Slashdot Mirror

I'd much rather believe Anandtech's benchmarks, but Tom's Hardware Guide finds completely different results.

Anandtech has the Athlon winning almost every category...and with the example of the Flask MPEG encoder, Anandtech has the Athlon smoking the P4 by a lot and Tom's has the P4 winning by a convincing margin...who is fudging data?

I don't have time to look into it right now so any analysis someone can provide is appreciated!

Here is the article from tomshardware.com entitled Intel beats AMD to 2GHz And here is another from sharky extreme.

An alternative would be to get yourself a really quiet fan.

Like the Silverado, which you can buy from this german company.

As you can read in this article on Tom's hardware, they are both VERY quiet and able to dissipate all the heat the Athlon generates. A bit expensive though.

1GHz Durons are not only just a small ramp in clockspeed from the 950MHz Duron, they are also based on the new 'Morgan' core, which is the budget version of the Palomino. Tomshardware already has benchmarks here, and he talks about the new technology involved in the new morgan core. Worth a read.

AMD's already underwater on profits. Intel just needs to hold AMD's head under while it floats just above breakeven, and AMD will drown. Flash won't save AMD (Intel makes flash too; they both do well at it) if Intel can make its performance targets on the P4 roadmap.

In a week the P4-2GHz will be out. They've already made noises about stepping to 6GHz in fab lines under construction, and someone let slip that they think the P4 design can reach 10GHz. P4 is going to be around for a very long time. AMD has nothing like that kind of roadmap; they have cute things like nForce or whatever it's called. They are broadening with no plan for going up.

AMD doesn't have the capital to keep up with Intel in a real footrace. They only grabbed market share because Intel made a strategic error in committing itself to RDRAM instead of making it just a high-high-end option. With the new 845 chipset (SDRAM now, DDR in the near future) and some flanking help by VIA (DDR chipset now) Intel is clearly back in the driver's seat.

You're right about how they "help keep Intel on their toes". AMD's actions are benefitting the consumer in a gigantic way. Prices are clearly moving to our benefit, and the technology choices (SDRAM, DDR-SDRAM, RDRAM, motherboards, overclocking) are multiplying. Intel is adopting all of these, giving AMD no niche it can dominate for any length of time.

At some point, AMD's pocketbook is going to have to give. Unless they can be bought by some giant (and it could be anyone from Tyco to Texas Instruments to Warren Buffett) they will be in debt with no net income.

--Blair

P.S. The CPU/chipset stuff should all be pretty fresh at www.tomshardware.com [thanks for repeating that].

The article mentions forthcoming price cuts by Intel. Here is some info on that, describing dollar values as well as the justification for it - the demo of the Pentium IV 2GHz.

I also have a question for those in the US. Can you buy single P4 chipsets without Rdram? When P4 came out here they only sold them with Rdram bundles, but now they actually sell P4s and their RDrams seperately. What they do is take out the Rdram that came in a P4 box and sell them seperately. I wonder if that's legal...

BTW, I am actually beginning to hate Intel. I never liked them since I have known about AMD and some of Intel's monopolisctic tactics but it gets very annonying to hear them sue or slander some other company or technology every week.

I know it's sort of meaningless to ask legal questions on /. but I'll ask anyway: Could I for example build a fan specificly designed for P4s without Intel's consent? Would I get sued? Just because Intel has filed patents?! I mean Via must have produced its own cpu interface for P4. Other than that, it's just the number and the layout of the CPU pins they are using. Intel's gonna sue Via because of this?!!? Can somebody explain?

Because they can't outperform Via. Thus... just like their partner, Rambus, counter attack with lawsuit. What a classic. Meanwhile, Via has a very strong case, too.

Some bits here and here at Anandtech, and there is another one at Hardware Central. Then, here and here at Tom's Hardware.

All says: Via Rocks, Intel sucks. I'll leave it to you to judge.

Because they can't outperform Via. Thus... just like their partner, Rambus, counter attack with lawsuit. What a classic. Meanwhile, Via has a very strong case, too.

Some bits here and here at Anandtech, and there is another one at Hardware Central. Then, here and here at Tom's Hardware.

All says: Via Rocks, Intel sucks. I'll leave it to you to judge.

Because they can't outperform Via. Thus... just like their partner, Rambus, counter attack with lawsuit. What a classic. Meanwhile, Via has a very strong case, too.

Some bits here and here at Anandtech, and there is another one at Hardware Central. Then, here and here at Tom's Hardware.

All says: Via Rocks, Intel sucks. I'll leave it to you to judge.

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/00q4/001208/g4 50-09.html

Pentium 4 has an absolutely pathetic floating point performance. Even Pentium 3 at 1000MHz outperforms Pentium 4 at 1500MHz on floating point. See here for example. Your claim that Pentium 4 can do 3 floating point operations per clock cycle is nothing more than pulling numbers out of your ass. (unless you can somehow substantiate your ridiculous claim).

The P4 looses to the Athlon simply by the reason that the compilers can not use the vector instructions properly.

AMD has never had code optimized for their CPUs. They have always fought an uphill battle. Yet they managed to beat the crap out of intel in absolute performance (price/performance they had for a long time). The whole compiler crap is a strawman's argument. AMD has 3Dnow instructions which nobody uses. If current software was optimized for AMD, P4 would look even more pathetic.

Why anyone would be an Itanium instead of a dual P4/Athlon beats me.

Uhhh, perhaps because there is no such thing as dual P4?

It has less on-chip cache than a Celeron (128kb total)!! Sure it's packaged with a lot of sram, but still.

I don't know how to break it to you, but 1) Celeron has exactly 128KB L2 cache, and 2) SRAM stands for Static RAM, which is used for cache (as opposed to Dynamic RAM, which is used for the main memory).

Please! Reviewing the new features of chips is a great thing, but for fuck's sake we all know about Tom's Hardware, AnandTech and Ars Technia, All of which have covered the P4 in extensive detail.

Tom's Hardware Guide or AnandTech

Sorry, but comparing a 1.1gig/200Mhz FSB Athlon to a 1.7gig P4 is laughable at best. What hardware review site uses a processor that's over a year old (Athlon 1.1gig/200FSB) in a comparison to one of the latest processors from the competition?

huh. pot-kettle. from the article:

Although it might have been useful to include a setting that lets you choose both drives, there is probably a good reason why NickLock only allows you to select between single drives or none. For one thing, only a few drives run as slave by default if no jumper mode is set. The majority of drives run in single or master mode by default, and if you use two of them, there is no way to assign the specific drives to master or slave, thus causing a conflict.

twerp.

What would have been really nice if you could switch between which hard drive is master and which is slave from this device. That would allow you to run both drives while still being able to select which you want to boot from.

As the article explains, they didn't include that feature due to the different jumper settings on different hard drives. It still would have been a great feature though!

When nVidia releases nForce, DDR will suddenly have a Dual Channel configuration witha 128-bit wide memory interface. That means that a nForce board with two banks of PC2100 DDR will have about 4.2GB of bandwidth with very low latencies.

Relevant THG Page

Of course this is all still theoretical, but if it turns out to be true, DDR will have a higher bandwidth and drastically lower latencies than RDRAM.

-Sokie

PC133 memory kills any performance advantage the P4 has. See Tom's Hardware for benchmarks.

Until they support DDR, there is no real alternative to Rambus for P4s. If you are spending money on an overpriced P4, you are wasting your money if you use PC133 SDRAM.

On the other hand, Athlons work rather nicely with DDR, and are a much better value.

Superior? Look at the benchmarks, man! RDRAM consistently falls short of DDR (or in some cases, _SDR_) SDRAM!

Just look at the benchmark results...

Superior? Look at the benchmarks, man! RDRAM consistently falls short of DDR (or in some cases, _SDR_) SDRAM!

Just look at the benchmark results...

Superior? Look at the benchmarks, man! RDRAM consistently falls short of DDR (or in some cases, _SDR_) SDRAM!

Just look at the benchmark results...

The comment from the submitter makes it seem as if this is something new and important. This is actually really old news. Intel's 845 (Brookdale) chipset, which supports regular SDRAM and DDR has been in the works and well known for a while now and even benchmarked. Intel is probably initially only releasing it in the SDRAM flavor because of exclusive contracts with Rambus Inc. It is expected that in less than a year the DDR version will be out. Intel publically stated they are less than pleased with Rambus Inc. a long time ago.

As another poster mentioned the performance of the P4 with SDRAM is terrible. This is because the P4 was designed for memory with high bandwidth such as Rambus RAM and DDR as opposed to regular SD RAM. Tom's Hardware, perhaps the foremost Rambus hater, has an article on the 845 chipset and its very poor performance with SDRAM. Ace's Harware also has a summary.

All and all Intel's relationship with Rambus and use of Rambus RAM has been very foolish. The P-III was not designed to take advantage of the high bandwidth of Rambus so the improvements versus SDRAM were limited and the price of Rambus made VIA's competing SDRAM chipsets and AMD's solutions much more attractive. Now that Intel finally has a chip (P4) for which it makes sense to use Rambus RAM, Intel is slowly moving toward abandoning Rambus probably in favor of DDR. Although, given how hated Rambus is among RAM makers and the continued superior price-performance of DDR RAM, Intel's moving away from Rambus makes a lot of sense.

The comment from the submitter makes it seem as if this is something new and important. This is actually really old news. Intel's 845 (Brookdale) chipset, which supports regular SDRAM and DDR has been in the works and well known for a while now and even benchmarked. Intel is probably initially only releasing it in the SDRAM flavor because of exclusive contracts with Rambus Inc. It is expected that in less than a year the DDR version will be out. Intel publically stated they are less than pleased with Rambus Inc. a long time ago.

As another poster mentioned the performance of the P4 with SDRAM is terrible. This is because the P4 was designed for memory with high bandwidth such as Rambus RAM and DDR as opposed to regular SD RAM. Tom's Hardware, perhaps the foremost Rambus hater, has an article on the 845 chipset and its very poor performance with SDRAM. Ace's Harware also has a summary.

All and all Intel's relationship with Rambus and use of Rambus RAM has been very foolish. The P-III was not designed to take advantage of the high bandwidth of Rambus so the improvements versus SDRAM were limited and the price of Rambus made VIA's competing SDRAM chipsets and AMD's solutions much more attractive. Now that Intel finally has a chip (P4) for which it makes sense to use Rambus RAM, Intel is slowly moving toward abandoning Rambus probably in favor of DDR. Although, given how hated Rambus is among RAM makers and the continued superior price-performance of DDR RAM, Intel's moving away from Rambus makes a lot of sense.

Nice that they put out a new platform (if you wnat to get a budget p4-system) but why didn't they try to get it right from the start? Using non ddr-memory with the p4 is lika asking for crappy perferformance. Toms hardware tested the paltform here and came to the same conlusion. Still, I think I'll stick to athlon.

Wromg, wrong, wrong. DDR-RAM IS NOT faster than rambus. check Anandtech or Tom's Hardware. They benchmarked and compared P4 and Athlon and came to the conclusion that P4 has much greater memory bandwidth than Athlon, an part of this speed is thanks to rambus memory.

If Athlon beats the hell out on P4 is thanks to the excelent job AMD did on the chip itself.

But the same benchmark shows an advantage of Intel chips in multimedia and memory bandwidth intensive aplications.

--

but at least the US government is keeping advanced video technology out of the hands of those evil Taiwanese companies!!
Tom's Hardware is in for heartbreak.

Tom did an article awhile back comparing 46 CPU coolers w/ an emphasis on noise level.

It seems Intel may have bet the farm on Marketecture...20 stage pipeline to reach multiple gigahertz speeds, double pumped ALUs that run at twice core clockspeed, a trace cache of recently decoded RISC "micro-ops", and SSE2, almost 200 new floating point SIMD instructions that are supposed to give incredible performance. Yet the Pentium 4 has trouble against a lower clocked Athlon in many many benchmarks.

Intel is the market leader, but they shouldn't let their marketing team design their chips!

First, let's get this clear that I really don't give a shit about whether AMD can get better FP performance than a Pentium IV, because I don't use CAD/CAM applications, and frankly, FP is NOT everything. With that said, I present the Quake III benchmarks. Notice, if you will, the page before it which contains the WebMark results for the respective chips, something else that is important to me.

Also notice this, which is the Pentium IV's superior performance in OpenGL, even under high-quality graphics modes.

AMD also tends to have notoriously unstable motherboard chipsets, as most hardware reviewers will tell you.

Now, I trust you will retract your statement that I am talking out my "a$$," as you so elegantly put it? Or are you going to keep trolling?

AMD recently claimed they would have 30% overall market share by the end of the year, their goal before launching their 64 bit processor. It seems they are on track to meet those expectations. With NVidia's chipset offering a low-cost affordable solution for low-end machines and the 760MP chipset offering us the world's first multiprocessor AMD platform, they are putting themselves in a position to have real sway in the coming 64 bit desktop revolution.

Mind you SIS is new to the socket A scene so may still have bugs.

If you want server grade stablity and why not get the Tyan Thunder K7 board since is designed for servers and holds dual athlons.

1) Install Slash
2) Fill it with good content

For example... http://www.tomshardware.com

(of which I have no affiliation to this excellent site)

Glorat
http://www.glorat.net

Tom's Hardware talks about the Promise IDE RAID controller here...

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/00q1/000329/

Lately, I've seen mailing list chatter to the effect that academic environments are starting to use IDE RAID in their servers, i.e. those poor bastards are always underfunded. Most of them seem happy, but I don't recall which products they mentioned.

One thing for sure, the price can't be beat.

The review including the benchmarks on Tom's Hardware are detailed, of course, but what we really want to know is:

what if we benchmarked a Beo... well, never mind.

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

I didn't have much luck with the original link.

here's another one that seems to work better.

High bandwidth HyperTransport interface as connection to the IGP. Dual ATA100 IDE controller NVIDIA APU (Audio Processing Unit) sound device with a huge feature set, including Dolby Digital encoding for AC3-output. Full networking feature set, including FastEthernet 100/10 Mbit, HomePNA 2.0 (home phone line networking) and SoftModem Six concurrent USB-ports with 2 USB-hubs SteamThru, allowing high bandwidth and guaranteed real time memory access of all devices connected to the MCP, as typically required by video or audio broadcasting from disk, CD, DVD, LAN, WAN, IEEE1394 or when burning a CDROM.

to address part of your question about directx, directly here is a link to the page about the audio processing unit.

Hardware DirectX8 audio processor (the first of its kind) Up to 256 different stereo voices, of which 192 are 2D-voices and 64 are 3D-voices Dolby Digital 5.1 Encoder DSL2-acceleration (Downloadable Sample Version 2) 32 bin mixer, with 8 voice volumes mixed to each bin (to get to 256)

As it appears that this chipset is an outgrowth of the Xbox development I can imagine that integration with directx* will be pretty much a given.

As far as earlier comments about drivers go, this second article mentions that "A motherboard with nForce chipset will be installed with ONE driver"

Obviously this type of chipset won't appeal to everyone, but hey for me it sounds great. No more Nic, audio card, graphics card etc to buy. The only thing they missed was integrating 128 MB or system RAM into the mix..

High bandwidth HyperTransport interface as connection to the IGP. Dual ATA100 IDE controller NVIDIA APU (Audio Processing Unit) sound device with a huge feature set, including Dolby Digital encoding for AC3-output. Full networking feature set, including FastEthernet 100/10 Mbit, HomePNA 2.0 (home phone line networking) and SoftModem Six concurrent USB-ports with 2 USB-hubs SteamThru, allowing high bandwidth and guaranteed real time memory access of all devices connected to the MCP, as typically required by video or audio broadcasting from disk, CD, DVD, LAN, WAN, IEEE1394 or when burning a CDROM.

to address part of your question about directx, directly here is a link to the page about the audio processing unit.

Hardware DirectX8 audio processor (the first of its kind) Up to 256 different stereo voices, of which 192 are 2D-voices and 64 are 3D-voices Dolby Digital 5.1 Encoder DSL2-acceleration (Downloadable Sample Version 2) 32 bin mixer, with 8 voice volumes mixed to each bin (to get to 256)

As it appears that this chipset is an outgrowth of the Xbox development I can imagine that integration with directx* will be pretty much a given.

As far as earlier comments about drivers go, this second article mentions that "A motherboard with nForce chipset will be installed with ONE driver"

Obviously this type of chipset won't appeal to everyone, but hey for me it sounds great. No more Nic, audio card, graphics card etc to buy. The only thing they missed was integrating 128 MB or system RAM into the mix..

High bandwidth HyperTransport interface as connection to the IGP. Dual ATA100 IDE controller NVIDIA APU (Audio Processing Unit) sound device with a huge feature set, including Dolby Digital encoding for AC3-output. Full networking feature set, including FastEthernet 100/10 Mbit, HomePNA 2.0 (home phone line networking) and SoftModem Six concurrent USB-ports with 2 USB-hubs SteamThru, allowing high bandwidth and guaranteed real time memory access of all devices connected to the MCP, as typically required by video or audio broadcasting from disk, CD, DVD, LAN, WAN, IEEE1394 or when burning a CDROM.

to address part of your question about directx, directly here is a link to the page about the audio processing unit.

Hardware DirectX8 audio processor (the first of its kind) Up to 256 different stereo voices, of which 192 are 2D-voices and 64 are 3D-voices Dolby Digital 5.1 Encoder DSL2-acceleration (Downloadable Sample Version 2) 32 bin mixer, with 8 voice volumes mixed to each bin (to get to 256)

As it appears that this chipset is an outgrowth of the Xbox development I can imagine that integration with directx* will be pretty much a given.

As far as earlier comments about drivers go, this second article mentions that "A motherboard with nForce chipset will be installed with ONE driver"

Obviously this type of chipset won't appeal to everyone, but hey for me it sounds great. No more Nic, audio card, graphics card etc to buy. The only thing they missed was integrating 128 MB or system RAM into the mix..

While this looks like an interesting development, it looks like nVidia is trying to play both sides of the battle. The top graphics article on Tom's Hardware, here at http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q2/010511/i ndex.html, discusses the next nVidia driver release, which focuses entirely on Pentium 4 optimizations to the nVidia drivers. I would decalre an all-out war yet, guys. ;-)

Tom's Hardware had a review of Asetek's VapoChill. I know you aren't trying to overclock your computer but allegedly it only generates ~35db of noise and will cool the inside of the case as well.

The downside is that it costs around $750.00 for the case and there aren't that many drive slots.

A Home-Grown Water Cooler for 115 Dollars

Toms Hardware has the only (as far as my knowledge goes) CPU cooler review with objective noise data. Unfortunately the (there mentioned) 'Silverado' isn't available in The Netherlands :-(

Probably because this is an early prototype that needs some optimizations.

Sometimes I read Tom's Hardware for news on processors and stuff, and according to their benchmarks Athlon is faster for somethings (like integers and floating point when using it's internal x87 unit) while P4 is faster for other things (multimedia and floating point when using it's brand new SSE unit).

And yes, clock by clock P3 can be faster than P4 in some benchmarks.

• Sharky Extreme's video card review list
• Graphics Guide on Tom's Hardware
• AnandTech list of reviewed video cards
• ArsTechnica list of reviewed video cards

A few years ago I was swapping hardware between an NT and a FreeBSD box, and I that was when I saw a first-hand comparison of the TNT2 and Xpert 98. Now in terms of 3D performance, the Xpert 98 can't touch the TNT2, but when I swapped cards and put the TNT2 in the FreeBSD box, I had to turn the monitor brightness up a whole lot to see the screen clearly. Conversely, I had to turn the brightness down on the NT box to keep from blinding myself. The TNT2 was dark and mushy on the desktop. Now that I have the GeForce, I wish I still had the Xpert98 for comparison.

--

From http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q2/010514/palomi no-09.html:

"AMD chose two notebook chipsets for Mobile Athlon 4 and Mobile Duron. It's ALi's MaGiK1 and VIA's KT133A chipset. The MAGiK1 is able to run with PC100/133 SDRAM as well as PC1600/2100 DDR SDRAM, but so far we weren't too convinced of its performance in desktop systems. VIA's KT133A is a good performer, but it does not come with DDR-SDRAM support."

Because of supposed performance problems no vendors have announced any laptops w/ ALi's chipset, so at this point in time the mobile Athlon, which is certainly *my* choice of a dream portable processor, is not being offered with DDR.

I really wish today we were seeing a mobile AMD 760 or SiS 735 DDR PC-2100 solution, but these chipsets do not have mobile versions.

Ideally we would be ogling the Athlon 4 on the nVidia "Crush" chipset. As I recall, Crush uses a 128 bit memory bus to DDR memory that allows for a hideous amount of low-latency bandwidth, something like 3.6 GB per second.

But I digress, it is enough to have a mobile Athlon solution that absolutely wipes the floor with anything offered by their x86 competitor. :) Good for AMD, today is another proud day for them. :)

And I am sorry if anyone misread my initial comment, DDR compatibility is a function of the chipset, not the processor. Hopefully with the other two explanations I have posted here this has been clarified for one and all. I am off to bed, this was a bitch of a day. ;)

Ace's Hardware has a nice summary and set of links for the Athlon 4.

Unfortunately Sharkyextreme and HardOCP do not have reviews of the chip up for comparison yet.

Tom's does have a review up.

It is now at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-2001 0510.html

There is also another article with decent info here

They also have updated info on the specs on the front page.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

It is now at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-2001 0510.html

There is also another article with decent info here

They also have updated info on the specs on the front page.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-2001 0510.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-2001 0510.html