PCA Forums

One of my friends is going to be making a new machine, and I recommend an AMD. They are faster and cheaper, therefore I don't know why he'd go with a Pentium. But he's hearing mixed things, so I'm just wondering, what do you suggest? He says he hears that Pentiums are more reliable (which I don't agree with either). The thing that's confusing me, is he's hearing pro-Pentium things from knowledgable people. Is there something I've been missing for the past 2 years?????????

thanks in advance...

Well to some extent he's right, although less of an issue now.

I've avoided AMD until this latest upgrade because generally Intel boards are "friendlier" with Windows. Used to be a pain getting drivers setup right with VIA boards but that's changed, and XP even has native drivers for VIA now.

Intel has the bragging rights to the fastest CPU at the moment (*I THINK* - changes every week) but it's probably a CPU that's not actually in any kind of practical production.

It's a fact however that, up until recently, AMD CPUs have outperformed Intel CPUs clocked at the same frequency.

You really can't go wrong either way, except I 'd read a LOT of reviews on mobos and get a lot of recommendations before making a final selection. There's still good and bad boards out there for both brands of CPU.

If he's building his own system then AMD is still cheaper - AMD has better single unit pricing than Intel (Intel is not interested at pricing their CPUs for hobbyists while AMD is). If he's buying an off-the shelf system, then the price difference is negligable (both AMD and Intel are priced about the same in large quantities to OEM vendors).

It really comes down to personal preference. The speed crown is curently on Intel's head (if you want to ante up for the 2.8 GHz P4), but the Athlon isn't too far behind. Athlon XP on nforce is a good moderate-cost, high-perf solution.

the f*ck do I care if it's 200 MHz behind? The point is, as far as bang for you buck, AMD has it? But does the statement "Pentiums are just more reliable" have any back-up to it?

FP: why do you say that Pentiums are more 'user friendly'...I didn't think installing a CPU was that hard (though I could see how installing a slot1 as opposed to slot7 would be easier--given the fact that someone could crack the chip when mounting the fan...)

AMD as far as I know has always been the best bang for your buck type. Atleast since I can remember when I bought my first AMD which was a K6-2 400, remember that beast?

And by user friendly, FP means driver wise. VIA chipsets used to suck ass, from what I hear. However, I've never had a problem with 'em dating back to my Abit KA7-100 board. Then I got my 8K7A+ which was an AMD761 chipset w/VIA southbridge and now I'm back to VIA on my new board. As I said, I've never had a problem with my motherboard and drivers/windows problems/whatever. I'm pretty happy with AMD. I see absolutly no reason why to pay more for the exact same thing, but thats just me. And all in all, it probably isn't really even that much more (though I havent' checked prices in quite a while)

Since Win98 and Win2K didn't have built-in VIA chipset support, it used to be a pain to install Windows on AMD systems.

XP now has native VIA driver support and also the VIA drivers are much less cumbersome to setup on a new system.

The other issue in the early days of AMD was that publishers tended not to bother testing their software on AMD systems and there's always subtle differences. You wind up with a new retail game that you had to wait for a patch for it to work properly on an AMD system. That's a thing of the past though.

Win2k also had the annoying little problem of not detecting an AGP bridge at all on the KX/KT133. No amount of 4-in-1 mojo would help it. I think SP1 is what finally fixed it.

And by user friendly, FP means driver wise. VIA chipsets used to suck ass, from what I hear.

the problem I have with Via is that they don't seem to document their chipsets very well, even to hardware designers. Go find and honest to God datasheet on Via's website (you probably can't). If you find anything, compare it to the chipset data sheets published by Intel and AMD. The problems that people run into is largely due to mobo makers writing BIOSes for performance, and using chipset register settings that cause odd problems. Since Via's documantation is less than stellar, they often don't know that what they're doing is bad.

Remember the problems with SB Lives and RAID cards? That could have been averted had Via published how their PCI bridge handles bus parking.