AMD Athlon Choices (AMD Athlon Processors in general)

Member Name: pnewnham

Product:	AMD Athlon Processors in general
Date:	06/05/01 (264 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Price, Speed

Disadvantages: Care must be taken to install heat sink

AMD chips are currently cheaper and in some cases faster than Intel. Certainly the Pentium 4 has been outperformed by AMD chips in some benchmark tests. AMD would therefore seem to be the way forward but there are still choices to be made.

Slots or Sockets? The slotted board was introduced by Intel for the Pentium II and followed by AMD with the Slot A design and Thunderbird Athlon chips. These are now being slowly discontinued and may be difficult to upgrade in the future, so Socket A is a more likely choice.

Popular motherboards are generally based on VIA chipsets and supplied by AOpen, Abit and Gigabyte to name a few. I chose Gigabyte's VIA based GA-7ZX based on a magazine review, and it's been very reliable.

As far as clock speed goes opinions vary. I've got an Athlon 800 with 384Mb of PC133 SDRAM and my system is very quick - the bottleneck is now the hard disk drives which are old UDMA33 devices - if you can do, get a motherboard with UDMA100 like the KT7A and faster disks.

Finally, one thing to bear in mind with all AMD chips is to get a good quality fan - mine is a Titan Majesty - because these chips will die if they overheat, thus requiring you to buy a new one. Install the heat sink securely before firing it up!

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