Opteron 165 Dual-Core, upgrading my Allenstein!

[RSSstudio]

Hey guys, just wondering if anyone had any advice/comments on the upgrade I am purchasing tomorrow (through newegg and antarestech.com):

-AMD Opteron 165 Dual-Core processor (939)
-Asus A8N-SLI mobo
-Asus GeForce6600 256mb PCIe video card

In total, the upgrade is just at $600 (unfortunately I just moved to CA, so newegg sales tax applies to me!)

This would be upgrading my current setup:

tossing:
AMD Athlon64 3700 2.4ghz (754)
Asus K8N mobo
Rosewill ATI 128mb AGP video card

keeping:
2GB Corsair DDR400 RAM (2x1gb)
Antec True 550w PSU
5x ata100 HDD's (all Western Digital's, diff. sizes)
Zalman Heatsink/Processor Fan
Adaptec 1394 Card
Aspire XDreamer Case, NEC 16xDVDrw, 2x LG 17" LCD's, Kensington trackball, a lot of patience, etc. etc.
PTLE 6.9 (soon to be 7 after this upgrade)

Thanks, I was a little pissed to see AMD drop socket754 entirely, causing me 2x the price for this upgrade. Hopefully it's well worth it. If there's anything anyone sees as odd or incompatible, please let me know!!

thanks!

[haydini]

I just got an ASUS A8N-SLI-Premium with an AMD X2 4400+. I tracked out 32+79 on the DAVEC II tests (nearly completed test 10). Why the Opteron? The 165 is 1.8GHz dual core while the new X2 3800 is 2GHz with the same Cache and the same price or less. Anything special about the Opteron architecture that makes it better suited for audio applications? Thanks.

[RSSstudio]

From what I've read, the Opteron is more stable and much more capable when it comes to overclocking (which I haven't done at all yet, but it's worth a try). For the money, just about every review I read of the Opteron 165 stated people were able to reach 2.4ghz or higher within stock CPU voltages, and I have a good power supply anyhow so I should be OK. Also, the cache setup is different/better on the Opteron 2x's vs. the lower-end Athlon 2x' s(according to the stats of both, atleast).

I have a feeling I wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyhow, but I ordered the Opteron today...so hopefully it goes well!

Thanks

[RSSstudio]

I just installed my new dual-core Opteron 165, and I'm running PT 6.9cs? (the latest) and Windows XP Pro, SP1. All installed fine, everything recognized ok. BUT...

I'm actually getting much worse performance than before with my Athlon64, and I get #9093 errors randomly and every 2-3 minutes upon playback. I also noticed the CPU usage meter jumping back and forth constantly, even in small sessions with low plug-in counts. I read a little about dual-core's not being optimized with SP1 in XP Pro, is this the culprit? The only reason I'm holding out on PT7 is the lack of plug-in updates for the ones I have, but is that really necessary for PT to be stable on a dual-core?

The only other help I've got so far was to "set affinity" for the ProTools.exe process and tell it to only use CPU 1, not 0 and 1, as well as to not put CPU Usage all the way to 99%. Neither of which have completely solved the problem, nor do I want to do that everytime I run PT.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions! Thanks!! Anyone with a dual-core and any insight would be totally appreciated.

[Allen Hallada]

Hopefully Shane will see this and chyme in as he is our Opteron expert here. I'd definitely upgrade to 7.0 with that machine for best performance as 6.9 doesn't utilize dual core or dual processors. Your basically getting the performance of a single core 1.8Ghz AMD processor now with 6.9. That processor you had was a great one too for anything less than 7.0. What didn't you like about it? Maybe a motherboard swap with some overclocking would have got you where you wanted to be? The DFI Lan Party 250GB NF3 was a very popular overclocking motherboard for that processor and you could run it at or near 3 Ghz with the right setup. Still not as good as the dual cores though on PTLE 7.0.

Allen

[Petander]

The only reason I'm holding out on PT7 is the lack of plug-in updates for the ones I have, but is that really necessary for PT to be stable on a dual-core?

You should go PT7, that´s the whole point with dualcore.


Try your old plugins one at a time when you get the 7.0 system running stable, you may be surprised about how many "not-updated" plugins actually work just fine. I only updated the ones that didn´t work and there were not many at all.

A friend is coming to take a look at my 3800 x2 system tomorrow. I promised to build a similar one for him, this is so ridiculously stable and efficient , I still find this hard to believe. Everything just works, never crashes,week after week. He may want a 4800x2 though, in case they are as good as this economy model of mine... wow.

[Shan]

What Allen said in regards to PT 7. I have a Quad Opteron system using the 265 CPUs and PT LE 7.

Dump 6.9 and get 7. It smokes. You'll be very happy. Most plug-ins seem to be updated now. I dont think the Digi list is 100% up to date so you might want to check the actual site of the plug-in developer.

Shane

[RSSstudio]

I did a test install on my laptop first tonight to see how that handled PT7 before I put it on the Opteron165 system...and wow, I actually made my laptop run more efficiently.

I've been in the middle of a mix for a few weeks now, never being able to get around to completing it, so once it's over and done tomorrow, to PT7 I go. Thanks so much for the insight.

And with regard to the athlon64, i never had a specific issue with it, and was able to really push it to it's max with 32 tracks and tons of plug-ins, but since pt7 started focusing on dual-core and the opteron wasn't terribly expensive (if you don't count the new mobo and video card that had to go with it), it seemed like a good upgrade to me to push it further.

The only thing i did tonight differently on the opteron system was giving in and installing Service Pack 2, which made no difference, but I did install a hotfix from Microsoft that addressed "systems running SP2 on dual-cores with decreased performance in single-threaded processes" or something close to that nature. It didn't totally fix things, but I even noticed my meters being much more responsive right off the bat after installing the hotfix. (KB896256.zip is the file, search the net for it because support.microsoft.com doesn't have it, only talks about it)

Thanks again!! Any other suggestions, please shoot them my way. Anyone know if Auto-Tune 4 works with pt7 yet??

[Shan]

...Anyone know if Auto-Tune 4 works with pt7 yet??

AT 4.3 works with my quad for the most part. But it has crashed PT 3 times. Ctrl+S is your best friend.

Shane

[RSSstudio]

Thanks for the heads up!