Athlon review

[nachtgeist]

I am by no means a proponent of Intel, however I have to wonder a couple
of things about the Athlon and your review of it:

How can you honestly compare a PII 400 with the Athlon 600? Isn't that
rather pointless? Wouldn't it be a better comparison to match the mhz
speeds?

Also, have you seen the Compatibility listing on AMD's site
(http://www.amd.com/athlon) ? Under the graphics card accelerators alone,
the only Diamond 3d card listed is the Monster 3D... the Monster 3D II
(which I have) and the Monster 3D III aren't even listed. I'm wondering how
many dozens of other hardware components are incompatible with the Athlon.

Clearly, AMD needs to do a bit more testing before they release this
into the market. I'd love to have an Athlon, but not if it's not going to
work with the peripherals I've got.

[800XL]

I took a look at AMD's compatibility testing list, and it is rather extensive. I've put in thousands of hours of hardware testing time myself, and I know what it would have taken to test the slew of video cards alone. They list the Diamond Monster 3D, the Monster 3D 8MB (obviously a Monster II, there were no VooDoo I chipset cards with 8MB) and there is no such thing as a Monster 3D III. I did notice the absence of the VooDoo 3 line, and more recent TNT2 based cards. As most of the Athlon reviews I've seen include some of these cards, I suspect this list is a little outdated. Intel is not known for making its compatibility data as public as this, though I'd be happy to admit my error if someone where to show me the way to their compatibility lists. If one can assume 'card X' is compatible with Intel products, why can't one assume the same with AMD? I've seen dozens of products that don't work with a given Intel based motherboard, or have driver issues when a new higher speed CPU (Intel, AMD, Cyrix, or what have you) is added.

On the comparison issue, its a matter of running what you have. I've read plenty of Athlon reviews in the last few days, and some did not even bother to provide any comparison system. The systems provided in the SysOpt review did represent what a great deal of people are actually running right now, and do give something real world to compare to. Putting the Athlon 600 up against and Pentium 3 600 gives me only academic data if I have a Celeron running at 450Mhz.

[christo]

The Athlon review was based on an K7 600 with a Diamond Viper V770 and 128MB of 168 pin SDRAM. To date there is no system that we could have matched it against. The PIII 600 had yet to be released and as such that speed comparison was impossible. We chose the 400 for practicality and as a common system and noted in the results that inspite of the obvious megahertz difference (200 to be exact) the system outperformed the Pentium chip in benchmark and hands on tests.

As for combatability...the Monster 3D III does not exist. There is a 3D-FX Voodoo III and to the best of my knowledge there is no known issue with its use (nor with the Voodoo II). We used the Riva 2 chipset as it is the fastest and boasts the most memory. Also, we made it clear that the Athlon was designed as a high end microprocessor and to that end it will only perform as well as its weakest component. A cheap video card (e.g. Voodoo I or Savage chip) will lead to bottlenecks. It was stressed that it should not be used in a low end system. All components should be of equal caliber for the results we obtained.

Hope this clears up some of your questions.

[BBA]

So we will have to wait until someone compares it to a P3 at 600 in the otherwise same configuration.

Thats not impossible for us to do ourselves, I think I could do it with my $250 P3 450 at 600, just need stable ram.

Anyone with a P3 500 at 124 could do it. Or a 550 at 112.

These do exist!

BBA

[nachtgeist]

When I said Monster 3D III I actually meant the Voodoo3.

I'm still a little confused as to why one would wish to show that a system that is 200mhz faster than its competitor would get higher benchmarks (I'd have thought this would be pretty obvious using just about any CPU), but it's what we got. I'm sure we'll see more comparisons as time goes on.

Thanks for the info though.

[WebMasterP]

There has been lots of testing at the same clock speed, and AMD has put on a smoke show every time. Between PIII 600 and a K7 600, the Athlon was almost 49% faster.

The only thing that urks me is that I CAN'T
buy a motherboard for the **** thing, as of
today (8/13) you can only get one kind (MSI 6167) and that is if you go to Japan, go figure. I think releasing the chip to buy individually and no motherboard to go with it is A HUGE mistake by AMD.
Ok, that's my rant

[Anakhonda]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the MS-6167 due in the US later this month?

[CMonster]

I have to rant about AMDs benchmarks: they seem to be in the habit of starting off the bar charts at about 90% of 100 in order to make the difference seem that much greater.

[This message has been edited by CMonster (edited 08-13-99).]

[BBA]

Not only that, but after reading reviews at various sites, the test arent ever objective!

Tom's, for example, claims the same hardware and OS on both, WIN98SE, TNT2 ULTRA, reference drivers, etc...

But he list incorrectly dated versions of the IDE drivers for the Intel sys, and uses a 'Wrapper' for the Intel sys video when the same card is used in both with the same drivers?....

I posted this on HOST about Tom's review:

He has done some fibbing in the test setup.

He claims to be running Win98SE on both systems, but the driver dates he list for the Intel system are from Win98, not Win98SE, or he overwrote the SE drivers with older versions. The Win98 drivers are dated 5/11/98, in Win98SE they are dated 4/23/99. Yet he claims they are both running Win98SE! Maybe he did a, "gasp", _____upgrade___ on the Intel test sys!


I do not understand why he used an AGP miniport driver on the Intel system. There is no reason, as both systems use the same video card and the same drivers (reference).

It is things like this that cause this test to be invalid. I know from personal experiance that if you replace the Win98 default BM IDE driver, you have performance problems. Besides that, my benchmarking of my own system even outperform some of his AMD results! Especially the game FPS results.

We will have to wait until we can judge the Athlon for ourselves!




It seems more than just Tom's has the same kinds of things to invalidate review results, but it's things you have to catch. Most computer 'un-savvy' people won't catch that it's turning into a big hype campaign!

BBA