> I was referring *specifically* to the combination of Athlon/x
> motherboard/W2K.
And
> PRECISELY MY POINT - dear oh dear, some Athlon chipsets (KT133A, say)
don't
> get on with W2K.
I have an Athalon 1.33 and a KT133A motherboard running W2K. Also running a
load of USB & SCSI perhipherals, as well as firewire for a Nikon scanner.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this combination. It works as well as
I could want it to.
W2K is, in my experience with it, rock-solid stable and reliable. I've been
running various different systems, and I can count the number of W2K crashes
in the past one and a half years on one hand.
> This friend killed his system trying to install SP2. He wiped it clean
and
> went back to SP1.
His experience is not typical. He probably has some hardware issues. I don't
know anyone who's killed their system by installing SP2.
> NT4 is roughly as bad for playing games as W2K. If you play games you're
> considered a masochist if you use NT/W2K. Simple things like graphics
cards
> and sound cards are not supported sufficiently well under the big OSs.
Many
> games explicitly state that W2K is not supported.
That's a good thing, really. W2K and NT do not allow application software to
write directly to the hardware, and as a result the systems are more stable
and more secure. Use 98/ME if you want to play games, use NT/W2K if you want
to get some work done.
> > If I were buying today I'd go for a dual Athlon m/b with DDR RAM as the
> > most bang for the buck.
>
>
>
> By the time you've factored in the cost of 2 CPUs and the motherboard to
> support them, you've added 40-50% to your costs, and MP doesn't give you a
> 50% performance boost over the single processor system. It's around 30% as
> far as I can tell. If you absolutely must have the best performance
> available now, then yeah, get the dual CPU.
It really depends on the application. Some applications and graphic card
drivers are optimized for multi-processor systems and give a much higher
performance boost. Some applications don't show any change at all.
> DDR gives a performance boost of 5-10%. But DDR is worth buying because
it
> is 5% extra performance for 2-3% extra cost.
Lucky you. Here it's about 50% more.
> LOL. The P4 is a pile of crap. In a year's time it'll prolly be worth
> considering. AMD's roadmap seems to show it falling significantly behind
> Intel next summer, I reckon.
The P4's 400mhz system bus is much faster than the Athalon's 133mhz bus, and
the 3.2gb bandwidth of Rambus is about twice as high fast as DDR ram. For
some applications that involve huge files and lots of ram, the P4 platform
will easily outperform the Athalon. This would include some of the
higher-end 3D animation packages. Athalon systems are probably better for
Photoshop. It's hard to generalize which is better. A person would need to
consider their applications, and get whichever is best suited to their
needs.
