OVERKILL
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Originally Posted By: itguy08
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
I'm on Intel, I've had a few AMD systems over the years but the stability of the Intel chipsets back when VIA, ALI and their ilk were the main game in town for AMD really soured me on them.
I think a lot of that had to do with Windows rather than the VIA chipsets. Been using AMD since the 486 days and had K5, K6, K62, Duron, and now the Ryzen. The VIA chipsets were pretty solid but had driver issues with Windows. On my Duron box, the machine that pushed me to Apple because of 98 and ME issues all the stability issues went away when I put Linux on it. It became rock solid.
I had far more board failures (remember the rash of ABIT and ASUS VIA-based boards?) with VIA chipsets than anything else. ALi and SiS were arguably more stable in some respects, but their support was next to non-existent. SiS or ALi southbridge driver procurement was an exercise in itself. Makes me shudder just thinking about it, LOL
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Growing up in the infancy of the personal computer, there were all kinds of brands that came, went or were absorbed. There used to a much broader array of graphics card/chip manufacturers: Trident, Cirrus Logic, 3DFX, VIA, ALi, SiS, Matrox, S3, Chips & Tech, OPTi, Oak, Real3D, Rendition, SGI, Hercules...etc.
I remember supporting that mess and those oddball drivers. It sucked...
It always made for an adventure finding drivers for stuff that was a few years old. I had quite the driver collection for that very reason
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The CPU market was far less diverse, you had Intel, and then if you were cheap, you had AMD, VIA or Cyrix, all of which were a serious downgrade from a comparable Intel offering.
AMDs offerings were as good as or better than Intel. AMD actually was the 2nd source for 8086/8088 CPUs back in the day and their 286, 386, and 486 CPUs were as fast as if not faster than Intel's of the time. The K5 and K6 were faster in office type stuff but had a weaker FPU. The K62 aattempted to fix that but it's FPU was a little less. The Athlon was faster than Intel and was an awesome CPU.
Don't forget you owe the x86_64 instruction set to AMD who invented it and licensed to Intel. Intel was too busy with Itanium to try to extend X86.
The floating point performance was an issue for gaming (which was a big part of what I was supporting through that era) and AMD reversed that with the Athlon. However Coppermine had faster L2 cache, and that made it, in many instances the faster CPU. However Intel threw that all away for quite a stint on the detour that was the P4. Remember RAMBUS? I have some RIMM's here somewhere on my desk, LOL!
And yes, Intel's attempt to force the 64-bit game went absolutely nowhere, ultimately having to adopt AMD_64/x86_64. I bet that was a hard pill for them to swallow.
I find it somewhat ironic that the PIII (in its mobile form) that Intel abandoned in favour of the P4, would eventually evolve into the desktop CPU series (core) that put Intel seriously ahead of AMD performance-wise. That was a truly strange era to be building performance rigs
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Chipset-wise, if you bought Intel, you got Intel unless you chose to intentionally cheap-out there as well. If you bought one of the others you got somewhat of a wide variety of potentially poorly supported garbage that finding drivers for was sometimes a serious epic.
Only past 486 was Intel in the chipset game. And even with the 486 and above there were other Vendors. IIRC VIA, SiS, and a few others did 486 and Pentium chipsets.
Aah the good old days - lots of good stuff and lots of junk....
Yes, other vendors made chipsets for Intel CPU's, but you'd have to be silly (or really cheap) to not just get the Intel chipset, which basically guaranteed reliability and support. That still holds true, they are still the best supported chipsets on the market, though their driver procurement process has become significantly more complicated than it used to be.
I used to have a Slot A Athlon 800 rig kicking around here somewhere, I may have to go looking for it. Had an AMD chipset on it. Was on an ABIT board that I re-capped. It worked REALLY well.
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
I'm on Intel, I've had a few AMD systems over the years but the stability of the Intel chipsets back when VIA, ALI and their ilk were the main game in town for AMD really soured me on them.
I think a lot of that had to do with Windows rather than the VIA chipsets. Been using AMD since the 486 days and had K5, K6, K62, Duron, and now the Ryzen. The VIA chipsets were pretty solid but had driver issues with Windows. On my Duron box, the machine that pushed me to Apple because of 98 and ME issues all the stability issues went away when I put Linux on it. It became rock solid.
I had far more board failures (remember the rash of ABIT and ASUS VIA-based boards?) with VIA chipsets than anything else. ALi and SiS were arguably more stable in some respects, but their support was next to non-existent. SiS or ALi southbridge driver procurement was an exercise in itself. Makes me shudder just thinking about it, LOL
Quote:
Quote:
Growing up in the infancy of the personal computer, there were all kinds of brands that came, went or were absorbed. There used to a much broader array of graphics card/chip manufacturers: Trident, Cirrus Logic, 3DFX, VIA, ALi, SiS, Matrox, S3, Chips & Tech, OPTi, Oak, Real3D, Rendition, SGI, Hercules...etc.
I remember supporting that mess and those oddball drivers. It sucked...
It always made for an adventure finding drivers for stuff that was a few years old. I had quite the driver collection for that very reason
Quote:
Quote:
The CPU market was far less diverse, you had Intel, and then if you were cheap, you had AMD, VIA or Cyrix, all of which were a serious downgrade from a comparable Intel offering.
AMDs offerings were as good as or better than Intel. AMD actually was the 2nd source for 8086/8088 CPUs back in the day and their 286, 386, and 486 CPUs were as fast as if not faster than Intel's of the time. The K5 and K6 were faster in office type stuff but had a weaker FPU. The K62 aattempted to fix that but it's FPU was a little less. The Athlon was faster than Intel and was an awesome CPU.
Don't forget you owe the x86_64 instruction set to AMD who invented it and licensed to Intel. Intel was too busy with Itanium to try to extend X86.
The floating point performance was an issue for gaming (which was a big part of what I was supporting through that era) and AMD reversed that with the Athlon. However Coppermine had faster L2 cache, and that made it, in many instances the faster CPU. However Intel threw that all away for quite a stint on the detour that was the P4. Remember RAMBUS? I have some RIMM's here somewhere on my desk, LOL!
And yes, Intel's attempt to force the 64-bit game went absolutely nowhere, ultimately having to adopt AMD_64/x86_64. I bet that was a hard pill for them to swallow.
I find it somewhat ironic that the PIII (in its mobile form) that Intel abandoned in favour of the P4, would eventually evolve into the desktop CPU series (core) that put Intel seriously ahead of AMD performance-wise. That was a truly strange era to be building performance rigs
Quote:
Quote:
Chipset-wise, if you bought Intel, you got Intel unless you chose to intentionally cheap-out there as well. If you bought one of the others you got somewhat of a wide variety of potentially poorly supported garbage that finding drivers for was sometimes a serious epic.
Only past 486 was Intel in the chipset game. And even with the 486 and above there were other Vendors. IIRC VIA, SiS, and a few others did 486 and Pentium chipsets.
Aah the good old days - lots of good stuff and lots of junk....
Yes, other vendors made chipsets for Intel CPU's, but you'd have to be silly (or really cheap) to not just get the Intel chipset, which basically guaranteed reliability and support. That still holds true, they are still the best supported chipsets on the market, though their driver procurement process has become significantly more complicated than it used to be.
I used to have a Slot A Athlon 800 rig kicking around here somewhere, I may have to go looking for it. Had an AMD chipset on it. Was on an ABIT board that I re-capped. It worked REALLY well.
