--- Douglas Wade Needham <cinnion@ka8zrt.com> wrote:

> Hiya folks,
> 
> Wooter is not the only person looking at this, and it has been some
> time since something of this has been discussed. 
> 
> My background is that while I have a pretty good number of machines
> here, ranging from a Dual-P90 system (which was at one time a machine
> at CompuServe) serving as my bastion host, clear up to Athlon systems
> including a 2500+ Barton system with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 9500Pro
> system I use as a workstation and on which play games.  I even have
> some Sun 3's and a HP9000/F10 (800 series unfortunately) which I play
> with from time to time.  But I have decided that my workstation has
> started getting a bit old, and I am debating on upgrading it and
> moving my MB/CPU/RAM around so that I can possibly retire the dual
> P90
> to the "play" pile.    So when my system drive decided to clip from
> 40GB to 33GB, I started thinking...
> 
> As Wouter said, getting a Semperon based system does not really pay
> off anymore.  While I can get a good AMD CPU/motherboard for around
> $220, another $50 gets me the same features in an AMD64 system
> (though, unfortunately still not a FX-53 or Opteron CPU).  And at the
> same time, I could start using SATA drives which have nicer cabling
> than their EIDE equivalents, and are much less costly than the
> equivilent SCA SCSI drives I used to prefer.
> 
> So, I too would ask that you please share your more recent
> experiences
> with AMD64 systems, and include details such as which MB/CPU you are
> using, what quirks you may have seen, etc.
> 
Hello gents,
I jumped on the amd64 bandwagon spring of last year, with an athlon64
3000 on a k8t800 mobo from giga-byte.  Before this I had a sun ultra 5
360 I used as my primary machine, and it actually worked pretty well
for me despite its reputation.  Anyway, when I bought my system none of
the 64 bit OS's were quite there (Linux was having MCE's every 5
minutes, the Windows XP beta didn't boot after the 2nd release), and
since I bought my system specifically because I wanted to play with 64
bit assembly on an x86, that was a little upsetting.  Of course, now
things are working a lot better (at least on NetBSD).  I would
recommend, A) avoiding the 754 socket type I have, since its more or
less EOL and the 939 models are cheaper every day and B) getting an
nvidia card, since they're been fairly good about delivering 64 bit
beta drivers.
Anyway, I wouldn't want to give the impression that I think people
should not buy an opteron or athlon64 at this point, even if things are
n't quite there on all OS's.  I've been running in 32 bit mode for most
of the time I've owned mine, and for the $50 or so more that I paid
over the standard athlon's which were out at the time it isn't a big
deal.  Unless the amount you plan to spend on your system is really
really tight, I'd skip Sempron.  Also, I'd skip my mobo manufacturer,
they've been really slow releases BIOS upgrades, even when they're
really important fixes.

Cheers,
Dave

=====
Attempts at mechanization of mathematics are also very important, since they 
lead to a greater understanding of concepts we thought we knew (until we had 
to explain them to a computer).  -Prof. Donald E. Knuth


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. 
www.yahoo.com