Thought I'd jump in here at this point...
> Well, will it be worth the difference? Will one Athlon really be so much
> faster than two Celerons, and will you actually notice it in common
> applications? How about memory bandwidth and the like, are the Athlon
> mainboards so much better in general than e.g. the ABIT board?
In my testing and comparison of a single Athlon 500 versus two Celeron 400
overclocked to 520 the Athlon was just a little bit slower. I don't
remember the exact seconds, but the Athlon was only about 5 seconds slower
building a 2.2 series kernel (make bzImage). Both systems completed the
entire build process (make dep; make clean; make bzImage; make modules) in
under 5 minutes.
Personally, I'm sold on the Athlon. I had to return the mobo and processor I
used on my testing, but I'm going to get another one. My only complaint --
the Athlons want 300 watt power supplies. Actually AMD has a list of
'approved' power supplies. That and the FIC SD11 mobo didn't have a standard
ATX configuration.
> > Go for the Athlons!
> > They have 100 MHz DRAMs (like normal PIII), but have a memory-bus
running
> > at 200 MHz. Within a couple of month there will be mainboards available
> > which use 133 MHz RAMs, so the membus runs at 266 MHz. So you can expect
> > a speed-improvement for your system only by changing motherboard and
RAM.
I believe the memory bus has the ability to run up to 200 MHz FSB, just like
the Alphas. However, if you load it with 100mhz memory, it will run at 100
mhz. If you use PC-133 memory, you'll need to make sure the mobo will
support 133 fsb (the SD11 would need a bios upgrade to support pc-133 memory
at 133 mhz). I do not believe the memory bus runs at 2x the memory, I think
that 200mhz figure is the max. speed of the FSB.
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