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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
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
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?
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!?
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.
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
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