Hardware experiences?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>

| D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

| > So why buy a P4 which isn't good and can hardly be significantly
| > cheaper than Athlon?
| 
| That would depend on whether you're buying new or not.  There are plenty
| of name brand "refurb" P4 systems available for about $200, which are
| sufficiently powerful for many users.

Perhaps.  I've never bought used systems that were not fairly old.
I've not found the middle ground too appealing.  I recently bought a
few PIIIs (cheap).  I've also bought refurb-but-hardly-used stuff.

Another problem: early P4 systems used RDRAM (Rambus).  That is
expensive memory and probably hard to get as well.  Since the first
upgrade you might want to do is to add memory, this is Very Bad.

| > Bonus: the latest Athlons (those that use DDR2) and all Cores (except
| > T2300e) have hardware assistance for virtualization.
| 
| I've got an Athlon 64 3200+, which I bought in June.  I assume it would
| have that too.

Probably not.  Does it use the AM2 socket?  AM2 is the first AMD
support for DDR2.  Because the memory controller is in the CPU, the
CPU determines the kind of memory that can be supported (unlike the
Intel world).

The AM2 socket CPUs are quite recent.  They are the first AMD cpus with
hardware assist for virtualization.

AMD seemed to sneak this feature in with little fanfare.  I hadn't
noticed until Lennart pointed this out.
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