1800 horsepower. Woooosssshhh!!! (AMD Athlon 4 (Palomino))

Member Name: one47

Product:	AMD Athlon 4 (Palomino)
Date:	20/01/02 (272 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Value for money, Performance

Disadvantages: Less well known

I've been spending money on computer toys again recently.... I wanted to buy a game called "Return to Castle Wolfenstien", but my old Pentium II-350 based PC wasn't up to it, so an upgrade was required.

I'd resisted this upgrade for a significant amount of time due to budget restrictions, but now the bullet was due to be bitten...


*** What is it?

Hard question - I suppose that a "Clone of a Pentium IV" would be a good starting point, except that that would be ignoring the true lineage of this chip.

AMD started producing cheap equivalents of Intel CPUs back in the days of the 486. So did other companies, but AMD is the only company who can claim to have kept up with (and sometimes exceeded) Intel's products.

Sadly you cannot quite go out and buy an AMD chip and plug it in in-place of your Intel processor; Unfortunately Intel patent and copyright their work in a maner designed to prevent that, so AMD cannot just replace an Intel processor - This means that you have to buy a motherboard which will accept one type of processor or the other. C'est la vie!


*** Who or What is AMD?

You've heard of Intel right? If you haven't, you clearly don't get out much.

AMD are Intel's supposedly second-class cousins. In my opinion their second-class staus is decidedly undeserved - They produce quality products at reasonable prices, and keep an element of competition in the marketplace, without which we would see Intel pricing their CPUs far higher than they do today.

Generally speaking AMD will price a product at half that of the nearest equivalent Intel component - That can easily mean a saving of £200 for todays top-of-the-range processors. I had the opportunity to try out their products at work, and haven't looked back.


*** Why "1800+" and what happened to MHz and GHz numbers?

Intel have been numbering
their processors and measuring their power in terms of Megaherts and Gigaherts (MHz and GHz). Until recently, so did the other chip makers.

More recently, AMD realised that a processor from Intel labelled "1.8GHz" was only as powerful as an AMD chip labelled "1.6GHz" - An unfair comarison. AMD quite sensibly under the circumstances decided to start labelling their chips differently.

An 1800+ is claimed to be equivalent to or better that an 1800MHz (1.8GHz Pentium IV processor) - So far their claims have proven broadly accurate.


*** Overall

Yippee! Wow! Super! Smashing!

No regrets at-all.

To do the upgrade myself, I had to buy:
1 x AthlonXP CPU
1 x Matching CPU fan
1 x Motherboard which accepts the AthlonXP
1 x Memory for the new motherboard.

Total cost £350, as opposed to buying new for about £1,100... Unfortunately I was left with no money for the game:-)


© 2002 Steve Davies

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