[NTLUG:Discuss] Interesting looking vendor

[Kyle_Davenport@compusa.com]

Christopher Browne spoke thus:
> What with the "disappearance" of the 3rd Saturday events at InfoMart,
> the DFW region "component vendors" have become a tad more elusive;...

I was never impressed with those, and was glad when internet shopping gave me an
alternative.

> And a somewhat hardware-oriented question: Is there any useful comparative
> information between:
>  a) Athlon
>  b) Duron
>  c) Thunderbird?
>
> Bottom end motherboard+CPU for _any_ of the three seems to be available
> for around $150-$160; is there good reason to prefer/deprecate some of
> these? Athlons seem to scale to higher MHz values than the other two,
> and "Duron" appears not to have higher speeds available, but as we all
> know, the number of MHz matters less than overall performance, and that
> can vary quite a bit...

durons and thunderbirds are athlons, ie, they share the same K7 core, but
"athlon" is usually reserved for the original cache-not-on-die chip.  The _only_
difference between duron and thunderbird is that tbird has twice the L2 cache.
Some early durons had "leads connected" allowing for soft manipulation of the
cpu multiplier, but durons and t-birds without those can be easily re-connected
with a conductive pencil - only for those who want to overclock.  In general,
on-die cache makes the chip more easily overclockable, and most have no problem
overclocking 40-50%, which makes cheap durons the price-performance leader.
Performance at equal clock speed is athlon < duron < t-bird with each about 10%
faster than other, depending on your application.

to bring this back on-topic, amd chips advantage over intel's is even greater in
linux.  I personally am waiting for mustang/palimino athlon's on DDR-SDRAM SMP
mb's, now expected in January.  My favorite sites for this kind of information
are cpureview, anandtech, arstechnica, tomshardware, and socketa.  They all now
include linux performance tests too.  From the reviews of motherboards, its
clear that you get what you pay for and $30 more is quite justified for
stability, features, and speed of Asus and Abit mb's.