> > 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.
Read the fifth paragraph (counting from below the byline) about DIMMs and
W2K.
>
> 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.
Cool.
>
> > 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.
I get plenty of work done here, thanks! I can get blue screens if I
misconfigure something in BIOS (experimenting!).
>
> > > 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.
We were talking Photoshop. Photoshop does genuinely get better with a
dual-processor system.
>
> > 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.
Ah, I should have said I was comparing prices of Crucial (made by Micron)
RAM. I would recommend peeps don't buy "unbranded" RAM. Crucial and
Corsair are the most respected names. Prices of unbranded RAM are quite a
lot cheaper. In high performance systems I reckon this is a risky route to
take.
>
> > 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.
I saw benchmarks of a 1.3GHz Athlon outperforming a 1.7GHz P4 in
Photoshop... Wish I knew where they were now.
Jawed
