If this has been your experience it means that your cases don't have proper ventilation. If the heatsink is big enough and the case is properly vented, the athlon will heat up quite a bit (and slow down as a result - same as the intel chips), but it won't blow. I've seen this many times. Most noteably on my mother's PC. She lives in Botswanna, daytime temperatures in the winter make most places on earth feel cool in the summer. The fan on her athlon went and she used her computer for almost a year after that. Her case is a mini tower, but the air flows properly over the heatsink, and is exhausted properly. Go on and buy an Athlon. No, if you're on a budget buy a Duron, it's still overkill for your needs. And it's the best bang-for-buck you could wish for. Then spend an extra couple of bucks on an extra case fan, and an atx power supply fan. Use superglue to stick this one to the side of your heatsink so it blows the air out. Most motherboards have a connector for an extra fan on. As for motherboards. I agree that VIA Chipsets aren't a safe bet, I've had lots of issues with them in the past. But my current board - Gigabyte GA-7ZXE (VIA KT133A) has given me nothing but joy (with the same hardware otherwise as before). I've also had no problem with computers based on SiS chipsets - motherbaord chipsets, NOT SiS graphics cards. The nicest experience and best performance I've had was on the AMD 760 chipset tho. Hans On Fri, 2003-02-07 at 22:51, Greg Freemyer wrote:
Hamm...yes~~ , i have seen certain kind of IDE raid card only about 34 US and provide 2 channel ATA 100. But does AMD athlon + PC motherboard = stable ??? I never test this and have some doubt about it.
In my experience the highspeed AMD chips run fine until that $10 cpu fan dies.
Then you get to replace the CPU, the motherboard, the RAM, and maybe one or two other things.
We bought several 2+ GHz AMD based machines a year ago. Three of them had fan failures and the resulting damage before we gave up on AMD.
We now use/buy only Intel. Intel chips handle a fan failure much more cleanly.
Greg Freemyer