Athlon XP vs. P4

[a4hire]

Hi all
I am thinking of buying a new computer. There is the new athlon Xp that sounds good. But is it better than a P4 ? I am not sure which way to go. The new athlon systems have DDR memory. IS this any better than the pc 133 memory on the pentium motherboards. I would like to get some feedback. I know that a lot of computer experts visit here. I was going to post this at the Xara forum but it is off topic so I thought I would see what kind of feedback I get here. Thanks in advance for any input.

[a4hire]

Hi all
I am thinking of buying a new computer. There is the new athlon Xp that sounds good. But is it better than a P4 ? I am not sure which way to go. The new athlon systems have DDR memory. IS this any better than the pc 133 memory on the pentium motherboards. I would like to get some feedback. I know that a lot of computer experts visit here. I was going to post this at the Xara forum but it is off topic so I thought I would see what kind of feedback I get here. Thanks in advance for any input.

[Klaus Nordby]

Check out the top hardware guru sites: anandtech.com and tomshardware.com.

I've long decided that my next 'puter shall be an AMD. Their brand new Athlon XP1800 can - as most hardware sites seem to agree - kick Intel's butt. I've already seen a guy with an AMD AthlonXP 1800+ (Palomino 1.53 Ghz) over-clocked to 1.8Ghz - and heard rumors of people hitting the 2GHz barrier. So I'm getting that 'puter within a month or so! The real headache is deciding on the motherboard, so much is happening in that field. The best one right NOW may be the EPOX 8KHA+ with the KT266A chipset - but that could be changed next week. Still, you can't go wrong with and AMD Athlon these days.


K


K

[williama]

I recently built a new PC with an Athlon 1.4 and 512MB DDR RAM. It's nice and fast. I'd done a lot of reading around, and the Athlon did better or at least the same in most tests against a faster speed Pentium 4.
DDR memory is faster than standard PC133 SDRAM. But the P4s don't use SDRAM, they have something called RAMBUS memory, this is quite a bit more expensive than DDR memory.
The XP chip can only be better than the previous Athlons, so I would have no reservations about recommending them.
Make sure that you don't skimp on the motherboard. I got an Asus A7A266, it's a Palamino (XP) ready board, and I've had no issues with drivers or BIOS updates. Asus has a nice update utility that connects via the internet and will update the BIOS directly in Windows without having to mess around with bootable floppy disks.

[a4hire]

Klaus and William
Sounds Like I might switch to AMD. I think I can get a faster computer for less!

[smorg]

Hi, Bruce:

I have an AMD and I swear by them! Intel doesn't like reviewers to let slip, but some do, that they've never solved or fixed the floating point problem in their chips, which I'm told primarily affects calculations and math. I've never seen any reviews on how it impacts graphics work.

The only caveat I would warn you of with AMD is that they run hotter than Intel so I would invest in a high-quality cooling fan, perhaps two.

[\"W\"]

I'm also giving AMD a hard looksee. I ran on a P4 w/512 mg of "rambus" (at work), and it was rather nice. But, if AMD can do the same or better for cheaper, it's logical to consider it for an upgrade at home here.

But, the reason I'm posting, is what smorg had mentioned about heat issues. I take it the processor ships with 1 fan, but how can you mount another? Is there room for it? Sorry, I don't understand. Or do you just screw another one on the fins?

Thanks for all the info this thread has brought.

Wayne

[This message was edited by "W" on October 25, 2001 at 07:39.]

[williama]

You can put a second fan on your case to draw air out of the back.

More importantly, I'd say that make sure that you get some "Thermal Grease", to make a nice contact between the bottom of the fan and the CPU. Without it I was running at ~90 degrees, with a nice smearing of the stuff, I was back down to 50-60 degrees.

[raffon]

here is a link just to give you an idea of the types of cooling solutions that are out there.

http://www.plycon.com/

I am not endorsing this site, its only for info.

Ich bin ein New Yorker

[Judi A]

Thanks for the info on the AMD heat problem. I got a AMD 1000 and 4 months later it was fried. I thought it was just defective, I didn't know heating up was an inheritant problem.

William how do you tell how hot the processor is?

Judi