Need Advice: Pent III or AMD Athlon ? for Chess Programs
Christopher A. Morgan
Athlon @ 550 not too far apart in price, with Athlon a little
higher in price. Anyone have experience with both and with
leading chess programs? Ed Schroeder seemed to tweak
his Rebel programs for use with AMD. Still true? Will Rebel
Tiger run better on Athlon? Any advice greatly appreciated.
Will probably use Windows 98, for now.
Chris
JB
I don't know what kind of budget you have for your new PC, or just how
strong you need your chess software to be, but I'd like to tell you
what I think.
From what I've seen, the ELOs of chess software doe not scale
proportionately to the CPU power of the machine. Unless you need it
to be as powerful as possible, I'd highly recommend you pick up an
Intel Celeron 400 or 433, but make sure you have a Pentium III
compatible motherboard. Then, when the P3 prices invariably fall, you
can drop a P3 into your new machine, saving hundreds of dollars. A
Pentium III 600 CPU runs at least $430 while a Celeron 433 is only
about $70. Of course the Celeron isn't as fast as the P3 600, but I
doubt you'd notice much of a difference without running some
heavy-duty graphics programs. I might be wrong, but I don't think
Fritz, etc., would be that much stronger on the P3 600.
Sorry if this doesn't directly answer your question.
Regards,
JB
Xena
wrote:
>Chris,
>
>I don't know what kind of budget you have for your new PC, or just how
>strong you need your chess software to be, but I'd like to tell you
>what I think.
>
>From what I've seen, the ELOs of chess software doe not scale
>proportionately to the CPU power of the machine. Unless you need it
>to be as powerful as possible, I'd highly recommend you pick up an
>Intel Celeron 400 or 433, but make sure you have a Pentium III
>compatible motherboard. Then, when the P3 prices invariably fall, you
>can drop a P3 into your new machine, saving hundreds of dollars. A
>Pentium III 600 CPU runs at least $430 while a Celeron 433 is only
>about $70. Of course the Celeron isn't as fast as the P3 600, but I
>doubt you'd notice much of a difference without running some
>heavy-duty graphics programs. I might be wrong, but I don't think
>Fritz, etc., would be that much stronger on the P3 600.
>
>Sorry if this doesn't directly answer your question.
>
>Regards,
>
>JB
>
>>>
Of course alot of RAM would be the best 128 +
also making sure your HD is getting all 66 and
not just at 33 if it's UltraDMA66 type drive...
Fricot
Seriously if your only matter is to have the fatest computer see different
benchmarks and choose the best.
According to my small knowledge, only brute force is needed and not
graphical capabilities so
- the fatest CPU is the best
- motherboard with highest cache memory size and bus speed
- a number of MB of memory like max size of hash tables + 32 (for
windows )should be enough.
--
Frederic Fricot
fri...@club-internet.fr
Christopher A. Morgan <camo...@worldnet.att.net> a écrit dans le message :
81q44s$9e2$2...@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net...
Jesper Antonsson
> Getting ready to buy new computer. Seems Pent III @ 500 & AMD
> Athlon @ 550 not too far apart in price, with Athlon a little
> higher in price. Anyone have experience with both and with
> leading chess programs? Ed Schroeder seemed to tweak
> his Rebel programs for use with AMD. Still true? Will Rebel
> Tiger run better on Athlon? Any advice greatly appreciated.
Ed has a benchmark page on his website, although he updates it quite
seldomly, unfortunately. Athlon 550 searches the test position in 58
seconds, whereas the PIII 500 uses 72 seconds on Rebel 10, so it would
seem that Athlon is quite a bit better.
Also, buy a lot of memory if you can afford it. At least 128 Mb. A
harddisk with spare room for the 6 Gb endgame tablebases wouldn't hurt
performance, either. :-)
As a side note to Ed: If you look closely at the benchmarks, you will
notice that the PIII-600 score are probably wrong, since there is a jump
in performance from PIII-550 with 32%(!!!) when the clockspeed only
increased 9%. That's unfair to the Athlon 600. Perhaps someone reported
Xeon (larger cache) results for the PIII-600?
regards
Jesper Antonsson
Jeroen ;-}
> harddisk with spare room for the 6 Gb endgame tablebases wouldn't hurt
> performance, either. :-)
I can second that. I moved from 128 to 256Mb a time ago and it was the best
buy for speed gain I have had.
--
Jeroen ;-}
-------------------------------
jimva...@wxs.nl
http://zip.to/jeroen
ICQ#45740870
-------------------------------
Alexander Fuchs
> I rather thinks it was once a PIII Katmai and a PIII Coppermine in the
> other case.
clockspeed-wise the Coppermine should not be inferior to the Athlon at
chess, the
PIII Katmai definitly is.
Alexander
Jeremiah Penery
>
> > I rather thinks it was once a PIII Katmai and a PIII Coppermine in the
> > other case.
>
> clockspeed-wise the Coppermine should not be inferior to the Athlon at
> chess, the
> PIII Katmai definitly is.
This is probably true. The PIII Katmai is slower than the Athlon.
But the Coppermine PIIIs are nearly equal with Athlon in speed/Mhz.
Hyperbola
>> harddisk with spare room for the 6 Gb endgame tablebases wouldn't hurt
>> performance, either. :-)
>
>
>I can second that. I moved from 128 to 256Mb a time ago and it was the best
>buy for speed gain I have had.
Well having more memory won't really speed up a chess program unless the
hash table was previously eating into virtual memory... but it does allow
you to have a larger hash table.
A recent advancement in memory technology may really be a boon to chess
programs... which I can gladly say I have invested in when I purchased a new
computer recently for my own program I'm working on. 400 MHz memory,
folks.... it's here. That can really speed up hash table accesses, as can
PIII-optimized code which uses prefetching.
The downside is that the new RDRAM (356 or 400 MHz) is quite expensive,
especially due to recent shortages mostly due to the earthquake in Taiwan.
My strategy is just to get the minimum 128 MB now, which isn't terribly
expensive, and upgrade later once prices go back down. Right now it would
have cost me over $900 to upgrade from 128 MB to 256 MB
Happy Programming
Hyperbola