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WHAT OH WHAT IS BEST FOR ME???Aug 11 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Most of you will want the AMD chips. The reason is simply the price to performance ratio; the AMD chips will do what you need inexpensively.
This article is written in an attempt to help those who have no idea what FSB stands for but would still like some idea of which processor is best for them. I will endeavour to keep the jargon to a minimum and to explain it in the simplest terms I know how; as a result, the more sophisticated of you out there will probably be saying..."but you didn't even mention the L2 cache size!!!" Well, that is true, but this and many other factors are covered in other articles(and I will be writing a more in depth article in this area as well) and I feel that there are those of US who could use a more down home(read...less technical) overview. The fact is that if you aren't building them, selling them or at least writing a book on them....all this is probably not going to help any more than a simple "for this, you need this." Now, having said that, I will probably go a little more into the techie side than you would expect, but I am always here to answer questions if you have any. Thank you and happy reading. The primary choices right now in the PC market are the AMD DURON, AMD THUNDERBIRD, iNTEL Pentium III and iNTEL Pentium IV. I will briefly go into each. The AMD Duron is the lowest priced of the chips in this lineup and might, therefore, be expected to be the slowest. No real surprises, in most high end apps it is the slowest in this line-up at the same MHz rating at peak use. What do all those ats mean???....Well, the reason I have written it this way is to give me leeway to explain the rest of the performance of this chip without contradicting myself. The DURON will perform beautifully and meet the needs of(I'm estimating here)90+% of the market. If you are running high end CAD or are a REALLY serious gamer, you might look into stepping up past the DURON line, but if you're running the SIMS, SIMCITY300 unlimited or similar...I happen to know for a fact they run fine, even flawlessly, on a 850MHz Duron($52.00 chip as of Aug. 11, 2001). There are some advantages to the pentium chips that we will get into a bit here and a whole lot more in another article, but they are really underscored by the cost to performance factor you get out of the DURON chip(not to mention you probably aren't going to see more than a 4-5% speed increase with the faster chips on most of what you run...notice I said see, and I'm leaving those speed reader guru guys that have been advertising on techtv out of this, because I suppose they might notice the difference a little more). Also, if you go with the DURON and are still going to spend the same amount of cash on the overall system, you get to go with more RAM, a bigger hard drive(or a faster one), maybe add in a CD/RW or DVD, or any number of other things. A decked out DURON is infinitely superior, in my humble epinion, to a scrapped down PIV. The Thunderbird is next up on our list. The AMD ATHLON THUNDERBIRD is a fantastic chip....mine is anyway.... The advantages over the DURON are not "all that great(laugh out loud)," but to me they make all the difference in the world. Now, I told you most of you wouldn't really see the advantage of the THUNDERBIRD over the DURON...let me clarify, right now, with the software common on the market, most users not in heavily graphics oriented environments will be well matched with a DURON, but for all you speed junkies out there....the word is THUNDERBIRD. With a 266FSB, loads of cache(l1 and l2...don't worry if you don't know what these mean, just suffice to say that they are like really fast RAM(Random Access Memory) that will help with speed), and overclocking a joke, these are capable of absolutely SCREAMING. I have personally had a 1.2 running stable for several days at close to 1.8 on an ABIT board with water cooling(of course, that isn't really practical for most of us, but it sure is fun. These chips are very inexpensive($102 for the 1.2 with 266FSB as of August 11, 2001) and will absolutely meet and exceed virtually everyone's needs. NOTE: THERE IS ONE MAJOR CAVEAT TO THE AMD DURON AND THUNDERBIRD LINE....THEY ARE SO EASY TO DAMAGE. THE PROCESSOR SITS ON TOP OF THE DIE, EXPOSED. IT USED TO BE THAT THE ACTUAL PROCESSING UNIT WAS UNDER A COVER ON THE UNDERSIDE OF THE PROCESSOR ON MOST CPUS, BUT THESE ARE RIGHT OUT THERE IN THE OPEN AND THEY BREAK IF NOT HANDLED PROPERLY. AMD uses these, in my opinion, substandard rubber pieces on each corner to space the heatsink and if you apply just a little to much pressure, you break the chip...ruined, no fix, toss it, no good........unless you bought it with a good credit card, then you get a new one and laugh at your "little" mistake. There are a number of ways around this, including going exotic with epoxy and a sheet of glass(this will be in my AMD overclocking article) or as mundane as a shim(both conductive and nonconductive shims available). Of course, you could just be careful, but do be sure you are. Also, never, never, ever, ever, never, absolutely, under no circumstances turn on the system without a properly applied heatsink with a good fan and thermal paste; you could get away with that for a while on an old pentium 133, but these'll be dead in seconds without proper cooling. Now, we'll go into the PIII. A really nice chip, price aside. I won't go into to much on this chip as this article is about which one you will want and I definitely don't think this'll be it for the majority of you. OKAY, you overclockers out there that are going to give me all the stories about pushing the envelope with these babies....yes, they are capable of doing a lot, but so are the AMDs(for less cash) and if you know all the technical how tos and want to tweak your sys out for hours everyday to stay on that "edge," go for it, but most of the people out there who are simply looking for a system to do their typing, get online, and maybe listen to music, will be very well suited with the AMD chip. Now, the PIV is in a very similar chip to the PIII in most aspects. It has a little more cache and a few more instruction sets, but the way it uses those instruction sets is inefficient in comparison the AMD chips. Does this mean its slower....well, yes and no. It is slower on some things, but it is faster on some of them as well. The real thing to remember here is that the benefits of the PIV are expensive. If you are the type of person who adds a supercharger to your car to get a couple of MPH advantage, then you might want a PIV. Will it "stomp" the Thunderbird...no, but in VERY high end apps, you will see some difference, especially if you are using RDRAM(higher bandwith, read very expensive(though the price is dropping) RAM). DDR(DOUBLE DATA RATE) RAM is a relatively cheap alternative with a great deal of the benefits, and it will work will with the AMD THUNDERBIRD AT 266FSB. I have a 600MHz Duron running at 790MHz(yes, its overclocked), a 850MHz DURON running standard, and a 1.2GHz Thunderbird with 266FSB(theres that nasty acronym I said you wouldn't have to know......well, you don't really, but what it means is Front Speed Bus and it relates to the amount of data that can be transferred from the processor to a useable state at any given time; generally the higher the number, the better off you'll be...right now the AMD Thunderbirds are either 200 or 266MHz...more about that in the technical article). I build PIIIs and PIVs pretty regularly, but don't use them myself(although I have a great old Pentium 90 that stills a workout as a web server running Apache on Linux....some apps don't need all the speed that is available to us now). Okay, so now you realize I'm a little jaded towards the AMD chips. Do I have anything against Intel? No, I just like the price to performance factor of the DURON and THUNDERBIRD chips.  |
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