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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (149626)	11/26/2001 6:37:13 PM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Tony: I'll have to pull an Albert on this one. Huh?????? I'll try again&#133 my previous comments weren't quite clear, I'll fully admit that ;-). Major OEMs use only a very limited range of hardware (and usually only hardware from major manufacturers). This reduces their chance of running into problems and reduces their costs associated with hardware qualification. The result of this is that quite a few bugs are discovered in white-box systems and DIY systems. Since AMD has a greater market share in these, AMD - and not Intel as you had argued - systems get faster exposure to the bugs. Thus, you should buy an AMD system, not an Intel system ;-). One instance of this was seen with the VIA South Bridge bug that cropped up recently. It was found in AMD systems first (and proclaimed to be yet-another-proof of AMD instability by a few Intelabees), but the problem was equally present in Intel systems. However, since the majority of Intel systems with the VIA south bridge were sold as complete packages by OEMs - and very few in the DIY market - the exposure to diverse hardware was minimal and the bug not detected at first (since it only occurs under certain circumstances). If you are buying from a major OEM, however, it probably makes very little difference, since the systems undergo full QC testing. The lesson is: If you buy DIY (esp., but white-box shoppers should also pay attention) do some research before you buy. Make sure there are no known conflicts with the hardware you are planning to mix. I.e. don't get one of those GeForce2 boards that don't live up to AGPx4 specs (or whatever the problem is) and put it in your i850 system - or you could well fry your system. And don't buy a motherboard with that buggy VIA south bridge if you are planning to use hardware which exposes it (not sure under what conditions it occurs). And so on... -fyo