AMD frenzy

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oneArtist

New member
Doing computer research now is crazy. I thought DAWs had settled down to PIII/CUSL/Matrox, but when I started reading the new reviews, it seems that AMD is dethroning Intel. The AMD board of choice for overclocker DAWs is the "Iwill" KK266(SDRAM/VIA). The next article says now is the time to buy DDR with AMD chips because the price has dropped and they're faster. As I'm looking over three DDR boards, I stumble onto the SiS single chip which is faster and cooler than the AMD chip boards. The next article makes all the others sound out of date and the SiS boards aren't even out yet! It's the nVidia chip and it appears ready to propel AMD audio and video processing up to a whole new plateau. The article said nVidia approached Intel but Intel wanted to do their own thing. AMD is starting to remind me of the VHS format with it's multible vendors and Intel is starting to look like Sony with its' exclusive Beta.
This is like playing checkers on a river, you're just about to make a move when all your pieces flow downstream.
Chuck:confused:
 
# AMD is starting to remind me of the VHS format with it's multible
# vendors and Intel is starting to look like Sony with its' exclusive
# Beta.

I dunno. Of course, I'm ex-Intel and bear the company such a grudge (like most ex-employees and contractors) that an Intel product will never, ever see the inside of my house, but I've never seen any point to buying Intel anyway. AMD's just a better deal now, as it has usually been in the past.

Just bought an Athlon T-Bird 1.2G/266 yesterday, to go with an ASUS A7M266.

Unfortunately, I was at a show and had to get the stupid boxed CPU (which seems like an utter chump shot to me) to get what I wanted, but the OEM-pack 1.2G/266 CPU is well under $100 now at long discount.

Anyway, overclocking in a DAW seems like asking for trouble to me.
 
I gotta say, I agree with bongolation here, O/Cing a DAW is asking for trouble. I use an Athlon 800 do drive my Digi001, and certain AMD configs were approved, and are now oficially supported by Digidesign, largely BC a couple of PPL have been selling Athlon DAW's with Digi HW/SW and supporting them themselves. Me, I was lucky, I ended up with a good board, long before I bought Protools.

Unoffically, AMD Athlon + AMD 761 + PC2100 DDR RAM = record setting track counts and host based plugin counts.
 
bongo & td,
If it would have been for me, I would have gone with AMD without blinking(I already have the first Athlon w/751amd chip), but Emeric , a very knowledgeable and helpful friend from Canada suggested I stay with Pentium so my nephew won't have anything else to worry about at Aviation school except staying ing the air.
I got him a P3 1GB, CUSL-C, Matrox450 32mb, YamahaCDRW, 17" monitor, full Tower etc etc for $1150. All retail box, no OEM. I'll donate my old SB Live card.
Chuck
ps the place I had build it didn't even charge for assembly- plus great prices. csfeathers@hotmail.com
 
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I just built an athalon box.

Abit Kt7E w/KT133 $110
Athalon 1000 $90 !
512 mb PC133 $58
WD 60gb 7200 ATA100 $125

Bang fo da buck!
 
betamax may be gone , but sony is going strong.....so , that was a sony thing??..........intel does make a decent chipset, if that matters.
 
J
Yes, everything I've read on the forums convinced me that Intel does make good, stable chips & processors, that's why I got one for my nephew. But, if you read the hardware reviews about what nVidia is about to do, it's incredible that a company would turn them down if they ask to partner with you. That's what Intel did.
Chuck
 
oneArtist said:
...it's incredible that a company would turn them down if they ask to partner with you. That's what Intel did.
Click to expand...

There's no explaining Intel's policies except by my theory that at a point when a corporation reaches a certain mega-size, Satan Himself quietly calls in the mortgage and starts running the place behind the scenes. 8-)

That's the only way I can make any sense out of the sheer awfulness of Intel from the inside. They have great PR about how wonderful they are, but they are a bloodsucking, pernicious outfit with about the same ethical base as Microsoft. And worse, they are _cheap_, crazy, pathological cheap like your senile maiden aunt who eats dogfood to save money and has her mattress stuffed with $100 bills.

Their actions on deals like you mention are predicated more on megalomaniac power strategy than on short-term economics.

AMD may be as bad (though I can scarcely believe it's possible), but I didn't work for them.
 
The main issue with an AMD setup is that the motherboards (really the chipsets, especially from VIA) still can't touch a good old Intel BX board for stability. Why is this? Well, for one thing, with new VIA chipsets coming out every few months, you can imagine that the production cycle is pretty quick. So they probably have little time to test for compatibility and write stable drivers and they definitely don't have Intel's massive resources. Intel has had chipset embarassments of its own (i820, anyone?) but overall, motherboards based on the intel chips are more stable. That stability is greatest with the BX boards which are definitely getting pretty long in the tooth.

If I were building a DAW today I would get an AMD setup and choose my components (especially motherboard) very carefully.

Overclocking not for DAW users?!? WTF? Overclocking is extremely beneficial to us! I'm sure we've all hit that plugin brick wall...well guess what? You'll hit that a few plugins/tracks later if you overclock. Sounds nice, eh? I've been running a Celeron 566 @ 850 for over a year now and my system is very stable. I firmly believe that I haven't had a single CPU lockup since I built it, and very few issues at all, but none relating to overclocking.

If you don't do it, you're basically losing the value of your CPU purchase, plain and simple.
 
Hey Bong, why don't you tell us how you REALLY feel?

:)

I should just say that I'm using an ASUS PIII motherboard with a VIA chipset and it works great for me. But after being skeptical of this whole story of compatibilty woes, I have seen enough grief about it to conclude there must be something to it. Users of the Delta cards seem to be complaining the most.
 
Don't you actually have to get in there and solder stuff to OC most AMD CPUs. At least on my K7 650 you can't just overclock it in the BIOS like you can with celerons etc. But, in general, if you can get a stable overclocked system running, there should be no problem using it for a DAW. I have a friend who burned through 3 Celeron 300MHz chips before getting one to overclock at 450 without crapping out though. I think there are some sites that keep pretty good tabs on the latest best chips for overclocking if you look around.
 
RWhite said:
Hey Bong, why don't you tell us how you REALLY feel?
Click to expand...
OK, I admit I was a bit restrained there, but I'm trying to remain civilized.
I should just say that I'm using an ASUS PIII motherboard with a VIA chipset and it works great for me. But after being skeptical of this whole story of compatibilty woes, I have seen enough grief about it to conclude there must be something to it. Users of the Delta cards seem to be complaining the most.
Click to expand...
I see the gripes coming from Digisound 001 users most. They seem to have a lot of trouble with everything.

Supposedly, it's the chipset, not the CPU. I have repeatedly heard that the ASUS A7M266 MB was the way to go, having an AMD 761, so I dropped about $100 extra over the price of one with a ALi chipset and got it. I'm in the process of building the thing from scratch now. Booted perfectly the first time and now I am dithering around looking at the BIOS options before proceding further.

I haven't installed the Radeon VE card nor the SeaSound interface yet, just the MB, 1.2G/266 CPU, 512 Micron DDR memory and drives (WD 40G 7200 "Caviar").

We'll see what happens in the next couple of days. Frankly, with CPU speed so cheap I don't see the point in undertaking the headaches of overclocking.

BTW, if anyone has any advice on the setup of the A7M266, please let me know.
 
I have had some criticism for buying my nephew a P3/CUSL2-C/Matrox450 - old technology.
Besides my computer nerd friends' advice to get P3 for my nephew, my own experience was part of the decision. I've had a K7 650 for 1.5 years and before I partitioned it, blue screens and reformatting were a regular activity. An ASUS K7M mobo helped some. My nephews' family still has an old Pentium 266 that has never crashed and they have never reformatted.
I can save ghost copies and reformat, and I would choose a fast a AMD DAW for myself if I were buying now, but my nephew would panic as a freshmen away from home if his new computer got the blue screen of death. We can learn from History.
Chuck
 
I have an AMD K6 500mhz for my regular comp (not a DAW) and all I can say that it's a piece of shit. It's a compaq too, but all I have is problems with it. I get close to 3 or 4 lockups a day while just surfing the net, using Word, and AIM...not much, doesn't take up a huge amount of system resources, but still it locks up every hour or so. Before that piece of crap, I had 3 intel comps. The first was a 33mHz pentium chip (i forgot the number like 386 or something), it was a workhorse for back then. Then came a 150 mhz pentium 1... I can use power point, word, internet, AIM, even a resource sucking game running at the same time and the thing never quits...too bad the graphics card blew and all i can see are 16 colors now, but hey, CPU wise it's great. Then my pentium 2 PackardBell comp...Unfrickinbeleivable what i ran on that thing...preforms better than the K6 in every way, but has half the ram, CPU speed, and hard drive space...I'm stickin with Intel, even tho they're $$$ and bloodthirsty :)
 
Don't judge the K7 by the K6. They are completely different animals. I also have an old K6-2 350 system (its not an MP3 server) and while mostly relable it was no faster at anything than my Pentium 200. The K7 is a much, much improved chip.

And I agree, most of the problem with K7 motherboard seem to be directed at VIA chipsets, not the cpu. But once again I have a VIA chipset and it works fine for me.
 
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