Our dual AthlonMP/1200's have not had the thermal problems we have seen with
other recent products. According to my understanding, there is only one
Tyan motherboard compatible with this. The first truly annoying "feature"
is that the BIOS frequently disables control keys and mouse clicks; the
second is the propensity of vendors to supply the wrong style of RAM. It
requires registered DDR, which seems difficult to obtain in the USA.
Otherwise, it's a good enough product to embarrass Intel.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Biddell"
I thought this might interest someone that is about ready to get a new system. It seems, that even AMD's low end is better than Intel's high end stuff. :-)
It's fairly common knowledge around here. The only problem is convincing customers that they don't need an Intel chip. One of mine was about to buy 10 £2000 Pentium machines to update his drawing office, until I showed him the same application on a £1000 Athlon machine. Much faster, and things improved even more with 1Gb of DDR ram - try buying that in RIMM <g>
Lester (and others), I'm in the market for a grunt-box as a dedicated Linux workstation (well, with a removable hard drive, as it will play the occasional Evilware game of Total Annihilation, assuming I can't get that working under WINE or similar). I have to admit, I was leanint towards a P4/1.6GHz or better, but the Athlon XP is several hundred Australian Pesos cheaper..... What are your thoughts on DUAL Athlon machines, specifically with regards to cooling and performance ? Any motherboards to stay AWAY from (I prefer non-integrated boards to those with sound/lan on-board, as I will be running an SB Audigy and probably a RAEDON video card - I need the SB for both sound and Firewire for Video Editing). Jon