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

To: Charles Gryba who wrote (153864)	1/5/2002 11:29:19 AM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 186894

wbmw, I thought you were waiting to see benches of Northwood on P4X266 since it's supposed to be faster than Intel's chip. I am now running Windows XP pro on an athlon XP 1600+ on a Via KT266A with 512MB DDR. It's the MOST stable computer I've ever used. It's up 24/7 ( running a development web-site ) and I am also playing games on it occasionally.It has never crashed or BSOD or anything. Amazing. Maybe Via is getting its act together Old expression in the computer industry: anybody can build just one.

To: Charles Gryba who wrote (153864)	1/5/2002 3:33:41 PM
From: wanna_bmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Constantine, Re: "I thought you were waiting to see benches of Northwood on P4X266 since it's supposed to be faster than Intel's chip." It sounds like your saying that I cannot both have a grudge against VIA chipsets and also want to see reviews with them included. I beg to differ. You might be right that VIA is improving, and your own personal experience is surely a valid point, but that doesn't change the fact that the majority of web review sites out there continue to rate Intel and VIA chipsets according to stability. If they were having as perfect a time as you, I would imagine that they would claim equal stability, rather than a more stable solution from Intel. I have heard personally that some of these chipsets from VIA et al can be finicky with different memory configurations with different DIMMs populated. I would assume that the rate at which VIA launches chipsets must mean that they cut validation time in order to reach the market faster. As long as people are only populating one or two slots out of three or four, then only a small fraction of people will find problems. But then, that is only one possibility. I'm sure there are other ways to foul up a VIA chipset. On the other hand, I am still eager to see them reviewed. Why? Because not everybody has standards for reliability as strict as mine, and many will be attracted to the performance and price of a VIA chipset. Also, Athlon PCs are always tested with the fastest VIA chipset available. Everything else being equal, doing a performance test against a slower Intel chipset is not testing performance as much as it is testing stability (hence, the reason why most websites have at least a small blurb to say regarding the stability of the Intel chipsets). If these websites really want to test the performance of the CPU for the enthusiast cheerleaders out there, the least they can do is include the fastest chipset for both platforms, regardless of the reputation for reliability. Later, reviews can go into platform reliability testing, since a common feature story on many websites is the "chipset roundup". There, they can include all chipsets and test performance and reliability. But, I am usually not one to complain. These websites have enough problems catering to the thousands of readers that visit their site, who each have a different idea of what's "fair" in testing an Intel vs an AMD platform. I am happy to see any of the results, and then judge for myself. Still, I will still be more attracted to the reviews that cater to my own personal testing preferences. Usually, there are enough reviews out there that I can be choosy. wbmw