thunderbird or athlon

[Guest]

I am planning to upgrade from a Pentium II 350 to an Athlon or thunderbird 1 gig. I realize I need a new mother board and perhaps memory. But, I have not found any information on the which processor is best for me. The majority of my use will be processing audio files to remove clicks pops and other noise. The rendering time for this operation now is typically 1 minute for every minute of music on my pII 350. Any thoughts????

 

[Guest]

The eternal question, how much you have/want to spend? If money is no concern.. a Thunderbird... if it is, an Athlon.. even a low Mhz Athlon (around 600Mhz) will probably give you a nice boost.

/---------------------------------------/
Be and let others be as well!
<b>The Dark-Knight</b>

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply, I will probably spend enough to go to 1 giga hertz. The Thunderbirds are cheaper on price watch than the athlons. ??? It sound like you are saying that the thunderbird will process my files more quickly. If that is the case, I will buy thunderbird at the cheaper price.

thanks

 

[Guest]

TBird, you don't want to be stuck on a slot MB. when AMD is switching to socket for all it's upcoming processer. I know there is the SLOKET PCB. but still the price difference of a slot to socket is worth it. also you might wana look into DURON if price a concern. They are a realy mean CPU, though it's fly like a BIRD, but it will eat any *ntel CPU alive. =) and pentium III too. hehehe, maybe not PIII 1GHZ.

also check out the message TITLE: TBird or OClock DURON.

 

[Guest]

Do not go with Athlon 1-GIG. They use slot 'A' and thus must use SLOWER external L2 cache! There is a signifigant proformance boost between original Athlon and TBird-Athlon. .18 micron ect. I repeat DO NOT GO GIGA ATHLON!!!

 

[Guest]

You made the right choice. Buying an original Athlon now would be buying into an older and somewhat slower technology. Not that the originals aren't fast as hell.

FYI, the Thunderbird is the latest revision of the Athlon. The original Athlon has a separate 512K L2 cache which runs at a fraction of the CPU speed, e.g. 1/2, 1/3, 2/5.... The faster the CPU, the slower the L2 cache.

The Thunderbird has 256K of "on-die" L2 cache built into the cpu, so it runs at cpu speeds. At the same speed, the Thunderbird is faster than the original Athlon. (Hope I got these cache sizes right.)

All of the original Athlons are slot-A CPUs. Most Thunderbirds, and certainly the faster ones, use a socket-A CPU. So at one-gig, you'd need a different type of motherboard for each respective CPU.

Mike

edit: changed slot-1 to slot-A, as reminded by another post.
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by mikem on 11/18/00 07:21 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

Remember to check prices at www.pricewatch.com. The 900 Mhz t-bird was the better value last time i looked - $165, something like that. Spend the extra dough on more RAM, that should help your processing times quite a bit I believe. If you can wait, get the DDR supported mobo, that's what I'm waiting for !!

 

[Guest]

Sounds like you're locked onto a 1GHz processor. There really isn't much of a question in this matter. An Athlon is a slot A processor and is a dead end upgrade. In comparisson, a Duron at an equal clock speed nearly performs the same. The reasons being a slightly different core and on die cache.

A thunderbird should be the processor you pick up. I believe they're cheaper now anyway. (Which makes sense. A TBird doesn't use any PCB board and the cache is on die. Much cheaper to produce). That and the socket A has life left in it. All around, it's the much better choice.


The Jolly Wizened Oaf!

 

[Guest]

A Thunderbird IS an Athlon. Your Post should read: K75 or Thunderbird. If you see an Athlon 1GHz, now it is most likely a t-bird. Don't get Athlon and T-bird confused. THEY ARE THE SAME. Just like the Coppermine is still a PIII, the Thunderbird is Still an ATHLON. BTW get the T-Birds, not the K75. Despite what people think, there isn't a huge difference between a T-bird and a K75, (5-10%), BUT the slot A is dead, so even if a K75 1GHz + KX133 mobo is cheaper. You are already buying an obsolite mobo. And the Thunderbird should be cheaper as it uses the less expensive Socket A package

Duron 650@1000@1.725v, 40C idle, 45C after 6 Hours of DivX Encoding (100% CPU)
Abit KT7-RAID

 

[Guest]

Thank you all. It was unanimous. Thunderbird is it. Right now I have my eye on an abit board with built in raid. I am thinking of waiting a bit to see how long befor I can get DDR memory with my Thunderbird. That would be perfect.