Athlons XP and MPs perform well for their price, "more bang for your buck." I don't know too much about the chipset idea, but the main problem I see with the Athlons is the heat problem. If you don't have good heatsinks on the processors, they become quite unstable and if you just had the stock heatsinks, you wont have those processors for long. The stock (aluminum) processors cannot dissipate heat well enough for the Athlons, so if you don't have a good heatsink, you'll become a victim of thermal death. I suggest one of those copper Alpha PAL heatsinks. They are a bit expensive, loud, but they do their job well. Another thing, after the processor gets hotter than 150F, it will become quite unstable and you will see many software problems. There are no issuses with the MP CPUs/chipsets for various OSs, that I know of, so it shouldn't be a problem there. But an Athlon for a "top of the line" system? Thats not quite so. If you want a top of the line system, get a Pentium 4 (Northwood) 2.8GHz core, 533MHz CPU. Those support the 1066MHz RAMBUS, which has quite a bit of I/O, although its slow. Still, I would recommend a Athlon XP system (with a good HSF) over a Pentium 4, just because they are significantly cheaper. > Message: 7 > Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 10:27:43 -0600 (CST) > From: Brian <lxy at cloudnet.com> > To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org > Subject: [TCLUG] Athlon MP > Reply-To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org > > I'm building an uber-number crunching box for a guy. > He wants the best in > everything, so naturaly I recomended an Athlon MP > machine. he had a few > choice words to say about the dual MPs, and wanted a > single Athlon > instead. He wouldn't tell me WHY, other than "I've > heard things". > > Is Athlon MP a good choice? Are there weird issues > under various > OS's? (this box will be running dual Win2K/Linux). > > -Brian __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/