General Comments on Processors

Wondering which processor to upgrade to? Which is the fastest? or just curious? then you've come to the right place. This is the TzunamiBodgeIT guide to processors!!! AMD AMD are my personal favourite at the moment. They are relative newcomers, and break years of intel dominance in IBM compatibles (basically a fancy way of saying PC!) They began as far as I can remember with the K5 socket 7 chips. They could use the same motherboards as the pentium 1, and were seen as a cheap option. They were quite a bit slower than Pentium chips though. next came the K6 chips, and these were basically a small improvement on the K5. They operated at slightly ...  Read the complete review

Intel Pentium 4 Processors are now almost at the 3ghz mark as you can see from the Intel quote below "The Intel® Pentium® 4 processor, now available at 2.80 GHz, is the next evolutionary step for desktop processor technology. Based on Intel® NetBurst? microarchitecture, the Pentium 4 processor offers higher-performance processing than ever before. Built with Intel's 0.13-micron technology, the Pentium 4 processor delivers significant performance gains for use in home computing, business solutions and all your processing needs. " There is often lots of discussion with regards to who makes the better processor. Is it Intel or its main rival ...  Read the complete review

The processor by its very nature is an essential component in any PC. Until recently Intel was the leader in terms of processors but over the last few years AMD have fought their way in to the market and established a large share of it. Once upon a time there was only one make of processor on the market, all you had to do was pick your speed. Now, however, there are no less than 5 different processors available (6 if you count the Cyrix M III). This can make picking a processor very difficult. On the budget side of things there is the Intel Celeron and the AMD Duron, and on the more expensive side you have the Intel Pentium 3 or Pentium 4, as well as the AMD ...  Read the complete review

So, I took my AMD K6-2 and sent it packing... but I didn't want to go back to Intel just yet. I like to think of the AMD Duron as an Athlon with a reduced cache. It still has more cache than a comparable Intel Celeron processor, has a more advanced internal architecture, is built with a .18 micron aluminum die-casting process for more speed with less power consumption at a reduced price, and has the ability to communicate with the motherboard at 200 Mhz as opposed to 66Mhz for the Celeron. The Duron requires a pretty powerful cooling fan, and I've got a heat sink in a cylindrical configuration on top of it with the fan in the middle of the cylinder. ...  Read the complete review

If you are using a socket A Athalon Thunderbird or Duron chip, the most important thing is to remember to buy an approved heat sink. Why you may ask, as you can get a heat sink, which will fit for £3, and an approved one may cost £9. Well if you look at these chips, you will see that they are not flat, the central surface of the chip is raised. If you are lucky the chip may have 4 soft rubber feet in each corner, which will help to balance the heat sink on the chip, but not all of the chips have these feet, and they have been known to fall off. If a 'generic' heat sink is incorrectly fitted to one of these chips without these feet, it ...  Read the complete review