Great Link for computer hardware info!

[bloom25]

 http://www.emulators.com/secrets.htm  http://www.emulators.com/pentium4.htm

You need  read his P4 article.  If you buy one after that, you've probably had a lobotomy without your consent.    This guy is smart, he programs his emulators in assembly, so he is uniquely qualified to evaluate processors.  The P4 article is extremely technical, but don't worry, you don't really have to be an Electrical Engineer to get the main points in his arguements.

The first link I posted also has some other good information.  The funny thing about this site is it's actually a business that makes Mac emulators for PC use.  (They claim that their emulators can run MacOS on a PC faster than a G4 can run MacOS.    Funny thing is that they are probably telling the truth. )

Among some of the items I noticed on his secrets page is a little part on why ATI drivers suck so bad.  (They do.)  He also explains the virtual memory bug that has plagued Windows 9x for 6 years now.

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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS

[Skuzzy]

Bloom25, I got an ATI Radeon 64MB DDR card for benchmarking purposes, and, while I have dealt with the ATI video driver problems for some time, I have to say they finally got it right for Windows 95/98 anyways.
All the bugs I had with the Rage line do not exist in the Radeon line.  Remember the "radio tear" problem in AH?  It is gone with the Radeon.  That's not to say the card is perfect.
I have found an obscure bug (feature?) where some video ram is not being released when a game exits.  I am not sure as to where this problem lies yet.  It could be driver, DX, or game related.
Someone here reported a prblem where they get a "DDHelp" error of some type.  I have not experienced this.  I am using the card with DX7 though and not DX8 until I get all the benchmarks done.
So far, I have tested the card with AH, Unreal Tournament, Quake2 and 3, Half-Life, Battlezone, Star Trek Armada, Star Trek New Wrolds, Star Wars Rebellion, Homeworld, Nascar III, and Freespace.
Some of the above games are quite old, but all have worked flawlessly.  I have been using resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x1024 for all the game play testing.
I am not fond of the FSAA in the Radeon though.  At 1600x1200, the board performs better without FSAA than at 800x600 with FSAA and the FSAA has problems when running without V-synch enabled (i.e. screen artifacts).
One area ATI really improved on was the use of the PnP monitor tables.  For instance, with the ATI Rage MAXX at 1024x768, the card would use a vertical rate of 68.8Khz and a horizontal rate of 85.4Hz.  With V-Synch on this yeilds a maximum frame rate of 85.

The Radeon, at 1024x768, using the same monitor, would set the vertical rate at 99Khz and the horizontal rate at 120.8Hz.  With V-Sync enabled this yeilds a maximum frame rate of 120.

The monitor I use for all my benchmarking is a NEC FP-950 19 inch.  The vertical and horizontal rates were gathered from the monitors on-screen diagnostics.

I really do not have any particular alliances with any video card maker.  I use ATI due to the support for the products in Linux as it is my primary operating system of choice, but for Windows, until the Radeon came along there were/are bugs that I always had to work around.  They finally got the 95/98 drivers right for the Radeon.

I will be doing work with the GeForce cards and will be able to give a more objective comparison.  Keep a look out for it on the BB.

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Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.net
skuzzy@applink.net

[Skuzzy]

After reading both those articales I have to say, I am not too impressed with the writing.

There appears to be an awful lot of subjective comments which were derived from a limited point of view.

The drop in stock prices for Intel and the computer manufacturers is very complicated and cannot be directly attributed to Intel's P4.
Also, the lack of sales by the computer companies cannot be directly attributed to the Intel P4.  Companies that use AMD processors also underwent poor sales and dropped stock prices.

I have never liked Intel and as an engineer I think they have some very poor designs, given the technology available to produce semi-conductors today, but the article about the P4 feels more emotionally derived than based on the facts.
If you are armed with information from the business community as a whole and extract the emotional proclamations, you can derive a proper conclusion from the article, but without the business information, I think the article is very misleading.

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Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.net
skuzzy@applink.net