[rescue] 1998-2004 PC Hate (was Sun is purple...)

[Mark Benson]

gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

>> Are you trying to make me barf? AMD powered PCs of 1998-2004 era were  
>> some of *the* worst of *all* time. Cheap? yes. Good? I think not!
> 
> Part of the time AMD was producing cheap well made fast chips, usually
> sold soldered onto cheap motherboards. Intel was selling Pentium IV
> processors with high clock speeds that were slower than PIII's at half
> the speed.
> 
> Remember the AMD 2000's, with 1.2gHz clock speed?

I was piclking on the PCs rather than the CPUs, but even so...

Only x86 CPUs I've ever lost in a firefight were a Cyrix (say no more)
and an AMD XP2500+ Barton Core. The latter was on a good quality Asus
motherboard, which happily ran it's replacement 2400+ for years without
issue.

I also never actually stated anywhere that Pentium 4s (for the love of
shiny objects it's '4', not 'IV') were gods own children, they weren't
great CPUs but at least they didn't end up popping their little clogs
(unless the fan failed).

Like you say a lot of AMD systems as a whole suffered from junk
motherboards, and it was the systems I was picking on, not the CPUs
specifically. That being said, even though they were faster they were
junk compared to PIIIs, everything x86 Intel or AMD that was made for
consumers 1998-2004 was. The motherboards got better, and Intel boards 
were typically better than AMD ones, but the CPUs were really poor. I'm 
not holding them up against present technology, I'm holding them up 
against previous technology, what they came *from*, the PIII was a great 
chip, and if you run a Tualatin (or two) they'll walk all over a lot of 
XPxx00 AMD systems. Maybe it is just the motherboards, or maybe AMD 
chips were, as I've always stated, only good for gaming (mono-task, high 
computational load) applications.

If you offered me an AMD Athlon system from that era I'd have finished 
saying No before you even finished asking. Offer me an Intel rig from 
that era and I'd probably have it.

-- 

Mark Benson
http://markbenson.org/blog
http://twitter.com/MDBenson
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