AMD's vs Pentiums
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Just about to order my first upgrade in 3 years, and since the AMD's are so cheap I'm going to go for one of them. Before I sign my life away, has anyone any words of wisdom about these chips? On a general note I was kind of wondering what hardware setup you guys and girls are using. Is everyone running the latest 1.5GHz beasts and I'm simply a fashion victim, or are people still holding onto their old PII and PIII's? cheers, Chris Maunder
Hi Chris. I have a Duron 800@900 since 4 month and I am still quite impressed how fast the system is. The motherboard is a ABIT KT7 Raid, so I have attached two IBM DTLA307030 as a RAID-0 strip set and -- what should I say -- it rocks. Memory is 512 MB PC133CL2 (one month ago it was cheap enough to catch it). Coding is so much fun by now, even with VS.Net. I have never seen a system booting so fast since MS-DOS 5.1 :-D So long, Thomas
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A few things to keep in mind about AMD's: The chipsets aren't currently supported natively by any shipping MS OS, thus you have to install third party drivers. I haven't had any experience with the ALI Magik chipset, but the VIA chipsets have been nightmares for me trying to configure them to work correctly. Once you get them to work, they're nice, but man.. expect days of downtime unless you're planning on buying a preconfigured system. Example: Installing Windows 98 SE on an IWill KK266, Windows didn't detect the PCI bus, which caused the VIA 4-in-1 drivers to abort with a "registry error" so you couldn't install the drivers to have it recognize the hardware (such as your CD-ROM on a secondary controller). I finally figured out that the PCI bus was missing and manually added it, suddenly it started finding all the PCI hardware, then when installing the drivers, they finally worked. Enabling DMA on my Ultra-100 drives caused Windows to crash on boot up though, still haven't solved that problem. The Intel drivers seem to be a lot better than the VIA ones in general.
Yeah. I've got a VIA intelbased chipset (Apollo Pro 133A) and the 4 in 1 caused all sorts of problems. My recommendation is to only install the AGP and bus mastering drivers. (unless you've got obvious IRQ or USB problems). Cheers, Peter Pearson
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I have a 700 MHz Athlon, 256 MB RAM, 45 GB hdd... Works just as well as a comparable Intel system that I have. Jon Sagara "When I was fourteen, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the past seven years." -- Mark Twain
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Just about to order my first upgrade in 3 years, and since the AMD's are so cheap I'm going to go for one of them. Before I sign my life away, has anyone any words of wisdom about these chips? On a general note I was kind of wondering what hardware setup you guys and girls are using. Is everyone running the latest 1.5GHz beasts and I'm simply a fashion victim, or are people still holding onto their old PII and PIII's? cheers, Chris Maunder
I still use my good 'ol PIII 600, with 256 MB Ram, and 3 SCSI HHD's (2 of them in a RAID 0 :-)) I put a good monitor and fast HDD's higher than the processor... (I have a 19" Eizo) - Anders
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I have a 700 MHz Athlon, 256 MB RAM, 45 GB hdd... Works just as well as a comparable Intel system that I have. Jon Sagara "When I was fourteen, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the past seven years." -- Mark Twain
Installation was simple? cheers, Chris Maunder
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Just about to order my first upgrade in 3 years, and since the AMD's are so cheap I'm going to go for one of them. Before I sign my life away, has anyone any words of wisdom about these chips? On a general note I was kind of wondering what hardware setup you guys and girls are using. Is everyone running the latest 1.5GHz beasts and I'm simply a fashion victim, or are people still holding onto their old PII and PIII's? cheers, Chris Maunder
Thanks everyone. I'm now a little wiser and a little more careful. I'll go the AMD Duron and cross my fingers. cheers, Chris Maunder
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I still use my good 'ol PIII 600, with 256 MB Ram, and 3 SCSI HHD's (2 of them in a RAID 0 :-)) I put a good monitor and fast HDD's higher than the processor... (I have a 19" Eizo) - Anders
Absolutely! For my own use, I always buy the cheapest cpu configuration I can find, and spend the money I save on a really nice monitor. If most of what you do is programming,it is stupid to buy a 1.5 ghz machine with a small monitor and waste all your time dragging things into view. I have a 21 inch monitor set to the highest possible resolution, when I need to see something - its there, I do not have to hunt for it.
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Absolutely! For my own use, I always buy the cheapest cpu configuration I can find, and spend the money I save on a really nice monitor. If most of what you do is programming,it is stupid to buy a 1.5 ghz machine with a small monitor and waste all your time dragging things into view. I have a 21 inch monitor set to the highest possible resolution, when I need to see something - its there, I do not have to hunt for it.
I agree with you. I just want to add, that IMHO you have to choose your monitor carefully, because it is a long-term investment and undergoes two or three CPU/mainboard generations. It it that periphery you are always face-to-face, and if it is a bad one, your day will end up with headaches. So choose a good monitor, and your eyes will thank you :-D Best regards, Thomas
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Installation was simple? cheers, Chris Maunder
It went off without a hitch. Good luck! Jon Sagara "When I was fourteen, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the past seven years." -- Mark Twain
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Are there ? VC works fine for me, you're saying it would be faster ? Christian The content of this post is not necessarily the opinion of my yadda yadda yadda. To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion.
I'm a rookie here, but I thought you could compile applications with intel optimizations. My experience level is low enough those optimizations don't mean anything to me yet, but I thought they might in the future. Scott! Put the big rocks in the glass jar first!
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Just about to order my first upgrade in 3 years, and since the AMD's are so cheap I'm going to go for one of them. Before I sign my life away, has anyone any words of wisdom about these chips? On a general note I was kind of wondering what hardware setup you guys and girls are using. Is everyone running the latest 1.5GHz beasts and I'm simply a fashion victim, or are people still holding onto their old PII and PIII's? cheers, Chris Maunder
My first ever PC was a 486 dx which was AMD based. It worked like a dream. My second PC was a K6 200 which was absolutely amazing and the system I've got at the moment is a Athlon 950 which runs like a dream. Also me dads got a K6-2 500 which keeps him running nicely. They are absolutely amazing processors. I have nothing against Intel. I just think AMD do a better job of things and they offer a lot more value for money. I wana upgrade soon as well but I wana wait till the multi processor stuff comes out. Spose to be end of second quarter. Lets hope so. AMD multiprocessing on a alpha arcitecture NICE!!!!!!!! Darren Programming is the art that fights back