The following longwinded exposition is solely my own opinion. Any
resemblance to controlled product comparisons is strictly incidental. I
do, however, make most of my living knowing stuff like this.
As far as biased goes, right now i'm running 2 Celerons (OC 458 &
400), a PPro 200, a P-II 266, a K6 266, and a 133mHz RS/6000 (PowerPC). In
addition, the last 3 machines I've built for TARL were K6-2 350-450mHz.
All the above are boxes I work with or on every day.
One note about Athlons: they are FAST. They also are building a big rep
for burning up m/bs. The only board that's not coming back to the dealers
is the BioStar. The 2.3.xx kernels will have optimization for the Athlon,
but 2 friends are running 2.2.14 on them and they're stable.
The K6 and K6-2 chips work VERY well in Linux.. The only problems I've
ever seen with AMD chips are thermal. Somebody didn't spend the extra $8
for a better fan & a tube of thermal paste.... And that's *always* cured
the problem.
Anyway.
I'd like to have a Coppermine or Athlon 650. But if I was building from
the frame up, and money mattered, I'd stick with a K6-3, and spend the
difference on good SCSI storage, a fast graphics card, & LOTS'a memory. In
Linux, after the 400mHz mark, I just don't see a lot of difference in the
chips, or chip speeds. But my old 66mHz FSB P-II 266, running 192 mb and
wide SCSI drives, keeps up with the 458 Celeron with 128 mb and IDE
storage. The newer ATA33 & 66 setups might be as fast as SCSI for a
desktop; I don't know. The principle is that at 450mHz, your peripherals
make a lot more difference than the CPU.
As far as Chipsmart, they're not bad if you really enjoy standing in line
to return stuff. And you don't need info on the products they sell. They
may have changed in 3 years. I wouldn't know. I like AES, M.C. Howard, &
CompUSA. BestBuy if I feel patient.
--
Doc Shipley
Network Guy
TARL Labs, UT
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