Posted by Tom61 on 25, 2000 at 11:49 AM:
In Reply to: Yep - There are issues... posted by xiaou2 on 24, 2000 at 11:01 PM:
: Actually - Ive started out with an AMD K62 500... which ran ok... till I went to friends to play. His PII 450 killed it.
K6-2 was a "value" processor, designed to be cheap, not speedy
: Later I upgraded to a new Athlon 650mhz. I got the new 133hmz memmory and a board that was high on the reviews. It ran ok for a little bit... but then I kept getting lockups. I... and other techs tried EVERYTHING to clear it up (new motherboards, ram, software drivers, different cards...ect) as I worked at the computer shop.
Some of the Slot-A boards were a bit imature, also did you try a higher rated PowerSupply and better cooling?
: I gave up in disgust after like 6 months...and asked for a 'Downgrade' to a PIII 550. I was bent that I had to give up 100mhz of power... Untill... I ran the thing!
: When I had the Athlon 650 running Dos mame with Mortal Kombat (full 16bit audio, and color..ect) I got only arround 85% using Full-throttle mode.
Emulation is usually cache intentsive, the slower off die cache probably hurt it.
: Now running Mortal Kombat - I get over 120% with full everything on. (and thats on a 550 not a 650 !!!)
: I do not know about the new Athlon chips... but here is the deal...
: Motherboards makers arnt putting a lot of effort into design
actually Socket A boards are very mature
: - which is causing instability problems. Also - there seems to be no noticeable performance increase even with the faster bus. Most likly, its due to 2 things...
: 1 Math chip is not as fast or accurate as Intel's
: 2 Standard programs do not make use of this extra power... so its basically useless :(
only those programs that were memory intensive would show the boost
: My friend kept his athlon upgrade cause he said his computer renders 3d graphics faster... but I think he was full of it. It surely didnt show much power as far as emulation was concerned.
It will render faster if the game/program is optimised for 3D now, just like programs using SSE will run faster on a P3.
: My other finding is that the ABit Be62 is probably one of the fastest boards Ive ever experienced. I saw a lot of harware in that place - and nothing ran as fast, or as stable.
ABit KT7- one of the highest rated Socket A boards :)
If I remember right Nivo is running a Duron system for mame right now, and hasn't had any trouble.