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The AMD Duron Gets A Home - Sort Of
Techman writes "AnandTech has put together an in-depth analysis of the SiS 730S chipset for AMD's Socket-A platform. What's so special about this 730S? Well, it turns out that one of the reasons that AMD's Duron hasn't been selling well in retail markets is that it doesn't have a cheap platform to run on. The 730S from SiS is an attempt to solve that problem. Unfortunately as it is SiS' first attempt at an Athlon chipset, the 730S does not perform as well as you would hope it would. And in many cases, the Duron loses its luster when combined with the 730S."
Intel originally wanted to call their processor the Hardon, except in French. Unfortunately, the word celer in French means "to hide" making the processor the Hide-on, not the Hardon.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
At the time I bought my K6-II, it was as cheap as (lower clock speed) Celerons with similar FPU performance, and it blew away anything in it's price class for integer performance. Of course, Celerons got cheaper, and gamers stopped buying K6II chips, but they were always good for business apps. If you didn't need the highest Quake II framerate, and didn't want to upgrade the system later, you were set.
"Bad", of course, comes in when you try and stick a real AGP card in that AGP-shaped slot on most Super7 motherboards. Turns out they provided enough power through that slot for my Millenium II, but not nearly enough for even a Voodoo 3, let alone the GeForce I bought last summer. Feeling the undersized power transistors become excruciatingly hot was not encouraging. Having the computer crash, in Windows and Linux, after a few minutes use, was less encouraging. Having to upgrade my motherboard, processor, and case months before I'd intended to, to use a video card that was supposed to work in the original system, sucked.
I went to a Duron after checking out compatibility issues, BTW.
The original Athlon itself got a mostly-undeserved bad rep for this reason; there were a some early motherboards that had the same half-assed AGP compatibility problems.
Well, if that's the problem, customers should order Duron Ultra Deluxe High Gloss rather than the flat eggshell variety!
sulli
RTFJ.
The componentization of the PC industry and the economies of scale means that nobody makes cases anymore, nobody makes chassis anymore, nobody makes PC boards anymore and nobody makes anything distinguishable from the other guy anymore. Seems all you can do is buy cheap and assemble cheaper to sell on price alone.
:-)
That leads to an industry that's got zero interest in innovation and zero responsiveness to change.
If you can't convince a chassis maker, who's got a thousand mom-and-pop sweat-shop box builders besides you (so he couldn't care less about you or your idea,) that you need something different and it would behove him to make it, you're going to buy off the rack the same as everybody else and slit your own throat on price alone since you can't come up with anything different, never mind better.
The same goes for the PC board makers, the case makers, the component makers.
You don't stand a chance if your pin-outs aren't 100% compatible.
You don't stand a chance if your instruction set isn't 100% compatible.
You don't stand a chance of you cabling isn't 100% compatible (What the [expletive deleted] is the deal with these parallel/serial port "USB cable" kludges. Apple had the balls to make a port for it on their iMacs.)
This industry has [expletive deleted] itself to death. You the consumer have squat-all input in the process or the product because, even if you were willing to pay more, the people who want you to by only to sell you the same boxes as everybody else.
Face it. The reason Apple's designs look different is that the Mac buyers are paying what good design costs. I don't see a cool looking ultra quiet Cube on my office desktop anytime soon because my boss cares more about bucks than about me. But my den would make you drool.
Apart from Apple, computers have become so boring, you want them to be invisible, except that they aren't and you rip your knuckles open installing anything. Used to be the desktop was where you worked, now its the space occupied by the monitor and the beige box. There's no room left to work.
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...a full Athlon does not cost that much more. I think one problem of competing for low end business is that AMDs lowest end processor is being priced out of the market.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Also remember that SiS is the company that can't seem to make standardized video cards/video chipsets. e-machines is a huge customer of SiS (as was their parent company, TriGem America; back in 1997 they sold my school about 15 Pentium 166 computers with 16MB of RAM and a SiS integrated video chipset that stole 2MB of the system RAM for itself; fortunately, Windows 95 could run just fine on 8MB, let alone 14).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Durons are just the amd version of the celeron so it doesn't matter much anyway most geeks would buy the athlon anyway.
This Duron + SiS 730S platform isn't aimed at geeks, it's aimed at the goddamn-cheap market, the people who flog crappy PCs at low prices via full-page ads in the newspaper with lots of exclamation marks!! I think it has a lot of potential there - Anand says the 730S will cost $6 more in bulk than the Intel 810E, but that's no great hardship given that low-end Duron CPUs (obviously such machines use low-end CPUs) retail for $18 - $24 less than same-clocked Celerons (pricewatch).
Now of course these machines will suck, because even if the 730S is OK, and (as we all know) Durons are cool, every other component will be complete ass. Nasty 15" monitor, crappy case, cheapest drives in the world, etc. But anyway, it's more sales for AMD, helps fund their work on nice CPUs that geeks will love..
Rich
True, but with a low end system you also have to consider motherboards and features... it's much easier to get $65 board with integrted video and sound for the Celeron than it is for the Duron/T-Bird (hence the relevance of this story).
The additional cost of those other components more than make up for the the cost difference for the proc.
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
ASUS P2B-DS... now *that* was a kicking mainboard (I almost wrote planar...). Nothing like built-in Adaptec UW SCSI (a good UW channel still beat ATA/66 all the time and ATA/100 almost all the time, especially with all the extra devices, but I digress).
My main system is apparently hopelessly outdated (Abit BH-6 C-300a@450, Matrox G200, 512MB registered ECC), but it gets the job done... my gaming box is due for an upgrade soon... those 1GHz+ with a GTS2 sounds like a plan... hmmm...
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
(first, pardon the typos in my eariler post..)
I was playing a little bit of Devil's advocate there... I haven't ever used a board with integrated sound/video that's been better than a temporary solution until one can put the new hardware in...
>The problem is that there are no low cost Socket A motherboards
Yes, that's my point - the people trying to hit the $300-500 price point don't care nearly as much about anything else. Of course, the people that buy end up getting them at BestBuy or Radio Smack, and hope it comes with that Microsoft Netscape thing, that lets you download the Internet (fits conveniently on a Zip disk!)... An extra few bucks is usually worth the money, especially on motherboards...
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
In French, "dur" means hard.
Is Duron supposed to give someone a hardon? It's not workin' for me.
-Nev
Going for a cheap CPU is understandable... but why would anyone want a cheap motherboard?? They just cause headaches don't they?? Oops, not enough ports. Oops, no USB. If you're gonna go cheap on a CPU at least spend the extra money on a decent motherboard.
You're supposed to come out with the slow chipset first, let people get used to that. Then come out with a fast mobo so that people feel like they're getting more for their money by getting the "super" mobo.
Instead now the fast mobo is the norm, and pushing people into the mindset of paying less for the "wimpy" mobo.
Stability is the most important thing even for value users on a low budget. Speed comes in second - everytime (well that's my opinion anyway)
What scared me was this sentence
"The 730S claims support for both the 100 and 133MHz DDR FSB frequencies (effectively 200/266MHz). While we could get both settings to work, the 133MHz setting was noticeably less stable even to the point where none of our Windows 2000 tests would complete. Chances are that the issues will be sorted out in future revisions of the chipset if not simply requiring a BIOS update on our particular test board."
I mean it's not as if asus produces low quality boards being it pre-release boards or not. Hopefully it's just a bios issue but could be more than that i fear. Well only time will tell....
Thomas S. Iversen
Well the 730S is supposed to be a low cost low end solution. Their target market will mostly be pc manufactures instead of more advanced pc users who can build their own system. You'll find this chipset in almost all of the sub $1000 premade pc's (ie. compaq, hp, e-machines etc.)I think it's funny how this chipset is dogged because it doesn't meet hardcore geeks expectations, but i have to ask how many of you would buy a 60 dollar motherboard? not many of you.
:)
Basically the chipset meets it purpose, it's an inexpensive chipset for an inexpensive processor to make inexpensive, entry-level, low-end pc's. I guess it would be the equivalant of the 440zx chipset. Grandma only checks her email, types letters, and researches our family tree. She doesn't need 23500000000000000 fps in quake 3
Now don't flame me because I put the duron in the lowend group, remember that's what it was designed for. I realize you hardware buffs will want to buy them because they perform well and are very overclockable like the celeron, but would you really buy a cheap motherboard to overclock on? I didn't think so, but then this chipset wasn't made for you.
Why is everyone so gung ho about SMP?? What do you do that is soooo CPU intensive that a single 1Ghz chip cannot accomplish? You need to run NT/2000 if you want to play games that need the speed AND get SMP advantage. Unfortunately, you throw out a lot of game compatibility with those OSs.
If you're doing a lot of rendering/graphics work, x86 probably isn't the platform you should be using if you need that much speed.
Distributed.net/Seti@Home? Don't make me laugh. Anyone who buys dual procs just to run these apps has their priorities out of whack.
SMP for x86 is useful for maybe 1% of the computer buying population, yet it's mentioned all the time here. WTF?
Duron lost it's luster? A little Turtle Wax and a buffer will fix that right up.
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I've got two K6-2 systems myself, have built half a dozen for friends and family, and know a bunch more who've built themselves K6-2 systems.
All of them are rock solid and perform great for the money that was put into them.
Of course, I didn't go out and but the cheapest motherboard available when for a $10 more a stable, good performing was available.
You may think that the K6-2 is "cheap" and "bad", but informed people know better.
The Duron is the same way. I've got a Duron 700 sitting here on my desk. I didn't chimp on the motherboard. It runs great (fast and stable) the the speed is indiscernable from an Athlon 700 and saved me $80 in the process. When I need a speed boost in a year or so, I'll drop in a 1.2GHz Athlon (which should run about $100 by then) and run for another year with no other changes.
AMD chips are
This is bad engineering? Our Durons are running smooth as silk, thanks.
On par, a Duron is probably 90% of the speed of it's equal speed Athlon brother, on the same mobo. But it's a great bargain to pick up a 600mhz Duron for $50 and easily overclock it to 900+Mhz with another $50 of cooling supplies. That's what makes you a geek, taking slow equipment and kicking faster machine's asses in frame rates.
I believe that the 760 chipset will handle SMP, and you may rest assured that Abit will supply this need. Also, the venerable BP6 has been updated to the VP6
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750 Mhz Duron: $63.
733 Celeron: $114
750 MHz Tbird: $98
Thunderbird costs less than Celeron at the same clock. When building a low-end system, the real choice is between Tbird and Duron; Celeron isn't even a factor. Maroberts' point was: with the Tbird's extra cache only costing $35, it is hard to justify the purchase of Duron.
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