Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Oh, and one other thing. I do have access to AMD Phenom II 965 BE if it can clock higher. Would this be something to look into?

Quote:I don't have the money, Im on a decent MB (Crosshair V Formula, black friday was in my favor for AMD products, was the best I could get at the time) and I would like to pair the Intel CPU with a good MB too. Piledriver wont require me to get a new MB and its suited for all of my other needs, and will Hopefully run with better single thread applications. im just waiting on the release for benchmarks, im not gonna pull a "buy as soon as it comes out" situation like many others did with bulldozer.

A wise plan. Bulldozer cpu prices are only just now starting to come down to acceptable levels, a year after its release. AMD always pulls this crap. I remember when phenom (the original phenom series) came out and they were charging $200-300 for them despite the fact that Intels competing core 2 quad processors were:
-cheaper ($150-250 at the time)
-had lower power consumption and heat (95w TDP vs. 140w TDP)
-performed MUCH better at stock (a $250 core 2 quad outperformed a $300 phenom by nearly 50% in some applications)
-overclocked much better (20% was considered the max for most phenom cpus while core 2 quads could be OC by 30-50% depending on the model)

Then a couple months later the prices on phenom cpus started rapidly dropping over the course of a few months until eventually they were significantly cheaper than the core 2 quads that they were competing against (which makes sense because they are inferior to them).

The exact same thing happened with Bulldozer. And I'm guessing they are doing this on purpose because they know that they have a reasonably large percent of customers who are "AMD fanboys" and will pay outrageous prices for their products during the first few months since they refuse to buy from Intel on principal rather than looking at the products objectively. Once production ramps up and the AMD fanboys have bought the early products they begin to lower the prices. While it is true that manufacturing costs go down over time as the manufacturing process is improved (and with it the yields) no sane marketing professional should plan on selling a product for more than the competition if it is clearly inferior unless they know for certain that people will buy it anyways for some specific reason.

So yes, it is a good idea to wait. AMD hasn't priced their cpus competitively at launch since the athlon X2s.

Quote: I usually just say Base Clock to keep things simple, what would be that exact term for this value? I would honestly like to know.

I've seen it called many things:
-FSB
-External clock
-Base clock
-HT reference clock
-HTT clock
-and probably more

Sometimes "clock" is replaced with "frequency", "rate", or "clock rate" (all of which would be acceptable).

HTT and FSB are incorrect, although some motherboard bios/EFI setups use them anyways because the term FSB has really "stuck" with consumers over the years. All of the others are acceptable including reference, base, external, and HT reference. I dislike HT reference though because it literally has nothing to do with HT, but AMDs official documentation always refers to it as the HT reference clock.

You can call it the base clock if you want, that's fine.

Quote: Sorry I didn't tell you the CPU ddn't have unlocked multipliers XD I don't know why you think that OC'ing it wont help that much,

1. Because you begin to see diminishing returns after a certain clock rate. The exact point is different for every application and every cpu architecture. For most applications with core 2 and phenom II cpus that point is about 3.6-3.8GHz. Past that you're unlikely to see any improvement in application performance, and if you do, very little. Dolphin does seem to scale better with regards to high clock rates compared to most other applications though. More recent CPU architecture scale better. Bulldozer and sandy/ivy bridge maintains linear performance improvement up to at least 5GHz with many applications.
2. There are limits to how far you can OC obviously. Once you hit a certain point you're unlikely to get much further even with significantly better cooling. For a phenom II that point is around 3.8-4.2 GHz, for bulldozer it is around 4.8GHz. What I meant was that you might not be able to OC far enough to get games like SMG running perfectly even with liquid cooling.

Quote: I remember someone managed to get full speed with an 8120 with a little more than 5GHz for SMG somewhere, Ill go look for that interesting find. Sorry if I turn out incorrect.

With HLE that should be possible. With LLE it might still struggle in certain places.

Quote:-Edit: I think it was closer/around 6GHz, still looking.

I doubt it. You can't get bulldozer stable at 6GHz without liquid nitrogen or at least solid carbon dioxide in an evaporation chamber.

Quote:Oh, and one other thing. I do have access to AMD Phenom II 965 BE if it can clock higher. Would this be something to look into?

Not really. Even with unlocked multipliers you're not going to get it much farther than 3.8GHz, maybe 4.0 or 4.2 if you're lucky.

Quote:Sometimes "clock" is replaced with "frequency", "rate", or "clock rate" (all of which would be acceptable).

Or in the case of a cnet article I read the other day, "ghz rating." Hence why I don't trust their opinions on anything.

Just use correct terminology. Makes everything easier to understand.

Quote:Or in the case of a cnet article I read the other day, "ghz rating." Hence why I don't trust their opinions on anything.

Just use correct terminology. Makes everything easier to understand.

Your picture didn't show up NV.

Alright, I just remember people hitting around 5GHz in the wiki with 965's. maybe they were on on extreme cooling solutions. You say Bulldozer's usually hit around 4.8GHz at max usually? Hmmm, Ive heard differently, but you obviously know your stuff NV. Thanks for the help everyone, just gonna wait for benchmarks before buying bulldozer and price drop. Will definitely buy if it gets better single core performance than my thuban. Otherwise, Im not sure what Ill do XD MNaybe a miracle will happen, and magically get a mobo and an i7 for cheap, or dolphin somehow magically allows for more threads to be used (will probably never happen).

-Even though effectiveness would go down after 5GHz, would disabling 2 or 3 cores to OC be good for dolphin? Im just trying to bring ideas to the table, since dolphin only uses 3 threads at max, and I can just use a profile on mobo to reboot and switch between two profiles easily for normal and dolphin use.

Quote:Alright, I just remember people hitting around 5GHz in the wiki with 965's. maybe they were on on extreme cooling solutions.

Yeah I call bullshit on that. Professional hardware organizations have trouble getting the chips stable past 4.0/4.2GHz without chemical solutions.

Quote:You say Bulldozer's usually hit around 4.8GHz at max usually? Hmmm, Ive heard differently, but you obviously know your stuff NV.

On high end air cooling yeah. Liquid cooling can probably push it a little bit further.

Remember just because some guy manages to capture a screenshot of cpuz or his bios setup showing the cpu running at 5.5GHz doesn't mean it's actually stable at that clock rate when under load.

Quote: Thanks for the help everyone, just gonna wait for benchmarks before buying bulldozer and price drop. Will definitely buy if it gets better single core performance than my thuban.

You mean piledriver/vishera right?

Quote:Otherwise, Im not sure what Ill do XD MNaybe a miracle will happen, and magically get a mobo and an i7 for cheap,

LGA1155 motherboards are dirt cheap. You can get a good one for $75.

Quote: or dolphin somehow magically allows for more threads to be used (will probably never happen).

Not a chance in hell.

Quote:-Even though effectiveness would go down after 5GHz, would disabling 2 or 3 cores to OC be good for dolphin? Im just trying to bring ideas to the table, since dolphin only uses 3 threads at max, and I can just use a profile on mobo to reboot and switch between two profiles easily for normal and dolphin use.

Nope. It wouldn't help at all. It basically just makes them invisible to the system so that the system can't use them. Modern cpus automatically close the power circuits to inactive cores anyways.

(10-04-2012, 03:13 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:Alright, I just remember people hitting around 5GHz in the wiki with 965's. maybe they were on on extreme cooling solutions.

Yeah I call bullshit on that. Professional hardware organizations have trouble getting the chips stable past 4.0/4.2GHz without chemical solutions.

Quote:You say Bulldozer's usually hit around 4.8GHz at max usually? Hmmm, Ive heard differently, but you obviously know your stuff NV.

On high end air cooling yeah. Liquid cooling can probably push it a little bit further.

Remember just because some guy manages to capture a screenshot of cpuz or his bios setup showing the cpu running at 5.5GHz doesn't mean it's actually stable at that clock rate when under load.

Quote: Thanks for the help everyone, just gonna wait for benchmarks before buying bulldozer and price drop. Will definitely buy if it gets better single core performance than my thuban.

You mean piledriver/vishera right?

Quote:Otherwise, Im not sure what Ill do XD MNaybe a miracle will happen, and magically get a mobo and an i7 for cheap,

LGA1155 motherboards are dirt cheap. You can get a good one for $75.

Quote: or dolphin somehow magically allows for more threads to be used (will probably never happen).

Not a chance in hell.

Quote:-Even though effectiveness would go down after 5GHz, would disabling 2 or 3 cores to OC be good for dolphin? Im just trying to bring ideas to the table, since dolphin only uses 3 threads at max, and I can just use a profile on mobo to reboot and switch between two profiles easily for normal and dolphin use.

Nope. It wouldn't help at all. It basically just makes them invisible to the system so that the system can't use them. Modern cpus automatically close the power circuits to inactive cores anyways.

Alright then, I did mean piledriver. We can make excellent guesses, but in the end, we just have to wait for benchmarks. I guess this turned into waiting game. If Piledriver/ Vishera is better than Thuban for dolphin, I might just go for it, not sure though, and we wont be sure till then unfortunately. You know I was totally joking about the whole more threads being used in Dolphin right? ill look around for intel boards, but I still want something thats great in terms of features along with quality. The i7 CPU line still isn't cheap either. If the tests with the Phenom 965's are probably bullcrap, you might want to fix that XD

Quote:Alright then, I did mean piledriver. We can make excellent guesses, but in the end, we just have to wait for benchmarks. I guess this turned into waiting game.

1. I'm not sure if I would call it a "guess". This is what AMDs official documentation and press releases have said. Why would they understate their product so massively? If anything they are probably overstating their product, like all companies do. Expect a 10% increase in both IPC and clock rate resulting in a 20% increase in total performance per core just like they said.

2. The fact that they are using the exact same manufacturing technology for vishera means they literally can't gain significant performance improvements without completely redesigning the core, which they are not doing. A 20% increase in performance in one year without any manufacturing improvements is actually good. Ivy bridge was only 10-15% faster than sandy bridge and that was WITH manufacturing improvements. They may or may not decide to release a 10 core version of vishera, if they did we could potentially see up to a 50% increase in multi-threaded performance over bulldozer.

3. We do have benchmarks of piledriver. AMDs trinity chips use piledriver cores just like vishera and we already have benchmarks of those. The IPC is 10% higher than bulldozer on average just like AMD said it would be.

Quote:If Piledriver/ Vishera is better than Thuban for dolphin, I might just go for it, not sure though, and we wont be sure till then unfortunately.

It will almost certainly be faster than thuban for dolphin. But not very much faster. And I would hate to see you spend hundreds of dollars for a small improvement when you could spend slightly more for a large improvement.

Quote: You know I was totally joking about the whole more threads being used in Dolphin right?

Sarcasm is difficult to detect on the internet when total strangers are involved. I don't know much about you or how much you know about this subject and therefore have no way to tell the difference between you being ignorant and you being sarcastic (no offense).

Quote:ill look around for intel boards, but I still want something thats great in terms of features along with quality. The i7 CPU line still isn't cheap either.

True but high quality LGA1155 motherboards are actually cheaper on average than high quality AM3+ motherboards due to AMDs decision to keep the pci-e controller (among other things) external. Intel has made great strides towards increasing system wide integration over the last few years and this has massively brought down the cost of chipset and motherboard manufacturing to the point where you can get a high quality board for under $100 (which was unheard of 3 years ago). AMDs biggest enemy in this area is their commitment to backwards compatibility. If they made the necessary improvements to AM3+ to bring the cost of motherboards down it would mean that bulldozer would not be able to run on AM3 motherboards. That of course would make a lot of customers angry and greatly reduce their already poor sales (the majority of bulldozer users probably have AM3 motherboards).

Quote:If the tests with the Phenom 965's are probably bullcrap, you might want to fix that XD

I'm not going to delete user test data from a wiki page just because of my suspicions. If this were an official benchmark then I would probably ask for confirmation. But this is a wiki so their is no central authority.

Ive been considering a sabortooth board, maybe something less. If AMD really prices their top model at around $250, i might just bite for an i7 with a cheaper but still excellent board. Maybe use this still awesome hardware for a server.Is Ivy Bridge really worth it over the the price differance when it comes to the 2600K and the 3770K? Yeah, sorry for trying to sarcastic with text, I thought the whole "probably will never happen" would have cover it. Not trying to provoke, lol.