[TriLUG] AMD and reliability

[Pat Regan]

Josh Vickery wrote:
> I've owned 2 AMD systems, an AMD K6-2, and a dual Athlon MP.  The K6-2
> gave me no trouble.  The dual MP is running on a Tyan Tiger MPX, and
> it is a bit of a pain in the ass.  It crashes under heavy IDE load,
> and sometimes it won't turn on.  Sometimes it crashes when
> transferring lots of data over usb 2.  

I am actually very surprised to hear that you have problems with a Tyan
Tiger.  At work, 3-4 years ago, I built 4 Tiger machines.  Actually,
were the decked out boards with the MP chipset named Thunder?  Any who,
it was the MP chipset with on board SCSI and ATI video.  They were build
using MP 1.3 ghz CPUs.  As far as I know they are still in service
today, except for the replacement of the 60GB IBM Deskstar drives :p.

I was so happy with those machines that I replaced my (extremely flaky!)
dual Celeron BP6 board at home with a Tiger MP (the lowest end board,
MPX was not available yet).  It has a pair of XP 1700 CPUs.  It still
runs perfectly rock solid, although I do not use the on board IDE at all
anymore.  My disks are on an 8 port 3ware RAID card and I moved my DVD
burner into a USB enclosure so I could get it up closer to where I
actually sit :p.

Not too long after building the MP machines at work we build two more
machines with the MPX chipset and I believe MP 1800 CPUs and IDE disks.
 They were just as solid as the earlier MP machines.

That is seven machines I know to run well.  Now, the bad news.  I have a
friend who upgraded his home PC the same time as mine, we bought pretty
much identical hardware from the same vendors.  Something on his
motherboard has gone flaky.  It sometimes will not post, and sometimes
will not detect all the PCI devices during boot up.  I have very few
other details about his issues though, except that it ran for 2-3 years
before something happened to it.

> Of all the systems listed, my favorite is the pentium m laptop.  I
> hope to put intel's yet to be released dual core pentium ms in the
> next desktop I build, but I wouldn't hesitate to build an XP 64 X2
> system either, I just might spend some more time reading motherboard
> reviews before doing so.
> 

I am finding I have less and less of a need for a desktop as time goes
by.  :)

Any who, most of the people I see who have had "problems with AMD
systems" bought bottom of the barrel motherboards.  When I finally
replace my current desktop I will most likely go with a 2 CPU Opteron
system, and I will most definitely spend a few extra dollars on another
Tyan motherboard.  They make excellent server/workstation motherboards.

The funny thing is is that you really don't have to spend very much more
to get the higher quality motherboards.  Over the last year I built two
Athlon XP systems for friends.  I used an ASUS and a Shuttle
motherboard, and I believe both were between 60 and 70 dollars, both
Nforce chipsets.  I built those machines about 8 and 14 months ago,
respectively.

Well, it is getting very late (early?), so I am sure it is quite
possible I am not making enough sense to actually be writing this
message.  :)

Pat


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