On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 06:28:35PM -0800, Elvedin T. wrote: > Athlons XP and MPs perform well for their price, "more > bang for your buck." I don't know too much about the > chipset idea, but the main problem I see with the > Athlons is the heat problem. If you don't have good > heatsinks on the processors, they become quite > unstable and if you just had the stock heatsinks, you > wont have those processors for long. The stock > (aluminum) processors cannot dissipate heat well > enough for the Athlons, so if you don't have a good > heatsink, you'll become a victim of thermal death. I > suggest one of those copper Alpha PAL heatsinks. They > are a bit expensive, loud, but they do their job well. > Another thing, after the processor gets hotter than > 150F, it will become quite unstable and you will see > many software problems. There are no issuses with the > MP CPUs/chipsets for various OSs, that I know of, so > it shouldn't be a problem there. I still haven't found a 'safe' upper limit for the Athlon XP temperatures, the technical documentation at AMD's site claims 90C = OK 95C = Bye bye CPU, which I would tend to think is a bit wrong =) My system (with AMD's 'retail' cpu fan) sits around 119F with no real load, playing games such as ut2k3, or quake3 bump that up to around 140F (which seems to remain stable -- if it doesn't go higher) I have scraped off the stupid pink 'grease' that used some (suprisingly) good silicone based grease from best buy (I needed it quickly =) > > But an Athlon for a "top of the line" system? Thats > not quite so. If you want a top of the line system, > get a Pentium 4 (Northwood) 2.8GHz core, 533MHz CPU. > Those support the 1066MHz RAMBUS, which has quite a > bit of I/O, although its slow. I would disagree, I recently installed a 2.4ghz/533mhz bus system that a friend had purchased and it really isn't noticable, even with rather intensive projects (using 'neato' to generate 15,000 node maps) Intel figured out that people buy hz, not speed, longer pipelines means they can bump up the hz to insane levels with no real performance increase. Ever compared a PIII to a P4 with a similar mhz rating? The PIII will beat the P4 every time. It's simply not worth the money to purchase a product that's being designed from the ground up to be marketed to the people who purchase for hz rating, instead of performance. Especially considering the P4 2.8Ghz/533mhz is no less than $449, and the Athlon MP 2200 is $209 For the price of a dual processor P4 2.8Ghz system you can get *two* dual processor Athlon MP systems.. do the math. > > Still, I would recommend a Athlon XP system (with a > good HSF) over a Pentium 4, just because they are > significantly cheaper. Exactly. -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203