Jesus tapdancin' Christ. I knew Athlons still didn't have the built-in "killswtich" yet, but didn't realize they'd actually go up in flames.

I know that AMD <I>recommended</I> that mobo makers install their own killswitch, but none did until Tom's Hardware released their video on the life expectancy of an Athlon without a fan. So yes, it's up to the user to install a software monitor, and even that is a far less desirable solution.

Hopefully the failsafe is becoming standard in mobo's, and will be built into the CPU on their next architecture upgrade.

I should note that I've been considering the Abit BG7, but I can't find any really good reviews of it. Did this board just slip through the cracks? It seems to have all the features I'm looking for really (though I dig the extra IDE spots on the IT7 because it allows me to really expand), and it's the 845G chipset (the IT7 is only the 845E and only supports PC2100 vs 845G's support of PC2700), but... ? I'm sort of aprehensive about buying a board that it seems like no one has looked at. Maybe I'll take a chance and see how it goes.

Ill expand this later but just quickly...
Yes athlons whip the crap out of P4 for price/peformance but P4s are the best overall. But the heatsink design this is utter crap. I mean hell you've put on athlon heatsinks, those things require allot of force an often the assistance of a screwriver just the get those damn clips on. Fall off? It'd rip out of the motherboard first!!!

I think the white part it snaps on to broke off. :\

Okay, given my technical retardation, help me here.

As I understood it, when the P4 first came out, it wasn't anything spectacular, as it apparently was no better than the best P3. Based upon what I'm hearing here, it's a good chip now. So, did I mishear? Or, has it just been greatly improved?

Pretty much, mostly other issues like busses and ram types.

The white bit? Makes more sense. What mobo and how forcefuly di he isntall it... Most mobos i think you can set to shut down if the temp goes over X.

P4's, IMHO, are still crap. They're a crap design pushed out by Intel because they were getting their butts handed to 'em by AMD. In its original design, P4's were supposed to have various cool features that would have made them much better all-around chips.

However, realizing that most consumers pay attention to only clock speed, they took out a lot of that to make a chip that would run faster. The P4 is the first chip they have ever released that performs <I>worse</I> clock-for-clock than a previous chip; you are correct about that syc. Underclock a P4 to 1GHz, and a 1GHz P3 will beat it on some tests.

However, as jag alluded to, what really hindered P4's at first was the fact that you could only get them with expensive Rambus or ancient SDR-SDRAM, due to marketing and political reasons. Rambus is actually a better match for the P4 than DDR is, but it's just too expensive for most people, so they eventually came out with support for DDR.

I'll take issue with "P4's are best overall" though. Athlon XP's will hold their own quite nicely to a comparable P4. By "comparable", I don't even mean clock spead, I mean 2200+ vs. 2.2GHz. The reason P4's are best right now is that Intel currently has the leg up on manufacturing (although I haven't read the entire THG article that UT linked to, and it looks like this new 2600+ is more than just a rush job to close the gap..)

So even if one argues that P4's are better, I couldn't justify buying one unless you just have gobs of dough and want the absolute fastest possible right now. If you have $<I>n</I> to spend, your best bet is to spend that $<I>n</I> on an Athlon setup instead of a P4.

P4s are, clockspeed-for-clockspeed, an inferior CPU to the current Athlon XPs. A 1.6ghz P4 is inferior to a 1.6ghz Athlon XP, simple as that. There very, very few applications where the P4 will have any advantage, and if so, a minor one, unless the code was specifically P4-optimized. Fact.

They are, dollar-for-dollar, an inferior CPU to the current Athlon XPs. A 1.6ghz P4 costs around $125, a 1.6ghz Athlon XP costs around $85.

P4s ramp up to higher clockspeeds than Athlon CPUs, and it is at those very high clockspeeds (2.2ghz and above), that the P4 can pull away from lower-clocked Athlons. At those speeds, the P4s are usually more than 50% more expensive than comparable Athlons.

The P4 was designed with Rambus memory in mind, which offers higher memory bandwidth, with some latency penalties. Poor design and bad marketing decisions have led to a reversal of that policy, most new P4 boards are geared towards high-performance DDR memory, such as the upcoming DDR400 sticks.

The P4 was also designed with high clockspeeds in mind, this not necessarily being a reflection of actual resulting speed. Thus, the P4 core can probably be pushed higher for another few GHZ, whereas the current Athlon core can not. The marketing war is being won by GHZ, since that's supposedly a reflection of speed. The chip hasn't stopped underperforming, but if you are prepared to pay a considerable premium, you can get a version of it that's been tweaked enough to be faster than any AMD offering. A minor performance bonus (that doesn't make any difference for 98% of applications) for a major markup. As - at such high speeds - the CPU is almost never the bottleneck, paying a premium for such a small difference is utterly nonsensical; disk/memory/bus/graphics bandwidth will be a bottleneck long before the CPU becomes an issue, unless every single component bar the CPU is absolutely top-of-the-line.

The Athlon core does run hot, but any correctly installed heatsink/fan (such as the ones that'll be sold to you by almost any half-decent dealer, or MB/CPU combos sold on the net) will do its job well enough to prevent trouble. Horror stories of burning computers and melted CPUs are usually the result of amateurish tinkering.

As a side-note, the current fastest available Athlon XP, at 1.8ghz, costs $146, and is a very fast CPU. A P4 cpu with comparable performance is more expensive; the second-fastest P4, ignoring the 'flagships' which always carry a premium, at 2.4ghz, costs over $300. While it is slightly faster at a variety of tasks, it doesn't warrant the markup under any circumstances. As a final technical note, the just-announced (and very soon available) Athlon XP 2600+ levels the playing field again, matching the P4 2.53ghz at most benchmarks, also seeming to be very overclockable (The Athlon seems to go up to 2.8ghz without too much trouble.) See the story at http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020821/index.html

AMD has a very good history regarding their chipset/motherboard/upgrading policies, whereas Intel has a history of trying to force MB upgrades as rapidly as possibly, making their newer products incompatible with older boards; they also tried to control the market for intel-CPU chipsets, attemtping to sue competitors out of the market. (trying to create a quasi-monopoly to control prices on motherboards, and chips). They also have a rich and varied tradition of ruthlessly exploiting and discriminating against their workforce. (www.faceintel.com and http://www.faceintel.com/whoweare.htm ) That's just an 'added bonus' in addition to their overpriced, overhyped, and underperforming hardware, however.

X.

<center>
<a href="http://www.de.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q3/020821/images/start2.gif">Athlon, effortlessly running at 2.88ghz</a></center>

I think the issue with the P4 was to get those clock speeds they made the pipe too damn long. As a result every time i screwed up it lost 16 or so cycles. Frankly i only buy Athlons, i don't like P4s and i don't like Intel. The only exception is laptops, i prefer not to ignite my pants. As a result ill probably get a G4.

If i wanted to splash out i'd got for faster and more RAM, RAID, SCSI and better gfx over a P4 any day.

Jag - the PowerBook gets quite warm. Play with one for a while and you'll see. :)

Xug - you're spot-on.

Probably the biggest reason I want to build a P4 system is because I haven't done it yet. I've built everything from 486's up to some pretty fast Athlons but I haven't touched a P4 yet. The Athlon XP 2600+ has me reconsidering whether or not I'll go with a Pentium 4, simply because it <b>is</b> that fast. But I must have built 20 Athlon boxes, so it's just not that exciting...

Ah, decisions, decisions... :)

So, if I wanted to create a good porn computer...you know, one that allows me to watch high quality streaming video and download a ton of pics...what would you recommend?

Eh, I'd personally recommend taking the "home" system I have up there. Radeon 8500 LE graphics would be great for watching [porn] movies, 512 MB of RAM is definitely enough... I'd probably put 2x80GB hard drives in it though. And you could swap out the motherboard/processor for an Athlon solution to save a few hundred bucks. 1.4GHz or above would be all you needed to watch porn all day.

You'd also want to get some pretty fast DSL or a cable connection. I'm all about DSL because my experiences with it have been better than cable (I've had 2 cable providers, 1 DSL, guess which I use now :) ), but you can still get decent cable if you live in the right place.

Actually though, I guess I really need to recommend a Macintosh. Probably the new 17" iMac. iPhoto would be great for organizing your pornographic images and QuickTime 6 takes the cake for streaming video. Yeah. And that 17" wide display would make you drool over the crisp nipples it displayed.

Well, you know, I HAVE wanted a Mac for a while now. ;)

Seriously though, $10 says that someone out there actually HAS built a computer strictly for hitting porn sites.

X, I'm as big an AMD fan as the next guy (I've never bought an Intel chip either) but I don't agree with this statement. As that latest THG article points out, AMD's weakness is still in chipsets -- the memory controller is still too much of a bottleneck right now. I realize AMD doesn't have the resources to produce chipsets as well as Intel, and they've even said they don't want to be in the chipset business. But that's a mistake.. if they don't want to make them themselves, then they should partner much more tightly with a third party to make kickass chipsets.

So anticompetitive attempts aside, I think Intel is more in control of the infrastructure situation for their chips than AMD. And yes, they released the P4 knowing full well that they'd be changing the chipset within a year.. but who really plops a new CPU into their system? As you point out, there are other bottlenecks that are more pressing than the CPU. I upgrade the graphics card once or twice during the life of the CPU, but by the time I want to replace the chip, it's time for a new mobo anyway.

Effortlessly? Using a cooling system to keep the chip at -41°C, and even then only for "a short time"?