AMD Athlon

[demian1]

Hi
I am in the process of upgrading my PC.
My new processor will be the Athlon 700Mhz All reviews I read praise its great performance. But my main reason is the huge (over 60 %) price advantage over Intel.

Nemesys never mentionned the Athlon in their hardware recommendations, so I just wonder if there is any particular reason for that?
My GS should work great with it, right ?
Thanks

[Jan]

Hi Demian,

Some time ago a GS-user posted a message and said that he had contacted Nemesys for information on the new GigaStudio, and someone from the technical staff had told him that the yet to be released Gigastudio had been tested on an Athlon 800 and delivered 160 notes polyphony with that processor, so you should be safe with your Athlon.

[NAZARU]

Good luck with finding a card that will get along with the Athlon. I know from personal experience that the Echo cards will not get along with AMD processors.
Peace.

[donnie]

For ANYTHING having to do with audio stay away from anything but a PII, or PIII----trust me on this one...

dc

[elle]

These quite opposite opinions call for an intervention from above: \"Papa, Dave, ...\"

[Kenn159]

Hi All
Im that user that Jan refered to . In my conversation with nemesys, they said that they were currently using a Athalon 800 with giga studio and geating great results. [ so Im sure they must have been using a sound card with it with out conflict]. I said why did you decide to use a athalon instead of a pentium 3 ? And Joe said , it was the fastest computer out there now . And i said is the athalon the fastest computer because the highest megahert pentium avalible at the time is only a 733 or do you feel that the two platforms are equal asuming your comparing the same megahertz speed. And joe said , I cant answer that [I assume that decision was made by the enginneers and never relayed to Joe.]Also I ask if they would still be supporting pentiums and he said in a hesitating voice ,yes[ which gave me the impression that pentiums may not be the future prefered platform of choice for giga studio]He also said with giga studio 160 ,that you need a 800 to get all 160 voices , and anything less than that will get less voices, but in a later conversation he amended that and said 600 megahertz and above will get 160 voices , and my 450 pentium 3 will only get 96 voices [well maybe my fast 7200rpm ata-66 hard drive will play a part in that and Ill get lucky and get more voices ]I just bought my computer last july and I cant aford to buy a new computer every six months ,besides thats about how long it takes me to resolve all the conflicts with hardware and software.
So ill just live with the 96 voices or so , but when I do buy my next computer in the not so near future , I think Ill go with a athalon.

[Jan]

Just the other day I read in an article in Sound on Sound that problems have been reported about the AMD Athlon with the Echo cards and the Lexicon cards. The problems vary from conflicts to complete lock ups, so if you are planning to buy an Athlon you would be wise to take this in consideration.

Jan

[mramosch]

FOR YOUR INTEREST - From the Soundscape/Mixtreme Userforum

Hope that helps

Manfred

------------------------------------------

Thought I\'d check out there and see if anyone has opted for an
Athlon CPU over an Intel CPU in their latest systems.
I\'m not real happy with Intel based on

a)my actual recent experience working for them;
b) their i820 chipset & RAMBUS messups; and
c) the short supply of their high-end CPUs as they desparately
try to keep up with AMD with their archaic architectures and
produce extremely poor yields as a result.

Gamers seem to like Athlons, but I wonder if a lot of these
digital audio programs still expect to see Intel CPUs.
Also, I hear the Athlons run very hot.

Any opinions?

Thanks in advance,
Lory Kohn

------------------------------------------

Hi Lory,

the SSHDR1 and R.Ed host interface should be OK on an Athlon system.
The EPP interface is also supported in the latest driver in case
no ISA slots are available anymore. Mixtreme in mixer-only mode
is also working fine but streaming is a real pain.

The used Motorola DSP56301 is for some reason not compatible
with the AMD751 controller used on the AMD motherboards. I\'ve done
some (actually a lot) tests on an ASUS K7M, but so far without any luck.
I can get it to work by putting the Mixtreme in a PCI expansion box
but that\'s not a solution of course. It only tells us that
there is nothing wrong with the software but it\'s somewhere deep
down at the PCI hardware level.

FYI, none of the busmaster cards using the Motorola DSP are
working on Athlon systems (i.e. Aardvark, Echo, Lexicon...)

Regards,

Dirk
Soundscape Development


[This message has been edited by mramosch (edited 03-02-2000).]

[Laurence]

I would go with a fast Coppermine PIII over an Athlon. The full speed secondary cache puts it in the same performance range as the Athlon, but the PIII extensions give it the capability to excel beyond the AMD. Gigasampler and Gigastudio don\'t use the PIII extensions, but almost every other audio program does. If you were gaming it would be a different story, but for audio go with Intel.

[Laurence]

I would go with a fast Coppermine PIII over an Athlon. The full speed secondary cache puts it in the same performance range as the Athlon, but the PIII extensions give it the capability to excel beyond the AMD. Gigasampler and Gigastudio don\'t use the PIII extensions, but almost every other audio program does. If you were gaming it would be a different story, but for audio go with Intel.

[Dale]

The Frontier Design cards (Dakota, Wavecenter PCI) all work great with the Athalon now. The Echo girls and a couple of otheres have problems with the MB chipset, not the AMD CPU, a PCI issue if I recall.

The Intel \"extensions\" mentioned previously refer to the Microsoft SSE extensions and AT THIS POINT IN TIME there are only 2 audio packages out there that use them. This MAY change but who wants to wait on what may well be vaporware or wishful thinking on the part of Wintel.