[plug] OT: Anyone not like Durons?

[Steve Vertigan]

I thought I'd ask here as this is the most knowledgeable in general
group of people I can think of in Perth and there seem to be some AMD
advocates in here - has anyone had any bad experiences with either
Athlon or Duron processors?  I have a brother who's looking at getting
one but being told not to due to compatibility issues.  Most of the
criticism comes from my flatmate who got one and says he will never
touch one again due to 
1) The (Abit I think) mainboard was crap, he couldn't do things like
assign IRQs and IOs to PCI slots which he needed to do for some legacy
hardware he has.
2) Software was more prone to crashing, in particular quake and need for
speed were prone to sporadic crashes and his NIC configuration program
would not load at all.
3) Overall hardware ran "smoother" with the Pentium, for instance he has
a Nvidia  GeForce2 MX video card and the manual explicitly states that
it's *not* recommended for use with AMD chips.

So my question is what gives?  Toms Hardware has nothing but good things
to say about AMD, I've heard several people in here wax lyrical about
them, I think Dennis even said he has that exact video card and is
running with no problems.  I'm pretty sure my flatmate had the
second-generation via chipset in his mainboard which I know people have
mentioned.  So *are* you AMD owners happy with your processors?  And do 
any of you use windows and games with them much?  I imagine under linux
it's smoother again as you can re-compile and optimise for whatever
processor you want and the software should be more robust anyway *and*
there's a higher level of technical proficiency here for solving
problems that do arise.  Only problem is my brother isn't any of those
things, but I'm sure someone here has used AMD and windoze and can say
yay/nay.

Thanks,
Steve
-- 
OpenBSD maelstrom.dyn.dhs.org GENERIC#399 i386
12:30AM  up 12 days, 19:26, 0 users, load averages: 0.10, 0.16, 0.21
Any philosophy that can be put "in a nutshell" belongs there.
		-- Sydney J. Harris