AMD Athlon and Duron800

OMG! Just buy a friken decent $40 h/f and you won't have a heat problem! You are way to influenceable if you are convinced of that because of what Fugger and AMDMeltdown are saying. Listen to the majority.

- "That's no moon, it's Rambus!"

The Athlon is the faster, more expensive processor. The Athlon has 256KB level 2 cache while the Duron has only 64KB. Otherwise, they're pretty much identical, except that the latest Athlons (C-type) can have FSB (bus) speeds of 266MHz, compared with the Athlon 'B' and Duron's bus speed which is 200MHz.

If you're interested in graphics, you'll probably want a high memory throughput. The Athlon paired with DDR memory offers the best solution for this at the moment (the Pentium III only has an FSB of 133MHz, although they can use DDR on VIA chipsets).

If you can't afford the Athlon, I'd still go for the Duron, which will also work on DDR boards.

~ I'm not AMD biased, I just think their chips are better ~

Oh, well, maybe some people think the P4 with RAMBUS can rival DDR throughput. I say probably not (though I can't say for sure), but even if it does, the P4 is way too expensive for anyone to buy at the mo, unless you happen to have a spare arm or leg you can sell.

~ I'm not AMD biased, I just think their chips are better ~

In my experience, there are no real "software incompatibilities" as you put it, with AMD's duron or athlon. The main incompatibilities are in the hardware (mostly those damned via motherboards, lol) But once youve got it setup and running properly, there is not real "difference", software compatability-wise between and athlon or duron and, say, a pentium 3. On occasion youll find a very obscure program that needs a patch for "amd processors" but the same thing occurs just as rarely for pentium 3s (example: some acer scanners require a pentium 3 patch for win9x or you get random windows protection errors on bootup [note that a similar patch is also required for athlon or duron]) These issues are usually not the fault of the processor but rather of the software developer.

As far as things running smooth the athlon/duron and pentium 3 will run similar at the same clock speed although each occasionally upstages the other in some areas (athlons superior FPU comes to mind)

I guess its a matter of preference and price. (Whichever you find cheaper should be the one you take, which will probably be the athlon as for the most part the intel processors are a tad more expensive at the same clock speed.)

(BTW A couple of people do build Duron systems : Alienware [www.alienware.com] and compaq as well as others.)

<i>Nascar racing is one of the few sports where spectators routinely die</i>