On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, dfox wrote: > > I am upgrading soon to a Duron or an Athlon, haven't decided yet with a > > DDR mobo. Can I just chuck in the new mobo, RAM and CPU and them boot > > my system as normal? Run Kudzu then? > > You'll probably be better off in the long run with an Athlon. I'd check > CPU prices though - the Athlons may only be a tiny bit more expensive than > the Durons (as someone pointed out on the list) and for that little bit > extra, you get a lot more out of the CPU, since the Duron doesn't have the > cache, which can cripple performance (duron is kinda like celeron in that > respect, I think). I'd hate to have the CPU stall and the ram try to be > really fast at the same time :(. > I debated this for a while and ended up going with the Duron to save about $35 at the 1.3G speed. Benchmarks seemed to show that for most tasks the Duron kept up well with the Athlons, except when it came to things like the POV recompile (which, oddly enough, is the main reason I was getting a faster box). Anywho, the difference in time would amount to a few minutes over the several hour run for my POV animations.
This is my second move from a K6[23] to a Duron. The first was simply a motherboard swap, the second was a drive swap to the new machine. Here's everything I needed to do to get the second system running: Old machine was a K6-3/450 with some sort of Asus board, ATI Rage 128 video, PCI SoundBlaster card. New system is Duron 1.3G, ECS K7S5A, CompUSA generic Nvidia 32M card, onboard sound. First snag was a jumper setting on the primary IDE HD. Set it to "MASTER" and the system booted. Ran XFree86 --configure when the system booted. I needed to copy over the HorizSync and VertRefresh to get > 640x480. Used civilemes notes to configure the Sis7012 sound. Works great! I was using a custom, bare-bones kernel based on the Mandrake 8.2 stable sources so required a kernel rebuild. Added the "mem=nopentium" option to lilo. I've run several builds with this setup, including a clean XFree86 build, several apache and openssh builds, and maybe four straight days of POV renders. I'm not doing anything that would trigger the AMD bug though... Problems: Haven't gotten console framebuffer to work yet. I'm not certain if this is even properly supported. > Also check the price differences between 'top' speed Athlons and somewhat > slower ones - maybe 1450 vs 1700 etc. There might be a sweet spot where > teh best bang for the buck processor wise is just about two or three > grades lower than the top performer. But if you think you'll need a > 1.7+ ghz in a couple of months, you might as well go for it as you're > going to be out the $ for the cheaper processor when you upgrade :(. > I paid $130 for board/chip + shipping for the 1.3G Duron. It looks like prices have even gone down in the two weeks since I ordered it :/ > But having to reinstall isn't necessary. When I upgraded to an Athlon from > a pentium 100 a year or so ago, it was pretthy much plug in the components > and play. There were a few issues - mostly I had (or chose to) to rebuild > a new rev of X for the video card I chose, and also I had to reconfigure > things for the new sound card. Building a whole new X on the 100 mhz box > took the better part of a weekend ;(. But that was (in part) because of > special drivers from Matrox for the G450. > > > Darren > > >
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