Socket 478 or 775?

voxen · Post by **voxen** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 1:18 am

Hi all
im new here and my question may sound like a " u should know that " but i dont!
im in the process of building my second studio computer for recording audio.....
my questions is .......what is the difference between socket 478 and socket 775?
i imagine that 775 performs better because it cost more ..i dont know

i dont mind spending for a good cpu .i just dont wont to go over board..
can someone bring a little clarity to this issue
thanks

niels007 · Post by **niels007** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 2:07 am

775 is the successor to 478. It has the faster pentium processors and ability to host the dual core versions. 775 is newer and potentially faster because of that.

If silence is important though I would not go for Intel these days. SPCR is free of 'fanboys' so our decisions are based on facts which is quite rare on the interweb..

. AMD dual core 64bit processors are most likely faster, perhaps a little bit cheaper, but most of all about twice as easy to make a silent system from because they run relatively cool. It will save you multiple dozens of $ in electricity each year as well, which is a small bonus.

I would look towards one of the heatpipe cooled Nforce 4 motherboards, a dualcore AMD64 (x2 they're called) and you'd have a super system. I'm doing some audio myself lately and I wish I had dual core. Applying a filter to a big wave file brings my pc to a crawl while dualcore should still have one fully fledged processor ready to record or compose.

voxen · Post by **voxen** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 6:10 am

thanks niels 007....
silence isnt really a factor to me , performance is what i'm really more aimed at ..
I was told u cant overclock amd ..but i read that u could overclock intel .
but i also was told by an engineer who uses the amd dualcore that it performed great
so i figured that intels dualcore would rock even more because u could overclock it...
so niels007 what your saying is that there's is no difference between 478 and 775 except 775 is able to be used with the dualcore?
so would it be wise to say if i didnt get the 775 / dualcore i would do fine with one of the high end 478 socket cpu's?

thanks

Post by **MikeC** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 6:36 am

voxen wrote:so would it be wise to say if i didnt get the 775 / dualcore i would do fine with one of the high end 478 socket cpu's?
thanks

You're reading/hearing what you want to hear.

Generally speaking, the A64s are faster and cooler than the P4s -- regardless of socket or # of cores. Somewhat dependent on apps. The speed difference is small to modest; price for price, the thermal differences is often quite big.

kesv · Post by **kesv** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 6:49 am

voxen wrote: I was told u cant overclock amd ..but i read that u could overclock intel .

Wrong. Both AMD and Intel have made overclocking harder by imposing multiplier locks. However it is still possible to overclock them by various means. Anandtech recently took a look at overclocking an Athlon 64 on a socket 939 platform.

voxen wrote: so niels007 what your saying is that there's is no difference between 478 and 775 except 775 is able to be used with the dualcore?

Basically, yes. Since LGA775 is the new socket all technological advances that Intel can think up are most likely to only appear on systems supporting it. However currently there aren't really any advances that make LGA775 vastly superior to PGA478. As long as we are only considering Intel platforms the best reason to go with 775 is dualcore.

voxen wrote: so would it be wise to say if i didnt get the 775 / dualcore i would do fine with one of the high end 478 socket cpu's?

Depends on how you define 'doing fine'. I would think that a sound studio would be just the kind of environment that could make good use of a dual core system. When doing things like multitrack recording and sound manipulation having more than one processor core is potentially much more significant than any kind of overclock you might be able to achieve.

Still if you indeed deside to take the dualcore route I'd suggest also considering the AMD option. AMD holds the thermal advantage here too and while you want to emphasize performance, in a sound studio there are clear limits to how loud your system can be. The interesting bit here is that because of slightly differing strategies the Intel dualcore entry model is currently quite a bit cheaper than the AMD entry model.

niels007 · Post by **niels007** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 7:47 am

All the reviews conclude the same, dual core AMD is nearly always noticably faster than Intel. As far as overclocking goes, I don't think you can overclock Intel more than AMD. You can probably get between 10 and 20% 'real speed' increase out of both, after which you need a lot of extra voltage (and heat to get rid off) for very little gain. This problem is likely to be worse with Intel as they are harder to cool to start with.

I would investigate long and hard what software you use and what dual core could mean. If the programs use one thread, you can really do 2 things at once. Perhaps some programs can use both threads, which would increase the speed of things like mp3 compression and reverb filters by a great deal.