by ErMaC » Tue Oct 14, 2003 5:49 pm
DW, good to see you set these young whippersnappers straight on how CPUs really work, I looked back in the thread and was just shaking my head.
However, as much as I like AMD as a company and I like the Athlon design philosophy over the P4's, I still bought a P4 this summer, t oreplace my 3 year old dual P3 machine. I've refused to buy an Athlon for all this time, and I still recommend Intel machines to anyone who's in the market to buy one. Unfortunately for AMD, the reason I do so isn't directly their fault.
I can't speak for nForce2 boards, because I have very little experience with them, but from my experiences over the last four years since the Athlon came out, their chipsets SUCK. They're unstable, flakey, have incompatability issues, and usually don't have as many features as their Intel counterparts (the glaring exception being the 820 chipset/RDRAM fiasco). Over the last two years two of my three roommates have built Athlon systems, only to run into crashing problems, IRQ conflicts (between onboard components, no less), and compatability problems. One's already moved back over to Intel, the other just this week finally gave up and I suspect will be buying an Intel system soon.
The problem here lies not necessarily with AMD, but with the chipset manufacturers that make Athlon chipsets - VIA, SiS, and to some extent nVidia, although they have historically played such a minor role. The only VIA board I've ever been truly happy with was my VP6, which still gave me stability issues every now and then. SiS chipsets have been historically poor performers, and while recently they've made up for that somewhat I've still never been happy with their stability. Plus the fact that most SiS boards fall into the "budget" category, and you can see my reluctance to buy one.
Intel, by contrast, has, with only one exception, always made excellent chipsets. The BX chipset was godlike for a good year and a half, holding its own against VIA's newer P3 chipsets for quite a long time. The 845 chipset lasted a similar length of time, and now the 865 and 875 chipsets are performing really well, well enough I decided to get an 865 board for myself (got an Abit IS7 and I'm very happy with it).
The best thing is my new computer just doesn't crash. I've maybe had it reboot 3 times on my that I can count in the last 4 months that I've had the machine. That's more than I can say for any Athlon motherboard I've ever used.
So now I'm running a 2.4GHz P4 clock to around 2.6-something, with the super quiet Zalman cooler, a superquiet case w/bigass low RPM fan, and the loudest thing in my case is the hard drives - and I couldn't be happier.
For the hardcore computer builder, AMD might be the right choice. You may find the right board, the right RAM, and get a really nice overclock, all for less than you could with a comparably Intel system. But I've outgrown all that by this point I think. My new computer was built on a completely different design philosophy. I built my old computer to be FAST, to get the most FPS in Quake2, the fastest encoding speed in DivX, and the most expandability. My new computer is about being quiet, cool, and stable. The fires of youth flickering out, I suppose. I've traded in my sportster for a nice dependable Honda or something.
So to anyone who doesn't want to deal with the challenge of Athlon Motherboards, I recommend Intel, despite performance and marketing reasons.