[snip]
> So then, armed with all this info, I guess it now boils down to which
> way I wish to go. Obviously, you are of the opinion that I should take
> this Athlon route. This is sounding like the way I will go, and if I
> do, I will bump the RAM up to 256.
Well, I hope your KT7-RAID works. Mine didn't, and the place I got it from
(Transcend PC) went out of business right after I received the shipment.
Looks like I'm out $170. Anyway, if you really want an upgradeable
motherboard, you might want to wait a month or two and get a DDR-capable
Athlon motherboard. They had some problems with the earliest variants of
the AMD-760 chipset, but they'll be resolved soon I imagine.
> Thanks for the info on P4s. I will continue to wait on it, if for no
> other reason than the price and that there is only one MB maker at this
> time.
Actually ASUS makes a P4 board now, and it's faster than the Intel one
because they use more aggressive memory settings (which make the RIMMs run
hotter but give them faster response times). Still, Rambus is pretty steep-
a name-brand 128MB ECC PC800 RIMM is around $300- almost four times the
cost of a 128MB PC150 SDRAM DIMM.
> Besides, if I do go with the Athlon, there would not be any point
> in quickly going to the P4. Hopefully this weekend I can study and
> digest all your additional comments on it for pure knowledge increase.
> Just as an FYI, I do use Photoshop which is one of the few applications
> that can also use dual processors.
I learned recently that AMD won't release its dual-processor chipset until
the middle of 2001, which is a disappointment. As I probably mentioned
before, Intel plans to release 2GHz P4s in January, though dual-processing
capability is reserved for the workstation/server version of the P4, which
again won't be out for several months. But Intel had better cash in on the
P4 while it can, because an interesting rumor I read last week turned out
to be true: AMD is working with a company which manufactures isotopically
pure Silicon-28 wafers, and these will be used for the next-generation
Athlon (Palomino). There are reports of prototype processors using this
silicon running at 1.7GHz with only a heat sink- no fan. If this is the
case, Intel is going to be in bad shape in a few months unless they work
out a deal with that company as well, because I can say right now that
unless tons of software is heavily optimized for SSE2 in the near future, a
2GHz P4 will not compete with a 1.7GHz Athlon on a DDR platform in much of
anything.
Evan
==
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