Eric, In light of all of this hububub re: intel and AMD stuff, I felt compelled to contribute my $0.02 worth. A little background: In about 1993 me and my mother decided to expend about $1,000 on a new state of the art computer. The pertinent info:
I got many years of good, loyal, near crash free service from this computer. Upgraded the memory to 8mb 2 years later even! I first surfed the net on this computer, played my first flight sim, pretty much whatever could be done on a computer at the time I did for the first time with this baby. It was only until AFTER I had swapped several cables out and removed the memory sticks to replace some bad ones that I started having trouble. This happened in about 1997. I did everything that could be done short of rebuilding from scratch to fix it. It lasted until last year about this time. The CPU during that time I managed to (without over clocking, mind you, the construction of this particular MB prohibited that without removing the CPU, which I knew nothing about at the time) get about the performance of a 486/66 at times. It was compatible with everything I used in it. At the beginning of this year, I bought a new computer, this is what I have now:
I am in love with this computer! It performs better than any Intel I've met. In about '96 we bought and HP Pavilion 5120. Anyone familiar with this system will know why I kept using my 386 as long as I did, even through the frequent lockups I had at that point. (every 30 minutes I got a BSOD) I got stuff done faster on that 386. Imagine running Win95 on 8 MB's! Or, more aptly, TRYING to, since the Win95 .950 and .950 B releases BOTH use (even in safe mode, mind you) a minimum of 24 megs! Imagine running your ENTIRE system from virtual ram! (Did I mention, I got IE5 to run on that 386 with 8 megs RAM? What does dear old Microsoft say it needs? 12 megs. It ran, and ran damned well I might add. Don't ask me how, I just installed it one day for the hell of it, and actually didn't crash for about 4 hours!) I digress, I've rattled on. My point is, if that AMD386 outperformed a 133MHz Pentium (admittedly, not the exact same software versions, but the same titles) what does that say for Intel even then? OH! we mustn't forget about that Pentium F0 bug, either. Now, I'm a gamer. Primarily, that's what I assembled this system I currently own for. I like comparing this CPU's performance to that of the Pentium II in the 3D department. My favorite contrast is with Unreal Tournament. My comparison system is Micron's Millennia with a 4 gig Seagate HD, 64MB RAM, and 400MHz Pentium MMX processor. Just looking at the processor specs alone, ignoring the 50MHz difference, who looks better? Pentium? or the K6-2 with 2 sets of 3D instructions? Get this, that Micron has a 2x AGP with 4 megs, I have a PCI 2.1 with 8 megs, and get smooth frame rates. About 30-40 fps average. Bottom line: Intel has been in trouble for years, they are falling farther behind, and if I were AMD, I would do as was stated in an article somewhere, I forget where, and pull ALL their power into the high end processor market. Let Transmeta do the lower end of things. F&@! Intel. Thanks for letting me rattle, hope y’all get a kick outta this. Anyone doesn't like what I say, feel free to flame me either publicly or privately. Privately at Mixahl@SWBell.Net please. Email anywhere else will subject the sender to immediate skinning, drawing and quartering, being stunned with cattle prods, hot oil boiling, and your hamster will be violated by my parakeet. Have a nice day! Nicholas Corona Co-Owner and IT Director AWC (Allen, West, & Corona) Nicholas, Thanks for writing. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to point you out as an example of a loyal AMD customer to the folks at AMD. I also at one point had an AMD 386/DX40. It was an awesome computer at the time, especially when I was comparing it to an Intel 486sx/16 that I was also considering purchasing at the time. My feeling is and always has been, if you are happy with the hardware you are on and it does what you want. Stick to it. Of course, I would also suggest that you upgrade to a 750 Duron or faster, you will really like the performance boost. I did notice that you are IT Director at AWC....just out of curiousity, what systems are you buying for your company? Inquiring minds want to know.... Eric Svetcov |