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Pentium 3 Vs. Athlon - Which Is Right For You?
CitizenC wrote to us with a cool review/overview of the Pentium III and the Athlon. If you've trying to decide what to get, give this a read-through.
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Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade... What's the big rush? My 8088 is doing just fine for me thank you so very much. My Jumpman scores have even been improving lately!
Pentium III 700: $373.
That's about all I have to say.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
AMD is the one I would go for... you can get the 133Mhz Mobo's with AGP 4x and a 600 Mhz K7 for 360! Now thats good price, and the memory is not going to cost you that much either!!
WHEN are they going to come out with the dual processor MOBO"s for the Athlon... thats going to be freaking awesome. I mean thats where hte EV6 should shine.
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
What do you people do on these machines to need that much power? the only things i can think of are servers (which i can understand) or Quake 3 or something. But I don't run servers on my desktop machine and don't play Quake.
I just find it crazy to have 1Ghz chips.
I can see people that could really use it,
but for the general public???
I still think PII 400's are fast as hell.
Is this what getting old is all about?
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Hey kevin congrats!
I'm down with Intel and all, but AMD is going to rape them. When i have the cash, i say a product switch is going to be called upon!
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
The real question is, will I be able to wait long enough to get a "Spitfire"...
:)
It's good to see a review mention "Price" early on. That's a big concern to me. My computer never costs more than $1,100, and I always try to get something better (at least twice as good every two years).
Oh yeah, and I'm buying a new system. But I'm pretty sure my current K6/300 setup wouldn't be able to handle an Athlon.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm using an athlon 700mhz, have been for a few months now, w/ a asus K7M motherboard. I've had absoutley zero problems with this machine under linux, and while not trying to sound like a zelot, nothing but problems under windows. With the pentinum III, I had constant problems under Linux with certian optimizations, yet windows ran perfectly. My geuss is this: It just depends on what your doing. I've got plenty of CPU to go around in the Linux world.. 1405.75 bogomips, woot. However, in Win2k, I noticed qutie offten that the processor useage meter is maxxed when I go to do a bunch of trivial things, like check e-mail, sit on irc, and play mp3's at the same time, however on my 450 pIII laptop, these tasks dont come CLOSE to using all the CPU, and considering in Linux, running X11/XMMS/Pine/Netscape, etc, all at once, my Athlon system reports as having aproximatley 97% CPU free at all times. Sooo... ultimatley, the decision is yours. Mine is this: pIII for Windows, Athlon for Linux.
--- 'dex
the Coppermine Xeon PIII's are exceptional aswell, and at a price point thats more realistic than the aged bretheren.
When I do upgrade my Mobo-Cpu's I am going with the Xeon PIII (750+). Right now I am running a dual system and couldn't go back to a single cpu (compiling is slow enough as it is).
When is AMD going to produce that promised Dual Setup anyway??
--
WHERE is the documentation on all these alleged Athlon incompatibilities? I keep hearing people say "the Athlon has some compatibility problems" but I have yet to see anyone back them it with specifics. If you're going to make this statement, let's see some facts.
How long will your P3 last? How long before Intel decides to change the packaging AGAIN? Got any failure rate comparisons between the two?
I was just spec'ing a new R&D machine this afternoon for heavy compiling. THis is exactly the article I wanted to see.
I'm addicted to dual-processors though, I really wish the Dual-Athlons were out.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
Athlon is faster than PIII at same clock speed.
Athlon is cheaper than PIII at same clock speed.
Is this really a contest?
Will the Dual Athlon motherboards require a special SMP Athlon chip or will they work with any Athlon on the market? I'd heard a rumor that the current Athlons have a pin disabled to keep them from doing SMP. Of course, my sources aren't particularly reliable...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Along with CDR TACO in the moderated ship,
We took a little flamebait and we took a little troll
And we watched the bloody battle of Athlon and Pentium 3.
P3 fired their guns and the Athlon kept a-coming
There wasn't nigh marketshare as there was a while ago.
P3 fired once more and they begin a overclockin',
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico
Ole Intel said we could take 'em by surprise
If we didn't fire our flames 'till we look 'em in the eyes.
We held our flops 'til we seen their floatpoint well
Then we opened up our new chips and really gave 'em, Well..
P3 fired their guns and the Athlon kept a-coming
There wasn't nigh marketshare as there was a while ago.
P3 fired once more and they begin a overclockin',
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico
They ran through the shareware and they ran through the compiles
And they ran through the internet where the haxors couldn't go.
They ran so fast that the RISC couldn't catch 'em
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
P3 fired their flames and the Athlon kept a-coming
There wasn't nigh marketshare as there was a while ago.
P3 fired once more and they begin a overclockin',
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico
P3 fired their flames 'til the chips melted down
Then we grabbed an XT and we fought another round.
They stuffed the troll with steamy grits and powdered his behind,
And when they shot the fire off the troller lost his mind.
P3 fired their flames and the Athlon kept a-coming
There wasn't nigh marketshare as there was a while ago.
P3 fired once more and they begin a overclockin',
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico
.
Take all good things in moderation, including moderation.
Just visit jeffk's site and see what he has to say about amd vs intel.
www.somethingawful.com/jeffk
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Processor speed has little to do with your boot time. Look rather at your BIOS (does it do a goofy memory check? have you enabled LBA, 32-bit disk access, multi-block.) Look at what device drivers are being loaded. Do they have timeout probes on various cards? Look at the harddrive health. Is it heavily fragmented? Is it a 10,000 RPM drive? Does it use some kind of translation that leads to pathological seeking? Does it have bad sectors that are automatically remapped causing more cross-drive seeking? How much ram does each system have?
:)
I mean let's get real here. My original Franklin ACE 1000 (Apple II+ clone) booted to Applesoft basic in less than 1 second. It would boot to DOS 3.3 (yeah the original DOS 3.3) in around 8 seconds. And it only had a 1.1-ish Mhz processor. Gosh your athlon must be really slow.
When is AMD going to produce that promised Dual Setup anyway??
Everything I heard varies from this summer to this winter, but it sounds like it's at least going to be -sometime- in 2K. My question is - will they debut their multiprocessor solution using Athlons or their new "Thunderbirds"?
Anyone heard anything?
The egcs man page mentions architecture-specific optimization is available up to the i486 (and, by extention, the am486). The man page being somewhat dated, I checked the egcs info page and found architecture-specific optimization listed for the i586 ("pentium") and for the i686 ("pentiumpro"). But I saw nothing for the K5, K6*, or K7/Athlon. Am I blind, is the documentation lacking, or does the compiler not include architecture-specific optimizations for post-486 AMD processors?
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
http://www.gtgi.com/products/sec urity/cryptcard.html The above link details a PC card solution, exactly which you are wondering about. The product page says: The logical protection provided by the CryptCard is based on the internationally standardized encryption algorithm, DES (Data Encryption Standard). The SuperCryptDES cipher engine used in the CryptCard can achieve speeds of up to 20 MB/sec., therefore exceeding the speed of the notebook PC's PCMCIA bus and hard disk, ensuring little or no performance degradation. Data encrypted with a CryptCard can be decrypted with other DES products or vice versa.
No sig is worth reading.
My earlier post..I noticed my link was broken...
oops.
Anyhow, jeffk at somethingawful.com has a full
review on amd vs. intel as well. Although not
as informative as most reviews...he definately
approaches the situation from a different angle.
That angle being one in a completely different dimension.
Judge for yourself...should jeffk be instituted?
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Processor companies keep cranking out faster and faster processors but its getting to the point where it'll start bottlenecking.
Yes RAM and storage devices are getting faster, but not at the same rate as processors.
Anyways, I'd buy an Athalon just because its that much cheaper for what you get.
Coming from a family of techies, we have gone through at least a dozen processors in six years. Over those years AMD has been our processor of choice (although we own Intel stock!). AMD has consistantly outpriced Intel, but until recently has always lagged behind Intel in their clock speeds. However, the new Althon chips and AMD's new marketing strategy may undermine Intel's dominance of the market.
True Story: At a computer show, the guy next to me instisted on buying a 400Mhz computer with an Intel ship, even though the price of the AMD computer was $100 cheaper. Why? Intel has managed to market themselves as the processor company. That little jingle Intel has advertisers play is highly recognizable. The fact of the matter is that the people who unwillingly use Microsoft products probably buy computers with Intel processors, simply because of Intel's marketing strategy. (no offense to people who use Microsoft products)
Recently, television commericals for DELL now feature AMD processors. AMD is catching on, now that their processor chips are faster and cheaper than Intels, they should probably start a much more aggresive advertising campaign.
I hope that AMD really become a competitor for Intel; because in the end, competition benifits us, the comsumer. We will wind up paying less for better chips, since the two companies must compete for our business.
BTW, I actaully own a PII-400 now, ending the "family" tradition of buying AMD processors, since I though Intel was going to jump ahead in processor speed. Boy was I wrong!
Why would you want to turn off you computer?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
PC100 or PC133? While it's really nice to have more bandwidth available, most people will never even tax a PC100 bus - it's 800MB/s! The determining factor for me is latency. The lower the latency, the less time the processor has to spend waiting. Latency is the reason why we have explicit parallelism and a half-dozen other methods to speed up the processor - predictive branching, etc. Lowering the latency has a direct benefit on system performance.
The next one is the HDD. How long must I wait to load a program? Having lots of memory helps, but the data has to come from somewhere - that somewhere is either the network or your harddrive. Fast harddrives mean less time spent waiting for files to load. Most people don't know that loading, say, IE5, under windows can load upwards of 50 files! If your track-to-track is 0.8 instead of 0.6.. you're gonna spend a few extra /seconds/ loading those files.
In short, the processor means nothing if you don't have the I/O up to snuff to keep it from idling.
Personally, I'd rather have a PIII but Intel has been sufferring with the whole RDRAM 820i chipset fiasco. Of course you can use the Via 133A chipset, which is a decent replacement but suffers from some memory bandwidth and AGP issues for some boards. Athlons are very fast especially if you like playing 3D games but you need a special device to overclock them. As a self proclaimed hard core gamer / overclocker I'd wait until the new Celerons come out. People whine about the 66MHz bus speed but I think it's a blessing. Multiplier of 9 x 66MHz bus = 600MHz. Multipler of 9 x 100MHz bus = 900MHz! All I gotta say is w00t! Plus Celeron IIs can run on the BX chipset so there's no need to get a new board for that Coppermine EB or Athlon. Another thing is I think Via announced that they are working on a chipset that supports DDR RAM which runs at 266MHz? (not quite sure). Until RDRAM becomes anything near reasonable (oh the price dropped! it's only 500 bucks! yay!) I'd stick with DDR RAM for any future system. But think about it this way. Who cares? 6 months later you're going to upgrade anyway. :P -chongus
-I'd rather spend 200 bucks on cooling equipment for overclocking than buy a faster chip. It's too easy!
A link, something, anything. What chipset? Any particular AGP version (1x, 2x, 4x)? Specific to certain video chipsets?
If the problems are known, and you know what htey are, you obviously gleaned that information from somewhere. Unless you're parroting what someone else told you they heard from their sister's boyfriend's cousin's father's 2nd wife's boss'grandson.
I guess you didn't read my sarcasm reply to myself.... :P
Gives you all the information you really want and none of that technical mumbo-jumbo.
They plan to keep the Cyrix brand alive.
Via is a kick-ass company. Everything they make works great and is dirt cheap.
Let's hope our president doesn't sell out Taiwan. The last thing we need is China bombing out their factories. Without Via, we'd probably be paying twice as much for motherboards.
the thing that makes the decision for me is Symmetric Multi Processing support, dual boxen are mutch more impressive :P
Now I just can't wait for spitfire. Then we get to see celeron2 vs spitfire.
While I wait,what do you guys think of this?
--Have a Johsonville brat.
> Athlon is faster than PIII at same clock speed.
> Athlon is cheaper than PIII at same clock speed.
But the PIII does get the same clock speed at the same clock speed!
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Athlon 700: $189.
Dual Cel 366 o/c to 550: $35 each = $70
Abit BP6 = $120
I'll stick with my dual system, thx.
We all know that the bestest AMD vs Intel review is JeffK's.
As far as I know, the AMD equivalents to Intel processors have compatible instruction sets. So a program on a K6-2 can be compiled with i586 optimizations. While I'm less sure about this, I also believe that something could be compiled on an Athlon with i686 optimization and work. Granted, it won't have 3DNow optimizations, but an i686 optimization doesn't have SSE either.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
You don't use electricity. Now, most of you don't care if your power bill is $10 higher each month, but for poor college students who share flats and electric bills, well it can be an issue.
No, Rain and waterfall don't count. the machine still pulls a respectable amount of juice (so do monitors in low power mode).
Also, powering down makes your machine invulnerable to van eck phreaking >:) and almost totally invincible to hacking (i say almost, because someone would inevitably say, "what if the hacker has nanorobots huh? didn't think of that didja?" well, i did think of it. :P )
are you joking? spitfire will beat CuPIII much less celeron2.
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
Blue Screen Of Death? It ain't your processor, buddy, it's your operating system.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
98% of boot time is determined by hard drive speed + system configuration. Booting your pc has very little to do with cpu cycles!!!
Given those two choices........I'll take death.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Within a month and a half, AMD will be shipping it's newest versions of the Athlon which include full speed on die cache. There will be spitfire which is the value version and thunderbird which is the performance version. From rumors that have been online recently the spitfire is being delayed until the thunderbird is ready. The reason is that spitfire is faster than current athlons, but it's the value version. Both are supposed to be released in June, but rumors are that it will be sooner. Much like when athlon beat katmai hands down, that will once again be the case once these are released. I'd recommend waiting two months and then buying a thunderbird. Paul Sundling
Dell has been the last holdout on using AMD chips; probably due to their cosy relationship with Intel. I havn't heard anything about them switching yet. Maybe you mean another mfg such as Compaq, Gateway, IBM etc. All of which are now using Athlon chips, and promoting that fact too!
All of the OEM's have been burnt by Intel recently by product shortages, bugs and low performence relative to the Athlon. Dell is the last holdout on using AMD processors.
Your post was great. I love satire. It did NOT deserve a score of 0. Does /. score posts with a perl script that generates a random number from -1 to 5? It sure seems that way sometimes.
As the subject says. Intel demoed 1GHz model (what's the deal with this magic number though?), but they can't actually produce them in quantity. In fact, Intel can't produce anything above 800MHz. (And even at 800MHz there are some serious supply issues).
AMD, OTOH, is able to produce 1GHz Athlons. You can even buy one (just check pricewatch.com), but it's pretty useless with its cache set to 1/3 the CPU speed...
I am waiting for Thunderbirds myself. They will have on-die cache (a la Celeron or the new P3). That will boost the speed a lot. Cache is the major bottleneck in Athlon. At 500MHz, Athlon wips P3's ass by like 40% margin, but this margin quickly evaporates as the clock speed is increased -- that is due to half-speed cache of Athlons (2/5 for 800+ and 1/3 for 1000MHz), compared to full-speed cache of P3.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
This is the first post that is SOMEWHAT on topic and it is called Redundant!
How many revisions has Linux gone through?
I'm guessing all of the Athlon advocates in here either
A. Got a pre-built Athlon, or
B. Installed brand name memory.
There's a nasty little secret that I've encountered with the Athlons. You see, the Athlons are really picky with their memory. My friend and I have tried identical memory (PC100, for the record) on an AMD K6-2 350 and an Athlon. It works fine on the K6-2, but it choked on the Athlon. (It booted up, but it crashed all too often) I put back in the memory it came with and the Athlon worked fine again.
He got run around until he found someone who told him what I'm telling you now. I've heard from another person since who has had the same experience. If you're building your own Athlon, or upgrading the memory on an existing one, go with the good stuff. (We ended up ordering the memory from Gateway. - Thus, I can't give any hints as to what to use.)
--Eric
While that's nice, an Athlon 700 it's not. The fact of the matter is that the Celerons have puny caches, and thus have a large number of faults, and they share a bus for hitting external cache so they often lock each other out. Thus when running anything that doesn't fit in cache, they spend most of their time locked and idle. I have a dual celery system, for fun, but the performance is barely equivalent to an Athlon of the same clock, let alone one of higher clock.
----------------------------
Oops... Well, I don't have the time to spare to keep reading posts, I mean, my time is much more important than yours. I am just waiting for Cyrix to make the Jalopeno IIIxXena Starfighter Chip that will blow away an AMD K6 200!!!
Mrreooow! Settle down, Beavis :) You can't expect to make an inflamatory comment about a product, mentioning no details or circumstances, and not get some nasty responses back. So, which "reliable name brand" were they, troll? Incidentally, I don't run Windoze much anymore for precisely the same reason you mention -- I want to get stuff done, which requires Real Software(tm) :)
Read my stuff.
Boot time? That's one of those Windows customs isn't it?
My other first post is car post.
The Spitfire chips will behave more or less like the first released Athlons, only a bit nicer on the cache and the heat. Meanwhile, the Celerons are still on a 66MHz bus, with no plans to upgrade. Intel is now looking at 733 and 766 MHz Celerons. This will be an insane bottleneck. We're looking at 11x and 11 1/2x clock multipliers. The Spitfires will run on a 133MHz motherboard (or 200, if that ever happens) and will be much nicer on the caching and RAM bandwidth. Sure, 766 is a fast chip, but on a Celeron, most of it will go to waste.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Your post was great. I love satire. It did NOT deserve a score of 0. Does /. score posts with a perl script that generates a random number from -1 to 5? It sure seems that way sometimes.
No, posts are scored by moderators, suposed by many to be actual humans. In any case the results are far better than a simple perl script could produce.
BTW, that post was posted by an AC, and automaticly starts at 0, duh
The Uber Nerd
...can be found in this article.
In regards to Pentium IIIE versus Athlon CPU--the CPU that you choose really depends the application you're running.
Most new games and multimedia applications usually take advantage of the SSE multimedia extensions on the PIII CPU, so if you're running a games like Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena, Flight Simulator 2000, etc. you want to get a PIIIE CPU.
An Athlon CPU is a good choice if your game or multimedia application takes advantage of the 3DNow! multimedia extensions of the Athlon CPU, or if you are running applications that need sheer FPU processing power (e.g., CAD/CAM programs).
It'll be very interesting to see what AMD does with the "Thunderbird" CPU due in about a month's time. If they can keep the Athlon CPU core and match it with CPU speed cache, then it will be one VERY fast CPU indeed.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
AMD's not having as much trouble as iNTEL producing their high-speed CPUs. Also, for all people that keep insisting that the Coppermine is better than an Athlon at the same clock speed: check out the benchmarks! All IMPORTANT apps (such as UT and Q3A) run much faster if the other hardware is the same (or in case of the mobo&chipset, comparable). So what if Word starts 1 nanosecond faster? You won't even notice it anyway. It's the sustainable framerate that matters.
I agree - some people always have to have the biggest, fastest, etc. Personally, I'm quite happy with my Pentium 233 (which I upgraded from a 90 about a year ago) and don't see myself getting anything faster for quite some time to come. But then I don't play games or run number crunching simulations that take hours (that's what the machines at work are for)... I think those generally fall into the category of "legitimate" uses for the latest and greatest hardware.
As for your penis mobile comment... the analogy works there too. Most people who have SUVs don't need them, but there are those like me, who do. Ever tried hauling around 5 people and 5 mountain bikes in a Tercel? I didn't think so... ;-) My 4Runner does nicely for that almost every weekend, and that's why I have it. Besides, I think sports cars are far more guilty of being "penis mobiles" than SUVs... Unfortunately, SUVs are fast becoming "soccer mom mobiles" instead. But now I'm veering a bit offtopic...
Say hello to zMac.
People don't seem to realize that the optimizing process is highly processor dependant. A program optimized for the PPro will not take full advantage of the Athlon.
A) It can't schedule instructions properly. P6 level chips have one FPU while the Athlon has three.
B) The Athlon can juggle many more instructions at a time, so scheduling again can't be optimized properly.
C) The internal microarchitecture (yikes!) is very different between the two chips. I doubt the same optimizations would work for both. For example, there are two types of x86 instructions to K7 and P6 level chips, direct path and vector path. (at least that's what the athlon calls them) Instructions which can get translated directly into one macro OP for consumption by the K7 RISC internals are called direct path, and intructions that need more steps and are translated into multiple macro ops are called vector path. Different sets of instructions take the two paths in the two different chips, so the compiler can't correctly optimize the code to include mostly the direct path instructions on the P6 without hurting the performance of the K7.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
*do NOT* buy a BP6 for a server. the BP6 has more problems than any other motherboard out there.
ABIT SUCKS...even though there have been good reviews..this board is bad bad bad.
want proof ?
here's some
lock ups
filesystem corruption
i've got 4 abit's and those are the last abit's im going to buy..all non overclocked with clean PSU's, 500Mhz celerons and APM off/ACPI off/noapic options and i get lockups with ALL OF THEM.
0? Huh? Just because the poster was Anonymous Coward? That so sucks. Anyway, I'm always registered and I never get above a score of 1. Let's see if this gets labeled OT as well.
Actually, I have a dual 400 on ABIT that has never locked up. The only problems I've ever had with it were related to trying to use it as a router for a while using diald. Killed it big time.
It's at Scottsdale. Incidentally, the reason why is the hostname is that's the replacement for the routing stuff. It's a lil ole P200 forwarding stuff back to where it needs to get.
The uptime would have been better, but for a 4 hour power outtage thanks to the power company. No real reason to plop massive UPS's in here since it's a backup site for the Real McCoy. The little BackUPS 500's are sufficient to keep uptime in the 6 - 9 month range.
My point: The Dual Celery has never locked up under normal circumstances.
Just shedding some light............
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
I have no need to have absolutely the fastest processor possible, but I'm probably going to replace my old Pentium 150 soon. The only reason it even occured to me to look at AMD chips instead of a PIII is the issue of the serial number/identification number built into the PIII.
I gather that Athlons present no such concern? Any thought or advice on this?
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
My Linux box is running on Athlon 700 for the past 3 months.
Havent rebooted yet. (never did a kernel upgrade until now)
Its fast.
--
If Microsoft is the solution, I want my problems back
Ok, things to do:
Did you install the right busmaster drivers, or any at all? Make sure you put the right ones on or you'll get wierd BSOD's.
Did you put crappy ram in? Get rid of it.
Did you use a 150watt power supply? Get a real power supply.
Did you install the proper agp miniport driver? Install it.
Official word is Q4. I wouldn't be surprised it they came out in late Q3 though.
I got the c366 for $35 from Access Micro back in Dec.
And of course the Athlon will outperform this config. I got the dual system because it was dirt cheap. SMP is very sweet. No more single cpu's for this programmer.
> *do NOT* buy a BP6 for a server
I agree.
I haven't had any problems with the bp6.
I checked www.bp6.com first to see what the issues were. I know there have been a few bad boards (my cousin went thru 2 of them!)
I needed a cheap SMP system for compiling at home, and it fit the bill perfectly.
ACK, you're right.
I got my set back in Dec. Who knew the price was going to go up?!
Hold it right there!
I have news for you. The SSE instruction set on the Pentium III CPU is quite a bit different than the 3DNow! instruction set on the Athlon CPU. If you write the app to take advantage of SSE it won't work on an Athlon CPU.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Do you need an SMP system? Then you have to get a PIII. Is 90% of your work done with an SSE-enabled, non 3DNow enabled app? Then you want to get a PIII. This probably adds up to less than 5% of the computer buying public, so the continued high prices and good marketshare of the PIII baffle me. Intel marketing, I guess.
At the moment the Athlon line is significantly (more than a hundred dollars, even including a more expensive high-end Athlon mobo) cheaper at all performance levels, and considering availability of GHz chips the Athlon line has the highest performance level.
Now Athlon vs. Celeron vs. K6II, that's where you've got a few good choices and want to consider your individual needs. Most people today would be happier with a K6II300 and a DSL connection than they would be with a PIII850 and a modem... but thanks to marketing, they don't realize it.
It was called Janitor Joe, but the filename was JUMPJOE.EXE . It was phun, but difficult on level 5. I, however, knew where the secret level was, and knew the godmode cheat. Armed with this and my bowl of trusty hot grits, I was able to finish the game and watch the cheesy but very entertaining ending sequence. Hurrah for old games!
I would just like to mention that you can have an Athlon on your desk in under a week, whereas many of the P3s (especially the higher mhz) are backordered until the next millenium.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
I don't understand the entire cpu based debate
After all, my celeron 366 is plenty fast, considering 96MB of ram, DSL, nice Sony monitor, and lack of anything even resembling a "win-modem".
People should:
(a) consider linux
or (b) build a well thought-out computer that meets their needs. ie: ram, disk, network, display
just my 1000,000000000 rubles.
my P200 is fast enough!
I Play Q3 all day with 20.fps!
So a new cpu is just wasted money!
I have contacts in AMD, and they claim it would be released in september or october if everything goes right... AMD Athlon rules, but I'll wait till they release athlons in socket A (for firebird or thunderbird CPU's).
Try Arachne. Its minimum requirements are an XT and CGA, though I'm sure it'll run atrociously on that.
Heh, big words for an Anonymous Script-kiddie. Why don't you go back to playing pokemon, neh?