[plug] P4 1.4

[Cameron Patrick]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 10:01:26AM +0800, Ben Jensz wrote:

| Last time I tested a system with an AMD retail heatsink and fan, it was 
| fine under normal tasks, but if you gave it a good thrashing (i.e. 
| nearing 100% CPU), it got very hot.  If the machine is sitting there 
| idle most of the time, then it probably won't make much difference 
| whether you go for Intel or AMD.  And if the machine is sitting there 
| idle most of the time, then any performance improvement an AMD will give 
| you is sitting there not being used anyway ;o).

My home machine is an Athlon 2600 with a stock heatsink and fan.  All of
the fans (including the CPU fan) have resistors soldered in line to keep
the noise down.  I've noticed no problems running it at essentially 100%
CPU load for days at a time.  I've no idea how hot it gets under load,
but it's evidently not hot enough to cause problems (I'd guess <60C,
which is quite hot, but those Athlons are supposed to be able to take a
lot more).  Stability has never been a problem once I worked out that
the motherboard /really/ doesn't like APIC being enabled in the kernel -
it was crashing every few hours or so before that.

My previous machine was an 800 MHz Duron (hmm, what was James saying
about superfluous upgrades earlier?), and I never had any reliability
problems with that, either - although it didn't come with a heatsink,
which ended up costing over half the price of the CPU itself :-)

I suspect that part of the stability problems that people attribute to
AMD machines may well be due to shoddy motherboards or other such
components.

Cameron.