Re: [APML] pentium vs athlon

["Alan Bland" <gordo@pcisys.net>]

>   Thanx for the reply. According to one retailer, the piii 550 is as fast
as
> the athlon 800 in benchmark tests and $200 cheaper. Make sense to you ?

Not likely.  I recently built an Athlon 650 MHz as my new home system, and
two weeks later got a new Dell Pentium III 750 MHz at work.  I ran some
benchmarks to compare the two systems.  Here are some raw numbers from the
Sandra 2000 benchmark suite:

    Athlon 650: 2055 MIPS, 911 MFLOPS
    P-III 750: 2012 MIPS, 998 MFLOPS

Surprisingly, the Athlon 650 beats the P-III 750 in the MIPS rating, which
compares integer math and other basic operations.  The MFLOPS rating
measures floating point performance, and the Pentium III 750 outperforms the
Athlon 650 as one would expect.  I get similar results with other benchmark
programs.

Both are very fast systems.  I use both of them daily and can't tell the
difference in general usage.  The Athlon system does a wonderful job in
Photoshop - much faster than the system it replaced (200Mhz Pentium).
Although I don't do Photoshop at work, I'm sure the P-III system would
handle it exceptionally well.

Notably, Athlon CPU's cost much less than equivalent MHz Pentuim III CPU's.
Below 750 MHz, the Athlon gives better value than the P-III (although Athlon
motherboards cost more than most P-III motherboards, so the price difference
may be a wash).  At 750 and above, the Athlon has a reduced cache multiplier
that will affect certain benchmarks.  I'm not sure what real-world effect it
has, but I would generally avoid the 750+ Athlons until AMD releases their
next generation.

>   As for the video card, what minimums should I look for and should memory
> be a concern ?

As others have mentioned, if you play 3D games get the best 3D video card
you can afford with as much video memory as possible.  Anything with the
nVidia TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, or GeForce chips will be more than satisfactory for
games.  If you are not into games, just about any modern video card will
perform well for Photoshop-type applications.  4MB video memory can handle
1024x768 at 32-bit color.  If you use a 19 inch or larger monitor you may
want 8MB of video memory to run at higher resolution.



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