Anyone Wondered Why

There has all of a sudden been a spate of newbies and strangers turning up with fried Athlons? I am not by any means, a long time member of this forum, but I would say there is a little bit of a statistical blip happening here.

Either a chunk of users just got unlucky/dumb or certain people are attempting to cast a bad light on a certain chip... hell maybe I really am paranoid.

-* This Space For Rent *-
email for application details<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by peteb on 04/23/01 00:35 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

Hypothetical Situation:

You installed a new Athlon. Switched on. All is fine. a moment later your computer just goes crazy and crashes. A smell come out of the case. You open the case and see the processor is toast.

What is the first thing you would do?


I'm not sure about you, but I would call the Vendor and then perhaps AMD, and return the cpu. I wouldn't find another computer and come on thg and join a forum that is full of flaming in this section to ask for advise.


<font color=red>"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair!"</font color=red>

Or they could all be AmdMeltdown or Fugger!

~ I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully ~

My opinion on the AMD bashers:

They are just a bunch of clowns who will be X-box fanatics in a few months anyway. If you can't read the directions and do it right then grab a playstation. They are much more idiot proof. And I can just imagine one of these guys wondering why their Nintendo games don't work in the X-box.

BTW, I deal with these maroons everyday at work, so I know exactly what to expect.

"But I typed in my password 5 times and now the computer is locked." Maybe you should have called me before the 5th try so that I could inform you that you left CAPS on.

Retards!

nada?!?!

Yeah - unfortunately a lot of CPUs require the kinda fans and cooling not available to 3 pin mobo connectors anymore.

I haven't found a bit in my A7V133 bios that would shut my system down if the fan wasn't running anyway.

I have MBM to keep an eye on my system.

-* This Space For Rent *-
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dude, just face it, more ppl are buying hahathlons based on false/handicapped reviews so,...

...you'll see more ppl come here to vent their displeasure and that's it, now if you want to read more of laughathon users disasters go to amdzone.com I'm sure you'll find some more.



"AMD...you are the weakest link, good bye!"

i have to admit...i like his quote. in all honesty i read mostly tom's reviews. i do read a lot of others but his the most. kindly point out some of the flaws in his reviews for me that i may be enlightend. he did several reviews on the p4 when it came out in an effort to be fair. and to the best of my knowledge he never called it a bad chip. it does perform well. just when it came out, not well enough for the price. now with the price droping, i don't know mabey to some people it is worth it. i won't buy it for the same reason i won't wear a shirt with a brand logo on it. i don't believe that my internet connection would be bursting any more if i had p4. it's marketing, i know. and it works for them. fine, let them make their money however they like. amd's going to get mine however. i do like their ad's though.

At the core of every system: "I'm sorry dave, i'm afraid i can't do that."

You truly are a good excuse maker. What will it be next? False advertising? HAHAHAHA

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I am the first and only one with a 16MB GeForce2 GTS graphics card!

Ok, here are some of the flaws in Tom's reviews:

He never tests with actual systems that are in popular use. I've never seen him test with a USB mouse, or a USB ADSL modem. (Two devices that I have that do not work on my AMD platform.) He says it's because he wants to be fair to both sides. HUH?! How is it fair to test a system with no peripherals attached, or to use peripherals that are hand-picked so as not to reveal the vulnerabilities of one of the platforms?!

He never test with 3DMark2001. He ran an article today comparing the 1.7 GHz P4 against Athlon. He uses up-to-date technology on all but 3DMark. For 3DMark he uses the two-year-old 3DMark2000 which shows Athlon in a better light. Why? I'll tell you why. Because HE CAN'T GET HIS ATHLON SYSTEMS TO COMPLETE THE DAMNED TEST. That's why.

Now, believe it or not I'm pretty impartial. I'm typing this right now on an Apple PowerBook G4 which doesn't use either Intel or Athlon. I have both an Intel and an Athlon system at home that I built.

I believe that Tom has some kind of personal vendetta against Intel. Personally, I hate Intel too, but he purposely distorts his testing ever-so-slightly to favor AMD, while he puts his presentation together to make it appear that he is impartial. Furthermore, he never tells the full truth about how much more difficult it is to be an Athlon fan than it is to be an Intel fan. He never quite gets to the full down-and-dirty details of specific problems with specific chips using specific drivers. He never writes an article about how to fix problems with new Athlon systems because A) He doesn't know himself how to fix them, or B) He feels that such an article would be an admission that AMD platforms have problems that need fixing. As a new fan of Athlon, such an article would be something I would appreciate a great deal. Imagine, complete truth and honesty. That would certainly be a welcome thing to see on Tom's Hardware.

Well they wouldn't affect the benchmarks at all if they worked right, but that's not the point. The point is that people don't run benchmarks all day long. They run real programs, which are usually operating real cameras, scanners, dvd drives, decoder cards, mice, keyboards, and a million other miscellaneous devices, none of which will you see in one of Tom's tests. The reason being that it would portray a "dirty" version of reality that Tom doesn't want you to see: Athlon systems that crash or die more frequently than do Intel systems.

If you're saying you've never heard of someone having USB problems on Athlon systems before, then you just haven't been reading very much. I've seen them. But perhaps you're just blind to these reports by the fact that you don't WANT to see them. Your mind just automatically skips by them because it doesn't suit your particular distortion of reality. Just because you don't know about it or don't WANT to know about it doesn't mean it isn't true.

TimF does make some valid points. To explain, I will address your question of how a USB mouse or modem could affect the benchmarks. If there are NO USB devices present in a system, windows can skip loading the entire set of USB system drivers. ANY reduction in the number of drivers windows keeps active will leave that many more resources available. Even while the modem is inactive or even disconnected, Windows will probably be polling that USB modem which will involve function calls through usbhub.sys, usbd.sys, other windows files, and the modem's drivers. That's a lot of overhead when nothing is happening.

Now, I consider myself very computer-literate. I have even designed a USB device used for hardware testing at Argonne National Laboratory and therefore have some insight into wonders and dangers of writing USB drivers. USB modems can cause all kinds of trouble. In fact modems of all kinds have been known to have some of the worst drivers available especially considering how simple they are compared to a sound card or a video board. They can seriously slow down a system.

I too have had trouble with USB on my AMD system. I have a 1.2GHz Tbird on an A7V133 which has two USB ports on the motherboard and two more on a little expansion board which fits in the case opening of an unused PCI slot and is connected to the motherboard by a little ribbon cable. I have a USB scanner (UMAX 2100U) which is very flaky when connected to either port of the expansion board. It behaved even worse if I also plugged my USB QuickCam Pro into the other port of that board. I cannot use the VIA USB patch as it will not run under Win98 (it is for Win98SE only, maybe ME, not sure). I could only achieve stability with the scanner and USB mouse in the two ports directly on the motherboard and the camera on the expansion board. Even with my detailed knowledge of USB and computer systems in general, I have no better explanation or solution than "hey, it works that way!" I'm very glad your system doesn't have any problems with USB but that just isn't the case for a lot of users.

I do agree that it would be interesting to see Tom do a review that takes some of these things into consideration. However, in his defense, he clearly does many things right. When Intel had to recall the 1.13GHz PIII, the news specifically mentioned Dr Thomas Pabst of Tom's Hardware Guide as one of the leading reviewers able to document and reproduce the problems with that chip. Whether he is biased against Intel or not, he certainly has some influence over them.