Buddy... if your Athlon ran too hot to run games, you obviously don't know the first thing about building a computer. I suggest you stick with a 486. They don't really require too good of a job to put the heatsink on.

I don't know what it is about message forums that brings the childishness in people out. I don't browse around forums very often, but when I do, threads always seem to boil down to name calling, grammar correcting (which I find hilarious) and fanatical company loyalty. It's all about "Xbox 0wnz Gcube" and "Intel sux, AMD rulez!" and blah blah blah.
Why do forums do this to people? Is there just a large amount of immature people out there? Is it because the net gives people a blanket of anonymity which allows them to say stupid things that they would not normally say out of embarrassment?
And the worse thing is, it goes so off-topic. I came here to read about the new GeForce line and I mostly got grammar lessons, counter-grammar lessons, flames, counter-flames, and the trials and tribulations of being in the processor business!

Anyways, I think that the state of the video card industry is good. All the new cards coming out look good and I think it's pretty hard to say who's going to "King of 3D Video Cards" or anything like that. Which is a great thing for us consumers. And hopefully the KYRO chips will start coming into their own so that we will have a triumvirate of gaming chipsets that are all viable options for our money.

So, that's about all I have to say. And to all those people who get caught up in flame wars, chill out people! You'd swear you were arguing about the pros and cons of Communism or something! Take a second and put things in perspective before you hit that reply button. And if you EVER have to resort to grammar correction to get the leg up in an argument, you know you've gone too far!

P.S. To that anti-Canada guy who posted way back: We Canadians aren't so bad man! Come up north for a vacation or something, we're good people!

I had a 1.2mhz Athlon.

DAMN DUDE!! That's fvcking FAST!! HAHAHAhaha, j/k.

I was a die-hard 3dfx fan since I built my first computer. It started with a Voodoo 2 8 meg. When the 3000 came out, I flipped out and bought it. Though I must say I was rather disturbed to find that it increased my fps by a measley 5 frames. Eh, it works.

Then 3dfx bit the dust, bought the farm, and went belly up. Who to turn to? I had absolutely no bias at all, and after hearing great things about the Radeon 64 meg DDR, I snatched one up. And what happened? I ended up with an improvement of 3 times the fps. The quake demo I had been timedemoing (yeah, I may play all the new games, but Quake 1 is still the bomb) jumped from 50 fps to 150. I'm sure 128 more megs of ram and a processor that was 633 mhz faster (P2 266 to a AMD T-Bird 900) had something to do with it, but I'm rather happy with my Radeon and T-Bird.

My 8 cents (inflation you know)

Ignorant fool!

AMDs are designed to run hotter. and if your chip didnt run any game you obviously dont know how to put it togeather right. my 1.4 athlon runs fine, and i find your incident at failing to properly install a cpu funny.

learn before you do stuff.

This comment was edited on Oct 8, 17:46.

What they don't tell you in any of these test's are how hot the AMD's run.I had a 1.2mhz Athlon.That wouldnt run any game for longer than 3mins without sounding the alarm and freezing.That by the way is with the fan they suggest to use.It ran fine under normal use{not gamingut to use it for gaming I was forced to underclock to 900mhz.You say it was just a bad processor,well my cuz had the 1.3 and the same thing happened.Now I have a P4 1.7 which BTW runs at a cool 104 Deg F.The AMD ran at 154 Deg F.Also for gaming the pentium runs much smoother than the AMD.I for one will never buy another AMD when upgrading.

Everyone knows that the P4 beats the Athlon in Q3. But think about it, you're going to be doing a lot of other things on your computer than playing Q3. The Athlon beats the P4 in those other things. Hell... if you use your computer ONLY for a game, why not get a console or something.

Remember, when the AMD K6-2 came out, there was a 3Dnow! optimized version of Quake 2.. just like there's a P4 optimized version of Quake 3 (Altho the Q3 one is built in.)

I never play Quake 3, altho I was a fan of the previous two games. I play alot of different 3d games other than Q3. I'm not alone.

God forbid people play games other than Quake III...

>>last time i checked, 1.4ghz athlon benchmarks were considerably better than a 1.7ghz p4<<

Look at the Quake 3 benchmarks on the same article. The 1.5 GHz P4 beats the 1.4 GHz Athlon. Since this is a gaming news site I think that's pretty significant. The gap will only widen.

"In short, just because 3DFX is dead, doesn't mean Nvidia is a tyrant. Nvidia can't help that they continued to make improvements to their cards while 3DFX was busy living off of the voodoo2. "

I think nVidia provides a wide array of cards to suit nearly every average consumer's needs. Their budget cards are very affordable, yet give impressive performance for the buck, and they have high-end cards for those wanted the bleeding edge. It sounds as if ATI's new chipset will be a worthy contender, or possibly become the card of choice, but I'm very happy that nVidia has provided us with the cards they have, and cannot fault them for stomping a mudhole in the competition's ass.

last time i checked, 1.4ghz athlon benchmarks were considerably better than a 1.7ghz p4, so 1.8ghz p4 = 1.4tbird isnt an exageration. heres proof:

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/amd_athlon14/5.shtml

You know, I've been on the internet for 5 years now. I've noticed a trend that seems to always repeat itself..
Someone who previously had bad products.. Like AMD and their K6 procs. Will bring out an awesome product. Like AMD and their K7 athlons and beyond. At first they'll get cheered on and everyone will be all gun-ho for them. Then after awhile, you'll get the people who will piss and moan. Ohhh, they're a big corporation, ooohh, they're abusing us consumers, ooohhh, this and that.

Piss off.

As for Nvidia, 3DFX was the only true competitor when Nvidia started making good cards. All ATI and Matrox cards from that era are complete shit for 3d. Go ahead, buy those cards and get a 3d accel game from that era and do some compares. Look at where 3DFX was going with their cards. V3 was a pair of V2 cores and some other crap. V4 and V5 weren't much better. No 32bit video. Not many new features of any kind! Yeah, sure, didn't they add FSAA there at the end? That was about it.
ATI didn't bring out their Radeons until more recently. Maybe they will compete with Nvidia. They have alot to prove though, considering that many people, like myself, have and one or another ATI card before with extremely buggy driver support. My ATI AIW 8mb pci pro card would lock up my computer if I captured in anything higher than QCIF, or if I used the 3d functions, etc. I have not seen newer drivers for it in years.

In short, just because 3DFX is dead, doesn't mean Nvidia is a tyrant. Nvidia can't help that they continued to make improvements to their cards while 3DFX was busy living off of the voodoo2.

I'm not going to say much about Intel except for this. Remember when the AMD K6-2 came out with 3DNOW! extensions.. and everyone was slamming them for the bad FPU performance. Remember, however, that games which were (Keyword..) Optimized for 3Dnow! would run at a good pace on those chips? Hrm.. didn't become very popular did it?
What makes Intel think that they will do any better with the same tactic?

Hehe, you know,

I really love to stir up trouble.......

Ain't it great?

Glad that I am nothing like that ;P,
Ray

------------------------------------
JEFF GREEN FOR PRESIDENT!!!

1.8GHzP4 = 1.6GHzTbird - get it right, don't exagerate

When did I say that I know everything? YOU are clearly wrong about that.

Although I agree with you and your analogy of how keeping everything constant and raising the clock speed results in a faster CPU. I didn't dispute that. What I meant was that in a comparison of two processors, clock speed isn't the only thing that counts. You are right though, I worded what you quoted kind of lazily. Ex. 1.8gHz P4 = 1.4gHz Tbird in terms of performance. That's basically what I meant. And Intel increases the clock speed to crazy numbers just so the CPU appears faster to the incompetents.

Yup, on some recent benchmarks it seems as if the GF-3 Ti500 is only a couple fps ahead of the Radeon 8500 but in 3D Mark 2001, the Radeon destroys the GF-3 Ti 500. Also, the Radeon has faster core, memory, better memory saving bandwidth technology, more transistors on chip, new spin on Anti-Aliasing, more textures (6) in a single pass than the GF-3(which John Carmak stated will be a major factor in his upcoming Doom Engine), TRUFORM to give games a better look, etc! Furthermore, their drivers are new and they have promised to forgo the Microsoft certification so they can now release new drivers every 3 weeks instead of 6 months. The Radeon 8500 looks like it will be the card in my next machine.

I like NVidia and I would buy their card if it would be the better of the two, but I think ATI has them this time around. Still, the GF-3 ti500 is one sweet card and the wizards at NVidia are releasing kick ass drivers so it still plays Quake III the fastest, albeit by the slimmest of margins.

I wonder how new benchmarks with DX 8 features included will fare between these 2 cards. The Radeon does seem to be winning the 3D Mark 2001 hands down. Lets hope the Radeon 8500 does well to provide competition for NVidia.

>>>Intel figures that if they increase the clock speed they have a faster CPU. That's so blatantly wrong, I want to shit myself laughing<<<

To Chthon or whoever posted this: at 16 years old you might believe you know everything but clearly you don't. While it's true that clock speed isn't the ONLY thing determining the speed of the processor, if everything else is held constant then raising the clock speed DOES result in a faster CPU. In the case of Athlon versus P4, since the architectures aren't changing anytime soon, the clock speed becomes the main factor. Already, the fastest P4s are faster than the fastest Athlons, and the gap will only widen as Intel keeps cranking up the clock.

I don't dislike AMD; I would like AMD to succeed, as I would also like ATI to succeed, to provide competition. If Nvidia and ATI offered the exact same price/performance, I would choose ATI because they need the support and Nvidia doesn't.

Does it really matter that anyones grammar or spelling is out? I think not. Mpst ov thhe peeple onere r bigtime juniors anysway. leeve emn alonz - leten ave a rant.

I've gone from being pissed off at some people here, to visiting this board everyday to get a kick out of how off topic it's been.

It's gone from an original topic of the GF3 and now on to GPAs... lol.