PIII or Athlon?

[Rocket]

In building my new system I am looking at the same problem.  If I go athlon what is the best mobo to get?
I need something with some space on it and a great board.
If I go PIII the Asus P3V4X is the only board I am considering but I am clueless to a good athlon board with the expansion space.

S!
Rocket

[lasse]

I also was a diehard Intel fan, up to now  

But with my last computer I got myself a AMD Thunderbird 1000MHZ alias 1GHZ  
(I build these things on an everyday basis)

It is foolproof, AMD thunderbird and a Motherboard with a VIA KT133 chipset, it works outstanding, and with my ASUS GeForce 2(AGPx4) I got one lean mean playing machine  

I have not had a single problem since I got it, so therefore I aint afraid to reccomend that setup.

But as AKDejaVu says, make shure you get the right powersupply.

I know that price was not an issue here, but the AMD is way cheaper too.

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The Wild Vikings
Commanding Officer
lasse-

[This message has been edited by lasse (edited 08-24-2000).]

[bloom25]

I would buy neither.    Intel has a new processor coming out later this year.  I've heard it will use a 462 pin socket, making it totally incompatible with previous processor types.  I just hope Intel finally wises up and drops that terrible RDRAM they have been promoting.  Pay more than twice as much for it, and it's actually worse than 133Mhz SDRAM in nearly every single benchmark I've yet seen.

As for the Duron, that's actually kind of like a Celeron is to a PIII.  The Duron runs at a lower FSB and only has 64Kb of on-die cache.

If I HAD to buy a processor right now, I'd probably go with a fast Athlon Thunderbird, since consumers can't yet buy the really fast PIIIs.  (I think 850 Mhz is the max you can get retail.)  I'm considering it myself right now...



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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS

[Snoopi]

After having built both a AMD Athlon and Intel PIII box, and testing them with my friends. (many different games and benchmarks & pro 3d software)
I would buy the AMD.

Main difference is you are not paying for th name. Otherwise you are splitting hairs.

I'm a person who doesn't fall for the "name brand is always better" idea.
I evaluate each on it's own real merits.

It kinda dumb to say "All Fords are better"  

As for prices dropping....
The best time to buy a new cpu is when the next generation is coming out. Let the guys with too much cash get ripped off buying the newest/greatest/outdated-next-month model.

Regards,
Snoopi

[Dinger]

Right about the duron, except:
FSB is the same as the T-bird; they just sell Durons at lower multipliers than the Thunderchicken.
Celeron's larger L2 cache mirrors the contents of the L1 cache, Duron's does not, so in essence those 64 k of L2 count more.
Duron has a lower voltage than the T-bird (1.5 to 1.7 and 1.75 for the 1-ghz), and the max voltage easily attainable for a Socket A Athlon is 1.85 (read: you've got more headroom for overclocking it).

[bloom25]

I just read an article about someone getting a Duron 700 stable at 998 Mhz on an Asus A7V with no problem at all.  The Duron provides the best performance per dollar of ANY CPU EVER MADE!  AH should run at incredible speeds because of the K7 series powerful Floating Point unit.  (133 percent better than the Coppermine.)

P.S. You know that AMD's next gen processor has the codename "Mustang."  



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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS