Bloom, my AMD 900 TBird / ABit KT7 was a snap to build. I've built both Intel and AMD systems completely from scratch and there was no difference in difficulty between them by my experience. The AMD fired up first try - as did the Intel.
A few points about the ABit motherboards...
They are more friendly for overclocking with finer voltage and clock settings to allow very fine tweaking. All of that is set up in BIOS without having to crack the case whenever you decide to eek it up just a little more.
My ABit also has more slots than the comparable ASUS and I didn't have to pay for the network riser crud, an on-board Winmodem, or an onboard sound chip that I wouldn't use anyway.
I think the ASUS is just ever so slightly faster than the ABit though I'm not sure how they stack with the KX133A chipsets (mine is KX133).
But right now, everything really does point to AMD as the superior performer and way better in price/performance ratio. It isn't much faster than the Intel chips but it is faster nonetheless.
I don't know what Intel was thinking with their price plan other than that people won't try AMD because it is different than Intel. I was tempted to go Intel P3 on this system, but after doing a lot of research and looking at how well the AMDs were regarded, it was a no-brainer. I don't regret it at all and if I were building another system right now, hands-down it would be AMD TBird powered (most likely the 1 gig) and the ABit KT7a m/b.
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Rape, pillage, then burn...
