Ed Bott's Microsoft Challenge--1/18/01

this is an opinionated question to answer unbaised is to be unfamilar with either sytem.So I will Just put in 2 cents worth.If I were using my computer for business I would use The intel chips for id'ing purposes.If I'm using this at home I would use the AMD's for the fact that if you surf the web there is a 99.9% chance you will break some state or countries law just by Viewing a page yes even in the US.Remember Big Brother REALLY IS WATCHING.They usaully don't mess with small fry but in the course of wanting you they can track it.As to Speed the resources used by different programs vary way to much to choose without standardization.The cache rams the bigger the faster.Intel been winning but there instuction imprint to chip has been faulty lately,due to just this would make me buy AMD with a wait and see for intel when I get a new computer.

I personally believe AMD is the best solution for my PC. With the Thunderbird at 1.2 Ghz and 1.3 just around the bend you have a very well established platform. The Pentium 4 as it currently is presented, is supposed to undergo a whole new socket this year. If that is the case you'd have to buy a new mobo just for the next processor in a few months. Where as the current flock of Athlon Mobos are in a good place for more upgrades. With the DDR SDRAM support and all the other new features ofthe motherboards and the fact that SDRAM prices are so much lower that RDRAM you can have a more powerful solution using the AMD Athlon and the extra money you save by not buying Intel can get you more RAM or a bigger Hdd.

In my personal opinion, I have used AMD chips in all the PC's I have built since they have come out with the K6. Why? I have found that stability-wise, the AMD chips provide a rock solid foundation to build off of (currently I have my 400 MHz homePC over clocked and running stable at 500 MHz). Intel has been riddled with far too many problems lately and just have not been releasing "user friendly" chips. They keep changing format, etc. AMD-Thunderbird is he way to go.

Till now I have always used Intel CPUs to build my system, but I think that things are going to change now. Intel released the P4, which is supposed to be the fastest thing on earth. In fact things are different, the Athlon 1.2 GHz is faster then the P4 1.5 GHz and its costs much less. Now AMD support DDR which again is faster then RDRAM and less expensive. Intel is saying that that few benchmarks have been written for its new instructions and that code written using the new instructions will boost the speed of the P4. It might be true, but by the time it happens, things will have moved again

I would recommend the Athlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz or the 1.3GHz when it comes out. With these chips being on Socket instead of slot, they have more room for cache and they have a 266MHz bus on the high level T-Birds. I used to be all for Intel, but lately, they have just been terrible. I have a computer business and have sold many more AMD products than I have Intel. So I would say go for the T-Bird.

The answer you seek realy depends more on the role of your PC. Assuming it is going to be used primarily for business the P4 is probably your best bet. For gaming the AMD Thunderbird is on par with any Intel chip, for a ower price. If you want value, buy an AMD Duron and overclock it about 20%. A Duron 850 running 20% over spec gives you 1020MHz for around $100. A P4 at this speed is going to cost close to $500

I just installed a duron 600 over clocked at 900 on a Abit KT7 board. After a performance test using SiSoft Sandra utilities it almost compared to a Plll at 1GHz.Which consdidering the cost difference is a hell of a deal. I'm running a dual boot of windows 98 & 2000. In the same box I installed the IBM Deskstar 75GXP IDE hard drive. Using the same testing utility, it was off the chart.Going back to the CPU, It would not suprise me if I could clock it a little bit higher, and still have a satable machine. Good luck.

I'm going to have to be a little un-conventional here. Most of you are saying Athlon, Athlon, Athlon... I like AMD too and I would like to see their competitive standing in the marketplace continue to force some real value for the consumers. But everybody's missing the point on the performance issues here -- we're looking for maximum computing here, and we have such a nice SMP-ready OS in Win2K to work with. Since the P4 isn't due for SMP stability till late in the year (and it may well take longer) and the SMP Athlon/Duron bugs are far from resolved as well. So it seems to me you're going to get more processing for your money, more cpu cache, more everything happening in a double-fire pattern if we go SMP with dual P3s on, say, an ABIT VP6 dual FCPGA mobo with onboard ATA100 RAID (yes, Ed, I figure disk is next since you did video and CPU first) and the nice SoftMenuIII to boot (pun intended). Like I said about the GeForce MX before, it's all about bang vs. buck. In this case, bang and buck work together and will personally guarantee that the same $$$ put into dual P3s as opposed to single AMD or P4 configurations is going to have a higher yield and be more upgradeable for less. Sure, the P3 will be extinct by the time you're able to afford an upgrade, but who are we kidding here -- that is always the case. At the rate that CPU speeds are increasing and mobo architectures are rising and falling, you better pick something you can use for awhile. And when it comes time to upgrade, just hope you can look at what you got for your money and say it was worth it, because by the time your 1.6 GHz+ workstation is not enough, the rules will all be different and it'll be time to start from scratch again.

For years Intel dominated the market in Stability AND performance... the tables have turned, and AMD has matched or beaten Intel in the last 2 years time and time again. They've (AMD) met their chip demand, they've responded quickly and accurately to any technical issues involving their products, and they've done it every time cheaper than Intel.
If going for raw performance in a windows machine and price were not an issue, it's completely a toss up depending on the applications you are running. If it's a FP intensive program, AMD. If it's a data moving program (some games especially) then P4's got it, although that's likely to drop once the new high BW DDR's come out this fall.
Considering that in 90% of the applications out there the performance is so close between the two, I would choose AMD. They've had CONSIDERABLY less stability issues, chipset issues. The price is lower, and the platform is older, and less likely to create unwanted suprises.

I have used about 30 Duron processors with Chaintech mainboard to build clones since October 99. This is the most stable machine I have ever seen so far not even one machine has come back with even a software problem

This is the best processor Ihave seen and gives the best value for money.

Let's face the facts -- nothing beats a good old, tried and true (well, except for some slight division problems) old Pentium 90. And, just your lucky day, I have a whole slew that I can sell you.
In my network, there have been some compatibility problems with non-Intel processors. We try to stick with Intel Pentiums when possible, although we do have some Celerons in some locations. From my experience, a PIII 800eb is a good solid chip with enough speed for the vast majority of users. It is also reasonably priced now, and should keep most users happy for quite a few years.

Relative to Operating system, Windows 32 bit applications experience NO RELATIVE IMPROVEMENT IN PERFORMANCE with the p4 64bit processor. Similar applications, re-ported to take advantage of the 64 bit processor, show a marked improvement in performance.
If you insist on running Windows, and windows apps, there is NO reason to go with P4 (yet), until 64 bit version of windows is released, and patched, and updated, and service packed....etc.
The best bang for your buck, is the Athlon/Thunderbird 1.x ghz line.

But until 64 bit apps and 64 bit windows hit the market, there is NO REASON to use 64 bit Processor

AMD vs. Intel... Hmmmm.. If your looking for overall speed in a PC, then Intel P4 is the way to go! At 400Mhz FSB, there's a lot of thru-put there! Yes, you're going to spend more money, that is the way it has always been with Intel. But, when itcomes to compatibility, who's chips have been there? Amd has always had a nice chip, and it's great for gaming! AMD got together with some gaming programmers, and said here, use these instructions (which our chip handles so fast you can't believe it), and we'll give you a couple free! 3DNow! is GREAT. but Intel caught up.

You want my dream machine?

Intel P4 1.6GHz
1GB RDRAM
GeForce 2 64MB(forget the MX)
Sound Blaster Live!
6 speaker Dolby digital surround sound system
Fast Ethernetconnect to DS3 line
12X DVD-RAM
50X CD-ROM
2 - 60GB ATA100 hard drives
MidTower case
highres flatbed scanner
USB WebCAM
HP Color LaserJet (HP for serviceablility as well as performance)
dual boot Linux and Windows 98

I agree http://www.tomshardware.com is a good resource, but he is a little biased towards AMD.

I am not sure whether I am qualified to give an unbiased answer. But I have used three different processors in my Computer Administrative experience of around 15 years. Cyrix, Intel & IBM's Blue Chip. Ofcourse most of the experiance has been with the Intel Chips. I would personally go for Intel chips. But whether it should be P4 or PIII etc., is very difficult to estimate. As a corporate user in manufacturing, I have found that change in processor speed does not neccessarily improve the performance of the machine. There are other issue such as the graphics card, the I/O for the HDD & ram. Hence the Ram should be able to support the highest rating as specified by the various standard organisations. In fact I currently use at work an Intel M/B with a 600 Mhz Cpu supporting a bandwith of 133Mhz on the I/O with 128 Mb RDRam of PC 800 spec. Even with these latest advancements you do not see a big improvement in the desktops speed, as compared to a 100 Mhz I/O with SDRam of 128 Mb. The softwares also would need to be buit to take advantage of the Harware facilities offered. You also need to load HDD Ultra ATA device controller updates to take advantage of these offers. We do use the Ultra ATA storage software as given by Intel as we use Intel's M/B. Hence it is not easy to answer the question put forth. One needs to try the various configuration in the scenario that it is going to be put to use to determine the functionality imporovement.

K. Ramaswamy
M. I. S. manager
The Ruby Mills Limited
ruby@vsnl.com

Since a long time I have thought that there is more thing that contributes to the speed and reliability of our computers than using just the right CPU. Unfortunately
people usually buy systems based on the brand name of the CPU and the clock speed. But everyone should realize that memory speed, motherboard chipset selection has at least as much influence on the speed of your Windows applications as the CPU. And this is only the hardware! The binary code of the user software and Windows itselfis generated from the source code by some optimizing compilers. The optimizations a compiler makes drastically change the speed of the code running. As the development of compilers lags behind the development of new CPUs compilers optimize to the older CPUs not the most up-to-date ones. E.g. (as anyone can attest it with DUMPBIN) Office95 was compiled with an older Microsoft compiler, which generated optimized code to the 486 processors, Office 97 was compiled a compiler for P6 processors (not yet for the Pentium 4!) so it runs faster on them.
But back to the CPU wars. We use both Intel Pentium III and AMD Athlon processors of 500MHz with the same amount of memory and hard disks of the same make and type in our department. We have found that the Athlons are faster somewhat with floating point calculations. But as I have stated earlier this may be the result of a better chipset on the corresponding motherboard. So what processor will we choose for our next computers? Certainly not a Pentium 4! Why? Just have a look at the article http://www.emulators.com/pentium4.html. This technical, but understandable article clearly shows the design flaws of the Pentium 4 processor which makes it to perform well below the Intel advertised level, making the 900 MHz Athlon almost as fast as the 1.5 GHz Pentium4.

I have been in tech support/sysadmin for 23 years. I've always had to support windows on intel machines, from 386 up to pIII 866's. I kept hearing from fellow techs how good amd k6IIs on up were. I took the plunge two years ago. It's true! I've built many k6II and k6III machines for myself and friends. They are far more stable and run noticeably faster than equivelant pentiums. I did find out the hard way that you need to use Asus motherboards. Also,Anyone that is serious about building a high power pc should go straight the the Step Thermodynamics site, www.step-thermodynamics.com. They have every type of processor with custom cooling systems to support overclocking. They offer motherboards, memory etc. that have been tested and are guaranteed to perform as advertised. They also have a long list of the best cases, power supplies etc you nees to build the most stable machines. Last year, I got their AMD athlon 550, gauranteed to overclock to 850, asus k7v MB and memory and got the recomended case etc. I now have the fastest and most stable pc I've ever personally seen. I go weeks between freezes and crashes. I built identical systems for 2 friends and one for my personal workstation at work, all far more stable and faster than the new PIII's we have at our office. Try a Step modified AMD Athlon or thunderbird(or Duron) on an asus MB and become a believer!

You did not specify on whether money is the concern or time is the essence. I would have to assume that a balance of all these factors is what you are looking for.

I have build a lot of systems based on Intel, AMD and Cyrix. Intel do generally produce more stable system to system builder and less hassle. But they are a bit high on the price part. AMD is continuing it's battle with Intel and I really must congratulate them for their successful effort. AMD have got good "alternative" to intelsto help bring down the "price" issue. But AMD systems are generally more prone to problems. I remember building AMD-K6 and it is tedious!! If you plan to do tons of things with this system, don't even think of AMD unless you are prepare for all these headaches. I am currently using an AMD Duron for my home usage. It does give more problems than Intel based systems but for the price and performance you get, it beats intel anytime. And I have tons of ppl to help me with my problems at www.icronticforums.com.

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