobile processors. Even though they were technically 64 bit processors, they were so slow in 64 bit mode that Intel in their infinite wisdom released a 32 bit EFI for them that had all sorts of crazy problems and weird arbitrary limitations. Thankfully 32 bit EFI only existed for 2-3 years before it was replaced with more sensible 64 bit firmware.

[@nep-nep6575]

The Pentium D is basically that British World War II tank meme “Sir, the 17-pounder won’t fit!” “Put it in sideways.” “The radio won’t fit!” “Put it in the back and have it stick out the back” “The engine’s no good!” “TAKE FOUR CAR ENGINES AND STICK THEM TOGETHER”

[@MN12BIRD]

I remember in apx 2009 (I know the Pentium D was old news by then) but my co-worker wouldn't believe me that a Core 2 Duo dual core at like 1.8GHz was probably faster than the Pentium D dual core at maybe 2.6Ghz for example. I don't remember the exact models/speeds but the Pentium D had much faster clock speeds on paper. These were both older CPU's at the time IIRC they were both basically used and sitting in a drawer! But anyway we did some testing and sure enough the Core 2 Duo ran circles around the old Pentium D. I remember reading that the Pentium D was basically two Pentium 4 cores glued together (LOL Intel) and that the cores had to talk to each other via the slow FSB.

[@mojouk8935]

I have to say i owned a Pentium D 945 and it was a step up from the intel Pentium III and the Pentium 4, but it did struggle in games at the time, i upgraded to the Q6600 > FX8150 and now a 5950x

[@AlQbyob]

congrats on eventually getting a good cpu

[@deltacx1059]

I remember the sempron, 1 core was all you got but they had one with 2 but I'm not sure what they were for considering their name .

[@jims_junk]

If I remember correctly, the Semprons were basically AMD's version of the Celeron.

[@deltacx1059]

@@jims_junk i went and did some reading and looks like they were pretty much a athlon XP but with less cache and a few other differences.

[@domainmojo2162]

Yep - Intel were the leaders for 30 years before 1998... but once AMD decided they're going to seriously compete, they innovated everytime. AMD was respnsible for the optimal dual core arrangement of today- as was evident with the Athlon64 X2(while Itel's first foray into it, was a sorry effort- which they turned around with the legendary Core 2 Duo). AMD broke the 1GHz barrier, AMD's Hypertransport was a prescursor to today's fast Mem/CPU busses, AMD was the first 64-bit X-86 processor... and more. An innovator through and through!

[@ABaumstumpf]

Back then intel glued together 2 dies - and learned that in general use that is not a good idea. They still used that for other designs were cross-communication was not required and there it faired decently. AMD with Ryzen ran into the same problem but a lot more help and support from Microsoft and game-developers to work around the problem. Games were written to specifically avoid doing any communication or switching between the CCX and specially CCDs - this helped enormously. But for gaming, back then, a Pentium 4 was cheaper and faster (and yes - P4 had their own problems but those were mostly addressed with the later generations) but you were better of with an Athlon and a single-core CPU would have still made more sense.

[@clemsonbloke]

I think Intel in those days was trying to keep the Business and Office people happy, that was where their bread and butter were at. Office and Pro markets have always driven everything. Then gaming became what it is today, basically since the Core series and they had to rethink what they were doing. That is why the Core was better overall, they had to rethink and start thinking about just office and home office and start to do the same performance for gamers. Today things are a lot different. Now some of those Gaming Processors/Rigs can run rings over the Pro/Office computers or at least similar. Just thinking about it. When I was in college in the 90s, nobody really was fooling to much with PC's for gaming, it was always about game consoles. Sure they had PC games but people mainly wanted the consoles. Gaming got a lot better though now, so different today.

[@MusicHavenSG]

How about an Pentium D Extreme Edition like the 965 (Stock and Overclocked) vs the Athlon 64 x2?

[@jims_junk]

Sure, I'll add that to my list

[@terrapinflyer273]

I'm using an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ 2.7ghz (Brisbane) and it still pulls it's weight! Upgrade path limited to 95W AM2/AM2+, so my mobo tops out at either the Phenom II X4 955 (95W only, Non-BE) or the B97 of the same model and specs. Been tempted to upgrade it for years, but 3rd and 4th gen full mobo combos can be found for under $50, when the CPUs would cost $~20. Still able to play some great modern indie games and a few PS3/360 era titles maxed out at 900/1080p with a Radeon R7 250 (OEM) and 2x2GB DDR2-800. I'd love to see a benchmark comparison between the Phenom II X4 955/B97 and it's Intel equivalent. Or the 955 95W and the B97, just for kicks lol.

[@jims_junk]

working on a phenom 9750 x4 vs q6600 right now. The phenom II's and athlon II's will follow.

[@terrapinflyer273]

@@jims_junk Very cool! Lot of people cringe at them, but they still game! I did not think the Q6600 would be able to even touch GTAV. Guess that might have more to do w GDDR5+ on the gpu side tho.

[@Aaron48219]

I still have my Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition I bought from Tiger Direct many years ago.

[@flotowncomputerguy6243]

The Athlon X2s couldn't clock like a P4, but 2.8 - 3.2 ate the P4's lunch all day long. You could go for a 90nm Windsor chip or a 65nm Brisbane chip that ran a bit cooler. The Quad FX offered up to four cores but wasn't that great. Software of the time didn't look as favorably on throwing more cores at a problem. Then the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quads came out and AMD ran a day late and a dollar short for years. Grabbing ATI paid off in the long term but did little to help immediately in the confusion that followed the merger. I remember thinking that they seemed a bit stretched -- GPU lines and CPU lines kept running late and arriving without delivering. If Phenom II had been what we received instead of Phenom, and Ryzen instead of Bulldozer, Intel wouldn't have sat on 2 - 4 core mainstream for so long.

[@shorty808100]

i just bought my first ever intel based PC an i5 11400H for an APU it performs pretty decent so far

[@johndododoe1411]

The Early Intel imitations of the AMD64 architecture was a firmware hack running on 32 bit CPU designs, causing most 64 bit operations to run at half speed. This ended as soon as Intel redesigned the CPU core circuits for the AMD64 instructions and modes.

[@mwolf7780]

Can u do Another video about AMD Turion x64 x2 vs core 2 duo (Laptop Version)?

[@jims_junk]

Sure if I come across some. Got a great core2duo laptop just gotta find a turion of similar quality.

[@mwolf7780]

@@jims_junk like hp pavilion dv series have amd turion and intel core 2 duo I had one core 2 duo t6400 clocked at 2.0 ghz

[@aaronbrucker966]

there is a 4ghz athlon out there. I had one, had the stock cooler on it and the computer sitting on a carpet, unfortunatly it only lasted about a year, my first customizing of a computer and fried that cpu.

[@e8root]

Athlon X2 was better CPU hardware-wise. What saved Pentium D for me personally was price and especially price of cheapest Pentium D 805. At the time I got my first CPU Pentium D 805 (2.66GHz) price was less than half the price of Athlon X2 3600+ (2GHz) and the thing with 805 was its 533MHz FSB. All Pentium 4 motherboards could do 800MHz so as long as motherboard had OC options and sufficiently beefed up VRMs it could run 805@3.8GHz. Many older Pentium 4 motherboards got BIOS updates to run Pentium D and this made it easy to find cheap second-hand mobo for Pentium D 805 and squeeze a lot out of it. On the other hand AM2 motherboards were all new and you had to have something like nVidia nForce 4 chipset which were quite expensive. I wanted Athlon X2 (especially coming from Athlon K7 on nForce2) but price difference was simply too big so went with Pentium D. It was right decision because very soon Core2 came out and later with deals like Pentium Dual-Core E2140 overclocking from 1.6GHz to 3.2GHz it decimated any first generation dual-core system anyways, both performance and price-wise. Another thing about Athlon X2 vs Pentium D, one which not many people cared to think about (but were still affected by) or remember was issues Athlons X2 had with Windows XP. It had to do with some kind of core timers which would desynchronize leading to issues in applications and games. Apparently Microsoft made a fix for it later on but I have yet to confirm it actually works and doesn't degrade performance. AMD made a workaround utility that changed colligation of some programs (mostly games) to single core to avoid the issue and this did at times lead to issues. The issue itself happened not that often as these timers not always desynchronized and most reviews didn't ever mention this... Pentium D on the other hand ran beautifully on all OS'es. As far as XP was concerned it was Pentium 4 CPU which was well supported at the point in time Pentium D came out. Overall Pentium D, at least cheapest model, was pretty good buy vs Athlon X2. More expensive models like 65nm 3.4GHz (don't remember which model was that, 9xx something :)) were pretty expensive and usually required newer mobos so were less cost-effective.

[@jeepsblackpowderandlights4305]

Still have my athlon 64 and athlon 64 duek core.. i remember when amd was very innivative back then.. struggling with the athlon xps for so many years

[@KeinNiemand]

Just like amd faster then intel today

[@ferrumignis]

Little known fact, the D in Pentium D stood for Disappointment.

[@AshenTechDotCom]

intel never put out a pentium-d with HT enabled because the talk between cores was already gimping these chips to hell.. double that up... make it soo much worse LOL... (they did make some xeon test chips with it enabled but.. yeah they were not great..i have seen a system with 8 of them made by HP back in the day, that thing was a genuine space heater and my buddy got it free after somecompanmy donated it to freegeek and they didnt want to deal with it.. told him if we got it out of there he could have it... total score... was great for using linux and doing encodes with each batch limited to 1 core 2 threads, actually got more done over large batches that way then any other way tested.. for a while he was also suing it to cap from a couple sat tv boxes he had.. then encode the captures to h264 from space hogging mpeg files..

[@Javadamutt]

Can you compare both versions of the Athlon 6000x2? From memory one was 90nm clocked @ 3GHz and the other was 65nm clocked @ 3.1GHz. Did the process shrink result in improvement or was it all from that 0.1GHz bump?

[@jims_junk]

Hmm... good idea! I'll add that to my to do list! Thanks for input and idea.

[@maicrowsoft8867]

The old 90nm Windsors had more L2 cache (2x1MB vs 2x512KB) than the 65nm Brisbanes, so the 65nm version needed the clock speed bump to get some of that performance back. Most Athlon 64 X2s didn't overclock much past around 3.3ghz-3.5ghz or so on air, so the 90nm stuff was preferable if you overclock and had a decent cooler that could handle the extra heat the 90nm chip produced.

[@patg108]

bring out the Pentium D extreme edition vs the OG Phenom, figure out where in the OG phenom higharchy its equivalent to.

[@Revoku]

what cooler are you using on both of these? I have owned both in the past(when they were actually new, one was my PC and one was the wifes PC) and the pentium D was an overheating lump of crap on the stock cooler In answer to your final question: intel was caught cheating in the pentium 4 and 4 D days by having certain things in play to mess with benchmarks to make the intel part look better, unfortunately it doesn't work as well on many of todays benchmarks so you'll run into random benchmarks where the 4D does massively well in that single benchmark, but not other benchmarks that measure the same thing

[@MrKillswitch88]

I've had some of the 800 series chips and when overclocking they were true power hogs to the point of ruining a board or two along the way.

[@Mini-z1994]

If you want too do another comparison perhaps between ddr2 & ddr3 on both AMD & Intels first attempts too run DDR3 the Core 2 duo e8400 & Athlon II x2 265 should be really close too each other performance wise & supports ofc both ddr2 & ddr3 either via chipset on the motherboard on socket 775 or via the built in memory controller in the Athlon II's case here, you'd just need an am2+ motherboard with an updated bios for ddr2 support & an am3 or am3+ motherboard for the Athlon II too run ddr3. *edit* saw you have the e8500 which is about 2% performance difference according too passmarks cpubenchmark site vs the athlon II 265.

[@jims_junk]

That's actually a great idea. I'll keep an eye out for an AM3 board as time goes on. If I get monetized then this channel can pay for itself at which point.....EBAY, LOOK OUT! I believe I have a 775 Mobo that's DDR3, so I could at least do the Intel part of it. Kinda sucks that I threw out so much years ago thinkin I'd never need it again and here I am now buying the same things I threw out.

[@twood1130]

What chipsets were you using with each system? Wouldn't that determine the memory scores?

[@foch3]

Athlon 64 has an on Die memory controller.

[@twood1130]

@@foch3 Then it's really weird that the pentium D has a better memory controller.

[@foch3]

@@twood1130 Intel has always had a good memory controller. Latency was the biggest benefit. It insured even cheap Amd systems had a decent memory controller. Edit: Am2 memory controllers sucked. I was getting 40ns latency on a 939 with DDR 500mhz Cas 2,2,2 1t.

[@LawrenceTimme]

That Pentium looks battered. I like it

[@miro_kauppinen]

Is dual core Opteron better than Athlon 64 X2?

[@10WA]

If you had a Athlon 64 x2 6000+ or 6400+ the Intel PD would have been destroyed 😮😊

[@Rolatnor]

Opteron 3365 vs FX-8350

[@jims_junk]

ohhhhh I cannot WAIT to get into the FX years

[@Mr_Meowingtons]

was the Athlon 64 just an updated Athlon XP with added x64?

[@jims_junk]

far as I know they are fairly different processors. the 64 had hypertransport and an on die memory controller. I'm by no means an engineer, maybe someone else can chime in.

[@pf100andahalf]

The pentium 4 was so bad that intel went back to the pentium 3 design and used that in their core cpu's, and correct me if I'm wrong, but they only dropped that architecture somewhere around the sandy bridge era.

[@laharl2k]

Intel had faster memory controllers than AMD back then, that may be one of the reasons it scores higher. AMD had much lower latency though iirc because of the HT and new memory architecture.

[@AlexandreMS71]

To test CPUs you should use a lower resolution, possibly one that was used at the time the CPUs were new, like 1024 x 768.

[@jims_junk]

Yeah. I explained this before. It's not about getting the best fps from the cpu but comparing how each handles it equally.

[@USSHammerology]

I still have my pentium D emachines 3.4ghz.

[@AlfaPro1337]

Back when AMD shamed Intel for gluing and calling out P4D (and later, early version of C2D and C2Q) as fake dual and quad core. We should shame AMD for pulling the same stunt.

[@rahulff2236]

Bro please tell me intel Pentium d vs intel dual core which is best Please tell me

[@Revener666]

But with Ryzen AMD did what Intel did in the Pentium D but the correct way. ;)

[@ciklopos8912]

неужели не хватает ума сделать шрифт оверлэя крупнее?

[@SuperWasara]

now is chipled design adored again... when intel does monolith...

[@blakedmc1989RaveHD]

there's a reason why Pentium D was punned as Pentium Disaster 😂

[@theanglerfish]

i remember old good times when 3 ghz was a big deal and now? 6ghz and who cares?!

[@niko.c.v.m...]

yo creo que si pones los dos de la misma potencia le gana el AMD 65 X2

[@pham3383]

Amd do what intel did,the correct way

[@livingroom.computer]

Then intel dropped the 1st gen i7 and smoked amd again...

[@giorx5]

30% faster only ; )

[@ProperMethodz]

The biggest issue with the Athalon 64 was that there was very little API or OS support.

[@eleventy-seven]

I've built systems since the 90s and in the US there was never a problem. Could you be more specific?

[@ProperMethodz]

@@eleventy-seven Sure, XP 64 was never stable and the other option was Windows 2000 64 but driver support wasn't really available. On Linux it was amazing, we built a lot of data centers/server rooms with these. It wasn't until Windows 7 that 64 bit really came to a head. The x64 platform absolutely was a catalyst for putting it there. But during it's launch and for a while, the platform wasn't reliable for home use.

[@massihkheiry8067]

You are using a slow Athlon with only 512K cache per core. To test the real Athlon speed , you have to try 5200 1 MB cache per core (or 5400 5600 Athlon) There is also an Athlon 64 4800 x2 with 1mb cache per core.

[@IswanRahmanto]

did you really notice instruction amd athlon have a (3DNow) maybe reason gamer choose amd

[@apollosungod2819]

Can you make this test a bit more interesting and add the Athlon 6400+ X2 64 3.2Ghz (90nm version) and the other Athlon 6400+ X2 64 which ran at either 3.1 or 3.2Ghz but was on an unoptimized 65nm process because of "AMD" trying to make the first Phenom look better instead of selling CPUs even if Phenom sold less at first... Also get an Asrock AM2 motherboard that can handle 8GB if you can... I feel this was a problem back then with AMD consumer grade Athlon 64 X2 and even Phenom AM2+ motherboards where even the professional reviewers either almost always made benchmark tests using the 32bit O.S. and less than 4GB of RAM... Combined with bad manufacturers not fixing issues with using full 8GB of DDR2 in Dual Channel (all slots populated) which was an issue that AMD, the motherboard makers,etc could have easily fixed with their bios microcode but few did... I know because the higher end ASUS mobos run 8GB in dual channel without flinching But just for kicks as the Athlon 64 at stock 3.2Ghz represents the official maximum performance that AMD reached beyond Intel Pentium 4s that needed to have higher clocks... Also both Crysis 1 and Crysis Warhead should be included in the benchmarks too.

[@zachbeckner]

Can you make this a bit more comprehensible by not having a 2 paragraph long run-on sentence? Also you can suggest things, but be nice about it. I doubt this is the last video he'll ever make so suggest new things to do, not be like "to make this more interesting".

[@SianaGearz]

KZbin test is a little unfair maybe? AVC1. You can afford to decode well in excess of 1080p but not AVC1. Suggest enhanced-h264ify. One of the most disappointing things about Netburst is the denorm bug that was never fixed, but was particularly bad in the very early steppings and was eventually made somewhat less likely to occur. It doesn't affect functionality but every time it flares up, it drops performance by like 3 orders of magnitude. Athlon is worth it just to never face it again.

[@jims_junk]

Oh yeah I definitely didn't expect either to be happy about it. It was more of a test to see how they would handle it, and who would handle it better.

[@eleventy-seven]

Funny, I built a Athlon system to play GTA SanAndeas.

[@lordraptor11]

problem with the athlon was it was the quality sucked and failed before warranty expired with amd not honoring the warranty. i myself had a pentium D 950 cpu and it will still fire up and work to this day , no athlon will. amd is trash