Magnusfarce said:
I've built a fair number of Intel systems, but hardly any AMD. You make
it
sound like AMD systems are harder to put together. Is that so and in what
ways are they trickier?
Well, in the past, the heatsink was trickier to mount and the CPU's have
their dies exposed, which could be damaged while installing the heatsink.
The Athlon 64 now is proctected like the P4.
It used to also be a big problem with seedy supply houses that would hard
overclock lesser OEM CPU's and sell them at a higher price. This was
enabled by the dies being exposed. Since the heatsink AMD supplied was so
crappy, there was little reason to buy a retail package version.
Also, I was a little put off by reports of higher numbers if DOA Athlon
builds. It was even talked about in Maximum PC when I did my first build,
where they mentioned that it was not uncommon to fire up an Athlon build
the first time and get nothing at all. According to the article, P4 builds
tended to make it through without much drama.
There have also been issues with chipsets. AMD only made a few chipsets of
their own. Some chipsets have had issues in the past, particularly some
earlier Via chipsets. I believe just about all of that is now fixed. Intel
chipset systems tend to be the most stable and hassle-free. That's not
saying you'll have a problem with a Via, SiS, or nForce chipset, but that
you're just less likely to have one with Intel.
Now, some users have varying experiences, but it made me change my mind, at
the time, to get a P4 board and CPU instead of the Abit KR7A that I was
lusting after. AMD has come a long way from being a fringe, budget player
in processors to be the force that's leading the direction future CPUs are
going.
I've since built an Athlon XP system because I wanted to build on a tight
budget and didn't want anything to do with a Celeron. I've been pleasantly
surprised how well it went. I'm so impressed with the performance/price
equation that I'm now going to build AMD for my next build sometime in a
year from now.