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Any problems with Athlons?


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My computer is in the shop beacuse i thought my old video card went on my computer. I had a Athlon 1.4 thunderbird and got so hot it burnt up. so i just ordered a P4 1.8 with a new mother boared and 256 of superfast ram. I also upgraded my Voodoo Banshee with a GeForce 2 DDr card. Will I have problems with that card after it is installed with CM, i have windows 98 second edition.

[ March 13, 2002, 05:43 PM: Message edited by: Ralph Beaman ]

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The Athlon's aren't particularly troublesome (though if you're not cooling them properly that's another issue). Most of the issues I see involve the chipset rather than the particular make of CPU. Some video cards and sound cards may have troubles with particular chipsets or motherboards, but that's a fairly broad topic.

Under Windows98 there are no particular problems with the GeForce line. Under Windows 2000/XP there were some problems, but the latest beta drivers have addressed those issues.

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In the category of price for performance the Athlon is a better bargain, but Pentium 4 prices have started to come down quite a bit so this isn't always true. RDRAM is a bit expensive still (if you have a motherboard based on the higher performing 850 chipset - some 845 boards now support DDR) compared to DDR RAM. Megahurtz for Megahurtz the Athlons are better performers. So an AthlonXP 1800 is probably faster than the equivalent Pentium 4 running at 1.8GHz, though there'll be some tasks that a Pentium 4 will do quite a bit faster.

The Intel CPUs have a better thermal protection (especially the Pentium 4's) than any of the Athlons. You could actually run a Pentium 4 with the heatsink off (though it slows down tremendously). An Athlon on the other hand could burn up and die if the heatsink is removed or possibly if the fan stops working.

The other issue is the chipsets used for these CPUs. Pentium 4's are usually coupled to the Intel 845/850 chipsets (though there are some other brands like SiS and possibly VIA), while the AMD's will usually be on a VIA chipset (SiS & ALI are two other common brands). VIA is one of the bigger chipset companies, but there's often some compatibility problems of one sort or another (some minor, others very annoying). This isn't the fault specifically of VIA and it isn't because they make bad products, it just the way things are sometimes. Anyway, the point being that the Intel chipsets don't have too many compatibility problems (but that isn't always true).

For a better comparison and information you should read some of the articles over at Tom's Hardware (CPU articles listing) or AnandTech. Some explanations and data may be a bit technical, but there's generally very good advice to be found on these two websites.

[ March 13, 2002, 09:24 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

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