dead box

[Frank Carmickle]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Scott Howell wrote:
snip
> beeping noise. Still a few more thoughts, but even if the cpu was toast
> I think the bios would still generate some error messages. Got a few
> more things to try and then I'll decleare it dead, but well then its
> kind of dead yet.<grin>

Well the board probably won't respond if there is a dead cpu.  Gone are
the days of boards being smart enough to generate errors with out a
working cpu.

I recommend you get an oem chip if you are going to get an athlon.  The
retail boxed heatsync and fan suck and the few I've seen recently are
atached and rather impossible to remove.  I really like the taisol forged
aluminum heat sync with copper insert.  Any fan you sit on top of this
heatsync should do the trick for most of the athlons.  The 2200 I believe
is the hottest one right now.

Looks as though the via kt400a boards are the best performers with single
channel memory.  Asus MSI Tyan and Abit are the board manufactures that I
would look at.

You have a lot of options right now.  You need to look at how much you
want to spend.  If I had to upgrade a single cpu box that also needed ddr
memory I wouldn't spend more the $250.  I feel anything more then that
right now is a total waste of money.  At least these days you should be
able to get a msi kt400 board with audio and lan for $80.  A xp2400 for
$120 and ddr pc3000 cas2 for $75.  It's hard to find cas2 memory these
days.  Looks like you can get it most easily in pc3000 370mhz which you
would run at 333.  Infineon micron samsung and kingston.  But I know you
Scooter I don't need to tell you to buy brand name memory.

I don't see any reason why anyone should be looking at Intel these days.
The athlon's fp engine is far superior to the p4.  Yes if you enable all of
the optimizations for the p4 you get similar performance but who bothers
to do that these days.  We all install are distributions i386 or i686
binaries.  Hey all I can say is I like it when my oggs are encoded really
fast.

Frank who's got his eyes set on the tyan s2466n with two athlon mp2000s
and a via c3 silent computer with no moving parts!