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AMD

Duron 850 CPU Benchmarks 69

Posted by Hemos from the amd-comes-back-at-intel dept.
ravedaddy and quite a number of other folks wrote in with the news that Sharky's looks at the processor which benchmarks very well in comparison to Intel's 800MHz Celeron - the AMD Duron 850. Last week, with the release of the Celeron with a 100 Mhz FSB [?] , Intel jumped forward - while AMD's Duron has an equivalent 200 Mhz bus (100 Mhz buses). It looks like AMD is keeping the crown in the "Value" category.
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Duron 850 CPU Benchmarks More

Duron 850 CPU Benchmarks

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  • This is obvious, and I'm not claiming to be such a visionary, but the more competition there is between chip makers, the sooner we will have faster more efficient machines, so I'm all for it.

  • Duron is a Great Chip (Score:4)

    by cansecofan22 ( 62618 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @03:53AM (#524182) Homepage
    I know that the Duron has been slow to take off because of a lack of an integrated chipset but I have been using a Duron 600 for a while now and with the 256 MB of RAM that I picked up for $100 it kicks ass. The chip is inexpensive (the 850 will be around $150) and the board with onboard sound costs about $100. Add 128 MB of RAM for $50 and a Voodoo 3 AGP card for about $70 and a $100 Maxtor (or Segate) 20 GB Hard drive and you have a fairly inexpensive system that will perform as well as any PIII 700 out there. And you are olnl talking a couple of hundred dollars. AMD is beating Intel all around. Now if they would only get there act together for a dual CPU system, there would be no holding them back!
  • You can get a Tbird at the same mhz which will preform better for the same price!

  • Not just the value market (Score:3)

    by Oscarfish ( 85437 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @03:59AM (#524184) Homepage
    A couple of weeks ago, I bought a T-Bird 1000 MHz chip and an Abit KT7-RAID. I got home, set it up, connected the L1 bridges, and stuck an Alpha PEP66 on it. I'm currently running at 1313 MHz (12.5 * 105).

    The chip (the T-Bird) is a blue core, which means it came from FAB-30 in Dresden. From the pictures at Sharky's you can see they had a green core, which mean it came from Austin (and uses aluminum, not copper interconnects).

  • I agree completely. AMD is the way to go for the average home user or PC gamer. I would much rather buy an AMD CPU and save money up front so I could then still afford an upgrade down the road - as opposed to forking out a small fortune for a P4 system today and being stuck with it when Intel decides to change the socket type yet again.
  • the more competition there is between chip makers, the sooner we will have faster more efficient machines, so I'm all for it

    Unfortunately the history of computers has shown us that increased competition can also lead to overcrowding in a very saturated market, and the most interesting technology dissapears because the manufacturer can't market it properly (i.e. put the most spin on it).

    Draw parallels with the home computer market of the late 80s for instance.

    I think competition between AMD and Intel is great, but I'm not sure the market can handle any more big-scale players - hey ... look at Citrix: they have all but disappeared to the average PC consumer.

  • Is it worth it for me to give these chips another go?

    Definately give the newer AMD line-up a go. I avoided AMD in the past based on articles I read and such but it was just a bunch of FUD. I own a Duron 700MHz and a T-bird 1GHz and they are every bit as stable as the dozen or so Intel CPUs I have purchased over the years.
  • Well, in the past, 'non-Intel' chips had their problems... Currently, though, the Athlons and Durons are on par, if not better than, some of Intel's chips... My AMD K-6 works well for what I do with it... I plan on continuiing to use AMD on my next box I build... Just my .02 though
  • Why get a "wow, what a powerfull system that beats piii 700 intel system", when you can easilly do that with a simple dual cheap celeron dual processor? SMP and dual (quad and more...) processors are the future. ALL GOOD PROGRAMS that requires a lot of cpu could be multi-threaded and then, could work on smp system with pretty much performance. When you see the p4 1.5 ghz (with performance that, for as much as I know, is not better than a piii 900), simply get a quad piii 600 100 mhz overclocked at 140 with 512 mo ram and check out the performance vs price of those two systems. I don't know for you, but I will never buy again a simple processor computer, since in every way you can look at it, the two cheapest brand new cpu you can buy on the market outperform the top of what you can buy, for the pc. two intel celeron 700Mhz = 320$ one intel p4 1.5Ghz= 1690$ (CAN$) pretty clear for me, and I don't actually yet have a quad processor mtb...
  • What I really want to know, are AMD CPUs as stable as Intel CPUs? I don't like having to worry about stability. Then again, I use UltraSparc II's too, so I suppose I'm not terribly worried about it. :)
  • I cannot be the only one who has trouble comparing processors these days. What with pipelines and prdictive branching, not to mention the various front and rear-side bus speeds, internal and external, it is harder and harder for me to look at the MHz rating to work out which is the best CPU.

    Perhaps we should devise a new number, (call it the power rating) which would multiply all the numbers (bus speed, data path width, pipline parallelism, etc) together to come up with one easy to compare number that I can use when I buy my next PC.

    Otherwise I have to know far more about computer architecture than I really want to. How about it CPU manufacturers ? A single number we can compare ?

  • The color comes from the finish, not from the technology used. So if it's blue, it does not much more than if if was yellow or pink or with a Nathalie Portaman picture on it.
    Look at the letters and numbers on the core.
  • Durons and Tbirds have always been handy for buying, overclocking, and generally getting a better processor for the price, along with some nice tweaking times. I think the Duron was always a great choice for this -- a lot more than the Celeron, but it seems to take more and more cooling on my machine to clock it up. Seems almost not worth the price...


    Seeka
  • There is only one thing that matters to me. Is this CPU (P4) better than that CPU (Thunderbird). At the moment I cannot compare based on SPEED. I am interested in ONE thing, how fast will this or that CPU run Linux. And don't ask me to look at BogoMips, we all know how fake and lame they are :-)

  • I run my K6-2 close to 24/7, only shutting down when I'm out of town (hey, gotta pay for power...). As for reboots, well, yes once in a while - but only to use my homebanking prog., wich happens to run under windows (otherwise I'm using SuSE 7.0 with kernel 2.4.0-test12). I've been using AMD for a while, and the K5 was definetly buggy. When I upgreded to a Cyrix 6x86 it only made matters worse, then I tried a K6-233. It's been AMD for me since then, 'cause they're cheap and stable!
  • Of course, it is JUST A BENCHMARK, so it is not perfect, but I think that it is quite good:
    - vendor independant
    - separate integers/floating-point performances (which are quite different beasts really)

    There are many available results, look here [spec.org].

    Anyway, I think that it is much better than your "power rating" number..
  • Besides, all durons use aluminium interconnects - regardless of the color of the polish used.
  • I don't want a single number. I don't think you do either if you think about it.

    Manufactures would just figure out what was the cheapest way to get their number up, even if it meant graphics rendering went to hell because they spent all thier budjet on cache or something... It wouldn't be a fair comparison. You need lot's of numbers, AND, don't think the CPU is the only thing that will effect them!

    Hmm, maybe someday I'll find some free time to finish hwinfo2html [current.nu] then at least I would feel a little better about comparing system... But... I have zero time, and it has a LONG way to go before being truely usefull.

  • AMD vs. Intel (Score:3)

    by CoBoLwArRiOr ( 301814 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @04:37AM (#524199)
    I've always heard people telling me that Intel was better than AMD, and AMD has had compatibility issues with Windoze. I had an Intel 486. That was the first and last Intel I've ever had. I haven't had one problem with AMD in the compatibiliy issue. When it comes down to it, price and performance don't lie. I'll take my AMD anyday. Durons seem to be decent chips for the price, but for power and speed (aren't we all speed demons?) I'm going to go with an Athlon Thunderbird for my next machine. As for the 'Intel is better than AMD' or 'AMD is better than Intel' battles that wage on, I feel that the best chip is whichever one does the job for you. For me, that's AMD.

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-
    The COBOL Warrior
  • Cyrix, purveyor of extremely crappy (but very cheap) processors.
  • Right, so we have SPECINT and SPECFP etc etc etc. All these numbers are 'bigger the better' what I want is to MULTIPLY THEM ALL TOGETHER to come up with the ABSOLUTE relative speed of a CPU.

    Look, take the disk speed, multiply it by the cache speed, the L2 cache speed, the fsb speed, the internal bus speed etc, and you will get a number. Then do the same for another cpu, you will get another number. The one with the biggest number is the fastest.

    The imformation is out there, but there does not seem to be a will to make it available. Could it be that CPU manufacturers don't want us to compare perfomance ?

    Its even difficult to compare CPUs from the same manufacturer (intel) because they don't make it easy for me.

  • I very much disagree with you on thhis case. I have been developing a webpage that is dedicated to comparig setups via gaming benchmarks. Why, you ask? Well, when it comes down to it, those are the numbers that count. Real world numbers. Who cares how many megs the bus can push or whatever? It is the final outcome that matters. To this extent, web sites that curently use all these gaming and professional becnhmarks to test the setups are doing exactly what we need; they are giving us the numbers that count in the end.

    I think the last thing we want to do is decide on some arbitrary index to rate all cpus. It would be a synthetic number that doesn't mean anything in the real world aside from bragging rights. It's like the Mhz war. It's a whole lot of bull. What matters is the final outcome, not the theoretical. So, my input is that we must stay away from that golden standardized index.

    Sure, this makes it harder for the average consumer who goes to compusa planning to buy a computer, but at this point, anything you buy is damned good, so I am not horribly concerned about that.

  • Agreed, this has already been done, via the PR mark. and look at how that was exploited. Whoever will create the new one will probably want to use the thought of fastest at the time, which the P4 will probably win out because of the Intel name. and then all the the think they know geeks who are afraid to try something new (Ill stick with Intel because thats the company I know) will bring up the PR mark fiasco and dismiss whever anyone else does, even if it is actually a good benchmark.
  • I have a Duron 700 as my main desktop at home now and it absolutely rocks. The price I paid for an A7V mobo/chip/128MB was so low I still can't believe it (around $280 including tax - about 2 months ago)

    I had never bought anything but Intel until this year. I have 2 servers, 2 desktops, and a laptop at home and the other 4 systems are all Intel, but if I have to replace them you better believe I'm going to buy AMD.
  • Right now, I love it. I can freely interchange my Duron and Thunderbird (not that I have one) on my Socket A motherboard. I don't have to put up with any socket type incompatibilities (Socket 370, Slot A, Socket 7) with my CPUs

    But, down the road, will AMD change the socket type for its upcoming 64-bit Sledgehammer chip?
  • I was thinking... wow the 100MHz FSB made a bigger difference than I suspected. Then I went to the article and actually went through it.

    The Duron 850MHz still beats the Celeron 800 (actually the Duron 800MHz does too). Though the margin of difference is so small in most of the tests it probably doesn't matter.

    And as the article points out, the Thunderbird at 850MHz is about the same price as the Duron *and* the Celeron competes around/above the Thunderbird price point so this is all pretty moot.

    The only advantage of the Celeron is the availability of cheap integrated motherboards so you can save a few bucks. Though some of the earlier Athlon boards are pretty darn cheap and if you care about the few dollars you are going to save then why are you caring about the benchmarks of the top end chips in the category.
  • Not exactly... the Duron and Thunderbird are capable of using Double Data Rate memory. Basically, the memory clock cycle has peaks and valleys. Rather than reading one bit for every peak, the chips can read one bit for every rising and falling edge of the clock cycle. That means that the frequency is still 100 Mhz, but the chips handle twice the amount of data.
  • Well, you can do this if you want, but why?

    You can have :
    - CPU A which is better than CPU B at integers calculation
    - CPU B which is better than CPU A at floating-point operations

    So which is the fastest?
    Answer: it depends on your needs, on the apps that you are going to run on it..
    So there is no absolute winner.

    And this situation does happen in real life: CPU A would be a 80x86, CPU B would be a RISC.

    Judging a CPU on only one "magic" number is quite meaningless and I would even say that it is stupid (no this is not a flame).

    Watch those "naive" buying P4 at 1.3 GHz even if:
    - there won't be no upgrade path: the socket will change in a few month so you won't be able to reuse the same motherboard.
    - a 1.3GHz P4 is quite often beat by a 1GHz Athlon
    - it uses some VERY expensive memory

    They buy it because they believe in the magical "MHz" number.. Well not all of them, but I do suspect that for many people this is the case..

    I'm sorry but to be able to compare CPU you can't use a "magical" number, you must understand a little bit how CPUs works, that's just the way it is...

  • Re:Folks, you just don't get it ;-) (Score:3)

    by toofast ( 20646 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @05:42AM (#524209)
    Yes, I use an 8-way SMP box boasting 8 Pentium III Xeon's @ 800MHz, with 2MB cache, and 1GB RAM as my home desktop machine. I just installed the Mylex RAID controller yesterday. The lights dim when I power it on.

    My operating system of choice for this puppy: Windows 98. Beautiful SMP support, especially after I tweaked and recompiled the kernel. I get _at least_ 100fps in Quake3, in software rendering emulation mode.
  • If I can run Linux web/smb/inn servers on Athlons without hics -- if I can play Q3A, UT, SoF one after the other, on Athlon and Linux, and still work with my machine after that, the chip isn't the problem.

    The buggy chip and incompatibility issues have been bogus since 1983. Incorrect drivers, user error, viruses, file corruption, improper install are all common "buggy" problems, but have nothing to do with the chip.
  • We all wish. The problem is that numbers are simply a marketing tool. My favorite example is the Pentium 4, starting at 1.5 Ghz, yet in benchmarks it is no faster than a P3-1000. Sure, _we_ all know that, but those senior IT/IS wiseguys don't, they just look at the number and say "This chip is 1.5 times faster than the P3-1000, and it's a Pentium-4, which should be in itself much better than the older Pentium-3. Let's buy this overpriced bitch." That's how things work. That's why every single PC at my place of work is Intel-powered (except mine of course :)

    Now I don't hold any grudge against Intel nor AMD, I have an Athlon at work and a Celeron at home and I think they both have a place in the market, but comparing them is like apples to oranges. The numbers mean very little. This Athlon (old slow slot-A core) runs at 700mhz, while my home PC runs at 850mhz. Some benchmarks say they're equivalent, others make my Celeron glisten in the spotlight. You just can't trust any number, not the mhz, not the MIPS crap, not even the independent benchmarks. The only true benchmark is your own feeling. Does this Athlon feel faster than my Celeron at home ? Yes it does. I don't know why, but it just does. That's all I need to know.

  • I think it is futile trying to get a single number to describe the performance of different CPUs, especially as a product of various numbers. Other people have pointed out that what is important is what you use the CPU for. That determines what performance number is important to you.

    Think about it like a car. What car has the highest performance? Then ask yourself what kind of performance you mean?

    Top speed? Acceleration? Torque? MPG? Range before refueling? Tire grip? Driving characteristics? Ground clearance? Payload capacity? Coolness factor? Envy factor? It all depends on what you want to use your car for (and on your wallet).

    It is the same with processors. If you are on a budget and only word-process and browse the web, get the cheapest Celery you can find, if you have a little more dough and want to be able to game some too, get a Duron and a GF2MX card. If you use 3DSMax or pack DivX;-), get a 1 GHz or faster Tbird. If you only play Q3 get a 1.5 GHz P4 and a GF2Ultra, for those important 200 FPS in 640x480... ;-)

    /Dervak

  • Let's face it: AMD has the lead on "Value" and "Performance". It still doesn't have in SMP because it doesn't want to - T'bird kick P4's ass big time.
  • You should keep your eye on this app: GliBench [ncpro.com]
    I tried this out and it seems to work pretty good so far. Hopefully it will get a little more featureful but, hey, it's a start!

  • Does anybody know where I get one of these in a 1U server for a reasonable price, shipped within the US? It seems like all the rackmount servers are still Intel-based.

  • For $98 Canadian [canadacomputers.com] (about $65 US) I bought a Duron 700 which I now have running quite happily at 1GHz. How's that for value?
    --
    Patrick Doyle
  • " - vendor independant " No way Jose! Only the vendors who can cough up the money to participate can claim official SPEC results. Until quite recently, that didn't even include AMD! FatPhil
    -- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
  • Not to nitpick too heavily, but 1500MHz is 1.5 times as fast as 1000MHz, not 1.5 times faster. That would be 2500MHz.
  • That's different, though; that's a part of the memory subsystem of the main chipset. And you've been proven wrong by me, Hemos, and AMD themselves. No matter what kind of FUD you're reading on heise.de, arstechnica, or wherever, you're wrong, and you're afraid to be wrong. Go worry about something worthwhile for a change, like the sad case of a low-latency OSS sound system or the 2.6 USB drivers; those two definetly need people working on them.
  • The news report is a bit biased towards Intel. What is this with "AMD is keeping the crown in the 'Value' category"? AMD never lost it. If you look carefully at the benchmarks, you can grab a Duron 600 and it'll still beat whatever Celeron you throw at it, 100 MHz bus or not, in most of the benchmarks. If you're shopping for a value CPU with an external graphics card, the Duron is the only rational choice. Plus, if you grab a decent motherboard, most of the chips can be overclocked to 30-50% of their stock frequency. You just can't go wrong.
  • But, down the road, will AMD change the socket type for its upcoming 64-bit Sledgehammer chip?

    All the more reason to buy AMD instead of Intel. Changing the socket type is inevitable, so saving money on the CPU is more important than ever since you will be buying a new motherboard also.
  • I wouldn't say it's unfair. They compare favorably on price (ie. the Duron 850 costs about the same on the retail market as the Celeron 800) and they are the two respective company's highest speed "value" CPUs. Go AMD!
  • This is not true. All Athlon/Duron motherboards use a 100MHz DDR FSB and a 133MHz memory bus (not including the AMD 760 DDR RAM chipset). The P4, BTW, uses a QDR(Quad data rate) memory bus, but still only uses a 100MHz data rate FSB. With all this terminoligy and the marketing spin doctors at these companies, it's easy to get confused.

    What does a 100MHz DDR FSB mean? It means that the CPU talks to the chipset at a 200MHz data rate even though the frequency is only 100MHz because it can send two bits of information per clock cycle instead of one.

    Let's compare Duron/Athlon vs. Celeron/P4:
    FSB MHz: All use 100MHz
    FSB throughput: Duron/Athlon: 200MHz, Celeron/P4: 100MHz
    Memory Bus MHz: Duron/Athlon: 133MHz, Celeron/P4: 100MHz
    Memory Bus throughput: Duron/Athlon: 133MHz, Duron/Athlon(DDR): 266MHz, P4(Rambus): 400MHz, Celeron: 100MHz

    OK, so not only does Duron as a chip spank Celeron (especially for the price), we see that a Celeron system is severely lacking compared to a Duron system.

    I'm not a hardware guy, so if I'm wrong on any of this, I'm sure it will be corrected in a polite and professional manner :-)

    - Rick Alther
  • Look, take the disk speed, multiply it by the cache speed, the L2 cache speed, the fsb speed, the internal bus speed etc, and you will get a number. Then do the same for another cpu, you will get another number. The one with the biggest number is the fastest.

    Why not just add instead of mulitply? That would give you a much smaller number to work with and would accomplish the same task. Or possibly use subtraction instead. The smaller the number, the better. Or maybe using an inversely squared number derived from the parts of the whole sum of said number that remain from the left over of the originally inversely squared but not yet sequentially mapped. And then multiply that number by zero.
  • This was done once already, with the "PR" rating used by Cyrix with the 6x86 CPU for so long. It failed miserably, because uneducated consumers were incensed when they found out that their "PR-166" chip was really a "only" a 133 MHz chip. There were talks of class action suits and so on.

    These people, too, didn't want to learn more about computer architecture than they had to. This doomed them to the narrow "MHz vs. MHz" vision.

    Once the semi-techies (people who like computers but don't know shit about them anyway) got ahold of this information, Cyrix CPUs became a kind of pariah. There were so many little local shops in my area who wouldn't sell them because (they said) Cyrix was a dishonest company who lied about the speed of their chips and couldn't even "figure out" how to make a real 200MHz CPU anyway...

    Basically, good luck getting anyone to agree to this, especially any companies who currently hold the "speed crown" in terms of MHz and can therefore market it that way to the undereducated masses...

  • Again... not exactly. The CPU, a Duron in this case, "talks" to system memory over a bus with an actual clock rate of 100 Mhz. To effectively double the data transfer rate over the bus, the CPU reads and writes two bits per clock cycle rather than one. The memory and CPU "talk" over one bus (not two), and the bus has a clock rate of 100 Mhz. The only change is the amount of data transferred per clock cycle.
  • That's correct... the only exception is the VIA KT133A Athlon/Duron chipset, which also supports asnchyronously clocked RAM. On that chipset, the system RAM can be clocked at either 100 or 133 independant from the CPU. So, memory bus MHz could be either 100 or 133 for an Athlon or Duron... and DDR throughput could be 200 or 266 MHz.
  • I have been developing a webpage that is dedicated to comparig setups via gaming benchmarks.

    How about a URL? I would like to check it out.

  • Re:I told you so! (Score:3)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @07:57AM (#524229) Homepage Journal

    What does a 100MHz DDR FSB mean? It means that the CPU talks to the chipset at a 200MHz data rate even though the frequency is only 100MHz because it can send two bits of information per clock cycle instead of one.

    IMHO, the best way to deal with this is to bring back an archaic-sounding word: baud. It's 100 MegaHertz but 200 MegaBaud. And if someone figures out a magic way to cram more transfers into each clock cycle, then we can talk about the baud measurement going up while, at the same time, avoid lying about the clock frequency.


    ---

  • Argh, I just marketroided myself! I meant bps, not baud. ;-) It's 200 Megabps, 100 Megabaud.


    ---
  • I have a Asus P5A-B (super 7 AT mobo) and I scored a K6-2 550 for it.

    Performance sucked, it seems that other people with this board had the same problems (a k6-2 350 was faster). It turns out, and Asus won't admit it to this day, that the motherboard couldn't supply the cpu with enough power.

    Lucky for me my friend had a k6-2 450 in his (better) super7 board, and we did a straight trade. If not for this, I would be stuck with a K6-2 that costs more than a Duron, and without a working computer at all.

    Non-Intel problems indeed.
  • The chip [Duron 850] is inexpensive (the 850 will be around $150)

    Why would one buy a Duron 850 when an Thunderbird 900 is $130?

  • In fact using Mbps for memory speed would be much better than the current situation. If you don't follow current tech closely it can be really hard to tell whether 133MHz SDR, 100 MHz DDR or 800 MHz RDRAM is fastest. And memory technology isn't going to be simpler...

    I would prefer memory performance ratings in bps and latency instead of some random clock frequency of given technology. The problem is that some memory types (like RDRAM) gives much better results for sequential reads than for true random access (recardless of the name). It makes a big difference whether bps rating is done with random access or sequential reads. Probably there should be some standart test but how to define one is the problem.
    _________________________

  • The Pentium 4, is faster, and "better" than the Pentium III, but only when software is compiled for it. Go read http://www.tomshardware.com [tomshardware.com] for more info. Tom had a real hard time understanding this at first too, but in the end, he was able to show some more impressive results for the P4 with benchmarks running code compiled for the Pentium 4.


    Another advantage of the P4 is that it will scale more easily to higher clocks.


    Of course, in the real world, it will be a while before MS can take advantage of this. (Anyone know if gcc can optimize for P4 yet?)
    ---

  • i think he wants to know which one lets him troll slashdot fastest and lets him get the most first posts.
  • I've been running dual celerons for a year and a half on a Supermicro P6DBE with Slotket adapters. No problems thus far, but I eagerly await dual Athlon mobos. I don't overclock and my system seems very stable under WinNT 4.0 sp6, Win2000, Linux (2.2.x-smp), and BeOS.

    Remember that Ford and GM don't officially support adding Lunati racing cams in your engine, either, but that doesn't stop thousands from doing it yearly. :)

  • sorry, but it is literally still in dev. I will be very glad, however, to have it /.ed when it is complete ;-)
  • ...then it will be clear that those dual P233s are the fastest processors of all!

  • The only true benchmark is your own feeling. Does this Athlon feel faster than my Celeron at home ? Yes it does. I don't know why, but it just does.

    It feels faster because it's either swapping less (more RAM) or swapping faster (better hard drive). Windows 98/ME on a Novell network with antivirus software is a RAM hog; if you have less than 128 MB of RAM, you are going to lose 90% of your performance to the swap file. I learned this the hard way; in June of 1999, I thought a 333 MHz PII laptop with 64 MB of RAM would be enough, until I tried to run Windows; the low-power-consumption i.e. low-rotational-speed i.e. slow-swapping hard drive ate all my performance, making the machine "feel" slower than my old 1 MHz Apple II.


    Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
  • Baud is "discrete signals per second." BPS is "bits of information per second." DDR modulation sends two signals on each clock pulse, one on the rising edge and one on the falling edge. Because these are two discrete signals and not multiple bits squeezed into one phase/amplitude signal (as with phone modems), the "baud" rate is the same as the "words per second" rate; however, the parallel bus increases the "bits per second" rate to 64 or 128 times the baud rate and 128 or 256 times the clock frequency.
    Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
  • I've had a dual Celeron system for a year. Motherboard it ABIT BP-6. Processors are Celeron 333a (Socket 370).

    Runs at 2.00v, and has been quite stable. The only problem I've had with this box at all is that the power supply is insufficient, so it sometimes has trouble on initial boot. But I don't usually reboot it, anyhow.

    --

  • The Celerons are running at 500 MHz. Since they are solid at 2.00v, I could probably crank a bit more out of them, but I like the way they run as it is.

    --
  • i dunno what kinda crack you smoke, heres some numbers from pricewatch, ranked by price:

    TBird 1100 -- 217
    Celeron 800 -- 202
    TBird 1000 -- 173
    TBird 950 -- 158
    Celeron 766 -- 153
    TBird 900 -- 133
    Celeron 733 -- 113
    Duron 850 -- 108
    Tbird 850 -- 105
    TBird 800 -- 103
    Celeron 700 -- 79
    Duron 800 -- 73
    Duron 750 -- 62

    Theres a pretty decent comparison. For the price of a celeron 800, you can put a 1Ghz TBird,to compete with the Duron 850 you'd have to compare it with the 733Mhz Celeron. The 766 did pretty poorly compared to the 850, so i dont see why the 733 would have a chance. I wish someone would put together a Price comparison, compare a couple processors, only marked by price. Then at the end say which one they are. Choose a couple processors, PIII, Celeron, Duron, TBird all of the same price range, see who wins out.

    Something like comparing: TBird 850, Duron 850, Celeron 733, and PIII - 550.

    You should note you cant actualy buy a PIII that competes in price with the others . . .
  • Yeah, I have an Abit KT7-RAID motherboard running a Duron 700, a Voodoo 3 3000, 256Mb of RAM, a disk array with 85Gb in hard disk storage, and it blows away any other computer I've had or used. AMD's Duron is by far the best processor out there for the price. In my view AMD is the best chip maker, and with the release of Intel's Pentium 666 (umm, I mean "4"), the rest of the world knows it too. Just wait until next year when AMD releases it 2 Ghz processor.
  • From what I have heard, AMD is using the Dresden plant exclusively for higher speed T-Bird cores and using the Austin plant for the aluminum interconnected Duron's and Slot A Athlons.

  • Actually, the color -is- important.
    A blue core means it's from the early line of Tbird/Durons, and it's possible to unlock the multiplier by connecting the bridges with something conductive.
    Green-core chips are later, and can not be defeated in this way - I should know, I have one. :/

    "If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
  • Well generally the ram and swapping would apply, but in my case my home box is somewhat more monstrous than the work box. At work it's just an athlon 650 (oc'ed to 700, bah), 256mb ram, ibm deskstar hd, all in wonder Radeon, yadda yadda. At home i've got a Celeron 566 @ 900mhz now, 512mb ram, 4 x 40gb raid-0 ide stripe (70mb/sec sequential), and an Asus GeForce2 GTS. So when I say my home box feels slower than my work box, i'm pretty sure the peripherals aren't to blame. It's definitely the CPU.
  • I've heard lots of bad stories about Cyrix chips, but I can't let these go without praising the Cyrix P150+ that I used for over 3 years. I never had a bit of trouble out of that chip. What's more, it held up well to abuse. I haven't bothered to put the case cover back on my box, which would have been OK, except for my male cat ... he scored a direct hit in the middle of the motherboard. I flushed out my motherboard with electronic cleaner, of course, but some of the pins on the P150+ chip still formed some corrosion. The printer port stopped working after a few months, as the control circuitry corroded, but the computer still ran fine otherwise, up to the day I finally upgraded to an AMD K6-2 500.

    BTW, I help install the Point of Service computers in the US Post Office. They use Cyrix chips; the first year I did this job, I was installing the same P150+ that was running on my machine at home.

  • Note the line where he says, "tweaked and recompiled the kernel." When was the last time you knew of someone who did that for any Microsoft product?

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