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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (151941)	12/10/2001 4:13:10 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Joe, Re: "There was one FSB change, and that is about it." And a memory change. And a change in base multipliers. And multiple BIOS changes to support new processors - Palomino, etc. Have you counted the number of chipsets that have come out for Athlon (and we'll just count VIA and AMD, since those are the largest sellers)? KX133, KT133, KT133A, AMD750, AMD760, KT266, KT266A... if you bought an Athlon Classic Slot A at 500MHz, and later upgraded to an Athlon Thunderbird at 900MHz, then an Athlon Thunderbird with at 1.2GHz/266MHz FSB, and finally an Athlon XP 1800+, you would have needed to upgrade your motherboard every time. The slot A Athlon only had the KX133 and AMD750 platforms available to it - thus the 500MHz Athlon classic would have required one of these options. The Thunderbird was socket A, and therefore required a KT133 chipset - there's your next upgrade for the 900MHz Athlon. Next comes 266MHz front side bus support. The VIA KT133A supported this, and so did the late AMD760, which would have given you DDR support as well. The 1.2GHz Athlon would have required you to get a chipset capable of the faster front side bus. So you were just forced to buy your third AMD based motherboard. Finally, you see the Athlon XP, which requires a DDR capable motherboard. If you had already bought the AMD760, you would have probably still needed a new motherboard to support the faster clock frequencies, and the Palomino features, such as the on-board thermal diode. That's your fourth motherboard, so you would have probably gotten the KT266 or updated AMD760 based motherboard. But that's not all. VIA just launched the KT266A. In order to get top performance with your Athlon, you'd probably have to get a fifth Athlon motherboard, but that's not requirement unless you are a hard core enthusiast. Without it, that brand new Athlon sort of goes to waste, though. But anyway, it proves my point. The Athlon upgrade path that you AMDroids are tooting your horn over is a joke. People that bought Athlon chips needed to upgrade their motherboard at least as many times as people upgrading their Intel CPUs. Bah. Some upgrade path. wbmw