brisbane or windsor???

[iq80]

hi-
about to pull the trigger on a budget amd setup. at newegg i can get a 3600 brisbane oem for $59 or a 3800 windsor retail w/heatsink & fan for $67. any difference between the 2 that would matter?

thanks!
iq

 

[F1N3ST]

Brisbane is 65nm and OCs better

 

[Smartazz]

The oem 3600+ overclocks to 2.9GHZ in many cases. My Windsor doesn't come close to that.

 

[Civic2oo1x]

Go for the Brisbane if it's the 65w. It'll run cooler.

I went ahead and got the 4800+ myself, waiting for the UPS guy to drop off my new parts tomorrow. I figure I'll be set until the Phenom drops to a reasonable price sometime next year.

 

[Cybercraig]

At equal speeds a Toledo will beat a Brisbane due to increased latency in the L2 cache. I'm not sure about Windsor. I would go with the 65nm platform though. A little less voltage and less heat mean less enery used also. Plus, I think you get the new Virtualization Technology! Wow!

 

[DrMrLordX]

Windsor should be faster clock per clock, but only by a bit. Getting a cheap Windsor to run as fast as a Brisbane is a whole 'nother ball game. My 3600+ can hit 2.8 ghz on stock volts which is more than you'll probably get from a Windsor.

 

[magreen]

Isn't there some weird thing with the non-integer multipliers in the Brisbanes? The 3600+ has a 9.5 multiplier to run at 1.9GHz, right? I've heard that makes problems running your memory at the speed you want -- that it can't run DDR2 800 at stock speeds, only if you OC. Is that right? And how does that affect the OCing experience?

 

[DrMrLordX]

Brisbanes have lots of things weird at all multipliers. In short, it seems to downclock RAM when you use any kind of divider, and it will also occasionally downclock RAM using the 1:1 ratio at certain multipliers.

It doesn't really affect the OCing experience negatively unless your board has little HTT headroom. You can always run your memory at 1:1 with tight timings and crank the HTT if you're having problems properly balancing CPU speed with memory speed. However, you can usually hit a memory speed that's good for your current OC with a ratio like 3:4 or 2:3, and you can tweak the speed with your CPU multiplier and/or the HTT bus once you figure out how it all works. An X2-3600+ Brisbane seems to run your memory at x% of its projected speed, where x = 10 * CPU multiplier, unless you're using the 1:1 ratio, in which case you get the normal speed for your RAM usually . . . I think. Honestly I'd have to go back and do more testing to make sure about which multipliers work well at 1:1 and which still penalize you (and to what extent).