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Motherboards with i845 Chipsets
manplusdog writes: "Dan reviews a couple of i845 motherboards here and lets just say he doesn't hold back! "Mainboards For The Stupid" is the verdict. I have no affiliation with Dan or his site (aside from being Australian) but found the review..... entertaining. Cheers"
All my personal boxes are currently Athlon 1.2 and 1.4 GHz 266FSBs running DDR, except for a little sad rarely used mother that was once my main box, a 1GHz P-III on a Asus "Black Pearl" BX board.
So I love AMDs, they are swell. But there is one thing about Athlons that frosts my ass, well no, the opposite. I have had to build in the odd year of 2001, twenty-two separate AMD Athlon/Thunderbird boxes. I have had seven Athlons burn on and die on boot up (stinky silicon).
I am not a retard. And that is just unacceptable.
I have never dealt with a chip as volatile as the Thunderbird. Some are just hardy little bastardos, others need a level of anal retentiveness that borders on owning ones own clean room. For me and my absolute need to have a box that makes apps open before I can remove finger from the enter key, or off the mouse on the second click. This is okay. When I am building a blah beige business box, for a client, or a friend or Auntie Ann. Then this makes me borderline homicidal.
The fact of the matter is, any monkey with a hammer can knock together a P-III box. Intel chips tend to be as robust as those freaky bubble glass ashtrays that weigh fifty pounds. I can knock together a P-III box and have an operating system installed in an hour, mostly while I am doing something more important then watching Win2K load or whatever.
I honestly wanted to see a nice Asus/Abit P4 board available so I can do more of the same for business clients ("Oh! goodness Bob! look! ONE POINT EIGHT GIGAHERTZ!!! INTEL BOB!!! HAVE AT IT BAYBE!!!... But first, pay me.")
Cheap boxes that run as stable and reliable as hell and can be assembled almost by remote control rock, the extra cash keeps me in Geforce 3 cards and klipsch speakers and other shiny things I see in the forest. I would be happy as a clam to see this whole i845 thing straighten it's wings and head into the promised land that the BX chipset promised us exists. Speaking of BX, that Asus black pearl box in the corner. It's not nearly as fast as my other three Athlon boxes, but damn it, it is as reliable as my subzero fridge.
As for myself, I will stick to my yummy AMD goodness until the data becomes more compelling otherwise. I am still a sucker when I notice that something is really "noticeably faster"
Idiot.
Did you even bother to read his post properly?
1) He never said it was a virtue. He just said it has higher bandwidth. He's right.
2) He mentions he's running quad processor configurations, which means that he's going to be very dependant on memory bandwidth - hence the Rambus memory.
3) '[his] company's heavy data processing algorithms'... Yes, people *do* write in-house code, you know...
4) Hoisted on your own petard on that one...
FUD? where exactly is the FUD in his post? As compared you yours? In his experience the Athlons are less reliable. It wouldn't suprise me - several people have mentioned reliability in this topic. Do you think he's making this up? Do you even *have* any experience with P4 systems?
Yes, Intel is normally taken as the 'big bad guy' of the processor industry. Yes, Rambus has undoubtably been very nasty with their patents, but all of this has nothing to do with whether or not P4s + Rambus memory are actually any good or not.
Next time, think before you type.
N.B. Note SSE2 code only applies to Double
precession floating point code.
For single precession SSE/3D Now to the same
jobs. Need Quad precession, your in software
emulation and its real slow.
Despite SSE2, the Athlon still rules at ScienceMark
Intels SSE2 autovectorising compiler still has
a lot of issues for general use.