Stability issues
This is the part where I should have given more thought to the strange answers that the AMD reps were giving at the AMD Road Show. Especially the part about them wanting to make sure the Palamino works at lower clock speeds first.
Is it no wonder then that I've had stability problems with all 3 of the Palamino systems that I've built, but comparatively zero problems with any of the 7 Pentium 4 systems and many other Pentium III systems that I now own.
People have said that the Athlon is not as stable as the Pentium III. Up until 6 months ago, I would have (and did!) strongly argue against that statement. None of the pre-Palamino Athlons and Durons that I have had experience with had stability problems. My Athlon systems ranging in speed from 600 MHz to 1200 MHz all run 24 hours a day without a problem, some of them on the order of two years now.
But starting with the Athlon XP 1800 (that I won from the back of that AMD truck on October 9 2001) and then with the Athlon XP 1900 chip a month later, and finally with the dual Athlon MP 1800 that I more recently built, I've had strange problems.
The Athlon XP 1800, having come with a nice MSI motherboard as part of the package, I can say is almost fully stable. Not quite. About once a week, the machine just randomly reboots. No blue screen in Windows XP. Just boom, black screen and reboot as you're using it. Otherwise it's a speed demon.
The Athlon XP 1900 problem I've documented on the Secrets page a few months ago, and that problem is that I am unable to get the chip running faster than 1200 MHz. It's a 1600 MHz part, yet when I try to boot it at 1600 MHz on the ASUS A7A266 board, it just plain won't boot, even though I can pop in an Athlon Thunderbird part and run it faster than 1200 MHz on the same board. I've had two other readers report similar problems to me of not being able to get the AMD chip to run at full clock speed.
So when I read that dual processor Athlon MP boards were finally available in January, I went to AMD's web site and looked at their recommended boards. They specifically recommend the ASUS A7M266-D board for dual processor Athlon MP system. So I bought that board, and a pair of Athlon MP 1800 processors, and 2 gigabytes of real Kingston brand ECC registered DDR2100 SDRAM.
I put the system together. Windows Me installs and runs in single processor mode. I get speeds similar to the Athlon XP 1800 as expected. Windows 2000 installs and runs. Both processors work fine. So far so good. I go to install Windows XP. Boom. It blue screens during setup. I've tried and tried and tried. I just can't get Windows XP installed on this puppy.
This concerns me. 3 out of 3 Palamino based systems give me problems, while never in the past did I ever see a problem with a Thunderbird processor or the original Slot A Athlon.
Why does AMD only certify a fraction of available Socket A boards to be Athlon XP/MP compatible, yet their marketing people claim how those chips are backward compatible with existing Socket A boards?
Why did the Thunderbird processors jump in speed in 100 MHz increments and the faster Athlon XP processors only in 66 MHz increments? Is it due to sleazy marketing trying to push the most out of a 4% speed increase or is it indicative of chip yield problems or stability problems at these higher clock speeds?
You can see my dilemma. Even ignoring current speed benchmarks, how can I continue recommending the Athlon XP when I can't even get one system out of three to even run properly?
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