Re: P4 VS. Athlon

[Adam Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>Looking to build a new system and was wondering if
>>anyone had experience with either the P4 or Athlon and
>>Linux??
>I have a Thunderbird 800 and it works just fine. Personally I wouldn't even
>consider buying a P4 system due to the cost, you can get a much much better
>system by getting an Athlon. SharkyExtreme.com was showing TBird 1.33ghz
>cpus for $185, or a 1.2ghz/266mhz for $139. Also if getting a Athlon, make
>sure you get a good motherboard, I have an Abit, my boss has an Asus, we
>haven't had any problems.
>Another thing, P4's won't be "good" till they get over 2ghz, most software
>isn't optimized for it yet, and won't be for a little while, so most
>software runs faster on an Athlon.
>Either get a current Athlon, or wait a month or so for the Athlon 4's(only a
>few minor changes from the thunderbird, but equally clocked a athlon 4 is
>about 5-10% faster) to start shipping.

IMHO, the most important issue is what you intend to DO with the computer.  
I dislike non-Intel because they still don't have SMP,  and I wonder how long
it will be before it shows up.  For most things I recommend basically any
processor available, and a hopped up video chipset and LOADS of memory (why
not a gig?).  The performance numbers posted by both AMD and Intel are 
just noise.  Even on my lowly Dual PII-300 with several users my performance
monitors indicate that I/O (network, disc, etc...) is unable to 
saturate the processors,  and I have UW SCSI drives on a multi-channel
hardware RAID controller (that sports it's own CPU and memory).  But again, 
it all depends on what you want to do.

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