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"

Comments

Good article

[Inthewire]

He reinforced my belief in the value of a competitive market...without AMD, Intel would have a lock on all of our business. It's interesting how destructive human nature can be...logically, the thing to do is run a single company that can leverage suppliers, research, manufacturing, distribution, administration, etc. This would reduce all the redundancies in the market and allow for superior products at reasonable prices.
Advertising could be focused on actual products, not competitive differentation. If something new was developed by this company, they would only need make the value known...no more blue men.
INstead of this utopia, when a single company gains the majority of the market they tend to maximize profit instead of customer value.
It's a hell of a world, isn't it?

The Pentium 4 is worth the extra price.

[Starship Trooper]

Now, Athlons may be fine for gaming and other unsubstantial desktop usage. But for the workout my Fortune 500 company gives their computers, AMD's products cannot compare to Intel for one simple reason - Reliability. This is where the value of the Pentium 4 comes in. In my experience, Athlon processors, while maybe a few percent faster than their Intel counterparts, die at least three times more frequently. When you have to buy the same AMD processor thrice as often as the comparable Intel one, the cost difference becomes negligible.

There are a number of other reasons the Pentium 4 platform is a better value than the Athlon:

• Rambus memory. Despite the common anti-Rambus sentiment here at Slashdot, RDRAM is of consistently higher quality and better performance than SDRAM, especially in quad-processor situations where memory bandwidth is everything and even DDR SDRAM becomes a bottleneck. Not so with RDRAM.
• SSE support. SSE2-enabled code beats the pants off the Athlon in performance. My company's heavy data processing algorithms depend heavily on SSE2 optimizations in order to process gigabytes of data in real time.
• Commitment to open source. Linux serves an important rôle in our work, and it's good to know that Intel has continued to support Linux and open source, and that part of our purchases goes to fund that support. Meanwhile, AMD jumps on the "XP" bandwagon with their new, specially-designed-for-Windows chips. That sort of behavior is detrimental to both our business and the entire tech economy.

So, I urge you all to transcend the Slashbot stereotype and realize that Intel truly provides the best value for business and home use. Just because they are the big player in the market don't make them bad.

I agree.

[Joe Groff]

While we aren't Fortune 500 where I work, we gave Athlons a try and, sorry to say, they just didn't make the cut. Too many hardware issues and not enough performance to justify putting up with it. Too bad the moderators will mod you down for telling the truth =(

Re:Reviews are cool, but whats the best hardware n

[EulerX07]

For AMD: I'd say don't buy anything until the KT266A (the A being VERY important) chipset is used by the manufacturer. Personally I'd wait until Asus churns out an A7V266 that uses the KT266A. The performance difference is staggering, it blows out of the water the Sis 735, which in turn outperforms the KT266 and AMD760 on mostapplications. Nforce reference board should be available soon for the benchmarkers, so we'll see what the 2X memory bandwidth does for the athlon.

I'm not enough of a whore to go out and find the links to kt266a reviews though.

Where should I buy an Athlon

[JeffL]

This is serious, and hopefully not too offtopic. I purchase lots of desktop machines, and for myself I can build exactly what I want from whatever pieces I think are best. However, for some random new post-doc I just want a decent machine that is easy for me to buy, and easy to get fixed if it breaks.

I have always bought Dells, because they make doing educational institution purchases incredibly easy, and if I need service I just call one place. I can customize the computers I am buying, and their prices are reasonable.

I am finding myself in the position of having to buy a very fast computer for somebody else. The problem I am running into is that Dell does not sell Athlons. I can buy a 1.8Ghz P4 from them for about $1900 fully loaded. I can also build myself a dual Athlon 1.2Ghz for the same price, and the Athlon is much faster.

So my question, is there a reputable and reliable company which sells customizable Athlon machines for a reasonable price?

Glad I'm not a gamer or running Windows

[PD]

I've got Linux on my Celery 300 (overclocked to 333 - couldn't get it any higher without cooling and it's more hassle than it's worth). With 320 megs of ram and a lot of disk space, I can't imagine what I'd do with a bigger computer. I also have a Thinkpad laptop with an 800 MHZ Pent III and as far as system usability goes, I cannot tell the difference at all. X is fast, compiles are very fast on both systems.

So, I will just sit back and laugh while I use my trusty Celery 300 for the next 5 years or so. Maybe then I'll pick up a real cheap antique Athlon or something to replace it.