Posted on 04/10/2005 9:49:32 AM PDT by rdb3
Dell will love AMD
If its customers really really want them
By: Friday 08 April 2005, 07:41
The promise comes from none other than CEO Kevin Rollins, and is probably just another indication that Dell is twisting and turning like a twisty turny thing with the mighty Intel or is hanging out for a better deal with AMD.
Rollins comments were made at a press conference that took place at the conclusion of Dell's annual analysts' meeting for Wall Street and the news media.
Reuters claimed that the comments revived speculation that Dell could end its long-standing refusal to use AMD chips, although we have heard that all before.
The man himself said that Dell was "still looking at AMD; they have fairly good technology". Nice of him to say so.
But Rollins added that any decision to make AMD its second supplier of microprocessor chips would mean sweeping changes for related components inside its Dell PCs.
He claimed that the changes would drive up initial production costs, so Dell would turn to AMD chips only if customers demanded them. While Dell would "never say never", customers would have to demand it and the bottom line figures would have to be good, he said.
Rollins claimed that AMD might have trouble meeting additional demand for high-volume PC products, but not necessarily for chips used in high-end PC servers. You can read the full comments here. µ
PTSC
every now and then dell says this.
i remember a few years ago going to their site and they actually had a poll to vote in whether you would wanted dell to have AMD chips or not.
Now, the Dell motherboard has all kinds of shielding on the caps on the motherboard, which is why I use it for audio. The AMD motherboard? I'm afraid to put different RAM in it because I could easily corrupt the BIOS.
AMD will beat Intel to the Dual Core market by at least a month.
I have a similar situation except my amd machine is a Gateway. I doubled the RAM to my amd machine and it rocks. No problem. I did the same to the intel machine and side by side, I prefer the amd powered Gateway.
To be fair, though, the Dell has a rather low end Intel chipset on the motherboard.
Games are not multithreaded, and games are what sells the $1000 CPUs. Pick up CPU magazine or Maximum PC and tell me how much space they devote to Intel and how much to the AMD 64. Both companies will have dual core 64 bit chips out this summer. It remains to be seen whether they will boost performance in games. Video editing is another matter.
I have an AMD box and an Intel box at home, both high end gaming machines and the fastest, by far, is whichever one I've most recently reformatted the HD and put a clean install of XP on.
I don't know what to say but around here, for the "equivalent" microprocessor motherboard, the AMD sells for 50% more than the Intel equivalent, and sells...
You should do an automatic system recovery backup, or a Ghost. If you do this after you get your software installed, the updated done, and everything configured, you can renew your machine in a few minutes.
You need a second partition or drive, and if you use Windows backup, you need a floppy disk. With Ghost you can burn everything to a DVD.
If you use the computer for other things, you can put your documents on the second drive and they'll still be there after the recovery.
Something I've found... There's an issue either in the VIA KT800Pro chipset or in the way the processor handles memory refreshes, but when you use dual sided RAM, it drops the speed down from 400MHz to 333MHz slowing the whole system down. It wouldn't be that big a deal, except I needed 4GB or RAM in this system.
Which brings up another issue. It seems that there's a lot of overhead in the chipset. The memory space used by the different devices are below the 4GB boundry for RAM, however the BIOS does allow you to remap the memory above 4GB. The problem is that WinXP can only recognize 4GB RAM. Which means that when you remap the RAM, you only have 3GB of RAM available. By not remapping the RAM, I get a total of about 3.7GB which is OK, but I'm still disappointed.
The speed is really guite nice. at this moment, I'm posting this from a Firefox browser, running on Novell Linux Desktop, running in a VMWare Workstation 5.0 Virtual Machine, on top of Windows XP Professional. At this moment, this one computer is also running Novell NetWare 6.5, Windows Server 2003 Standard, and another WinXP Pro workstation, all in their own virtual machines. Although CPU utilization does spike up a bit now and then,it's really not too bad. And performance is quite good!
Mark
Seems like a lot of work just to defrag the drive....
ping
Excerpt --
AMD is widely expected to formally launch the first dual-core versions of its popular 64-bit Opteron server processor on April 21. That's the date AMD chairman, Hector Ruiz, is hosting a reception in New York City to celebrate the second anniversary of Opteron's launch.
My latest PC Modder magazine compared the 2.8ghz chips on several motherboards. Surprisingly, the Intel chips kicked AMD's butt with the Prescott chip being fastest and most overclockable.
I was ready to upgrade to an MSI motherboard and an AMD CPU but it looks like Chaintech and Intel may be a better choice.
In any case, Dell has proven to be a pretty good business. I use their computers in my labs and they have proven to be the most reliable machines we have ever used. The prices were great as well. I'm not currently considering any other brand of computers as replacements.
My Athlon 2.4 FX53 overclocked to 2.6 with no problems at all and smokes my P4 3.2 HT like it's......well....something that's getting smoked by a superior chip.
Smokin'
Smoked
In pretty extensive tests, the P4 2.8e beat the Athlon 64 2800+ in almost every category except price. The 3dMark03 for the Prescott was 5416 as opposed to 5193 for the Athlon 64. The Athlon XP scored 5015.
I was surprised. I'm not planning to overclock, making all of that ridiculous cooling stuff unnecessary. Since I'm not playing Doom 3 yet, it should be fine.
How do you like the SLI video setup? Is it really any better than a single card?
Also, look in the BIOS under FID settings. Change it from Auto to 200. This should force the clock to 400MHZ. With Dual Rank DDR400, the BIOS Kernal Developers Guide states that it should derate to 166 to prevent reflection on the DRAM BUS. FYI... newer boards don't have this problem.
Also, keep in mind that you are running in Compatibility Mode. Not 64-bit mode. There are marked differences in performance with some of the 64-bit optimized apps running on a 64-bit OS with 64-bit drivers. BIG differences.
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