The future

If you want to know what's going to happen then you'll have to wait until my next editorial in several months time. Until then there's a good chance I will move away from Athlons depending on whether AMDs KX133 chipset solves my AGP problems or not. If you find problems with GeForce cards (haven't tested much else other than Nvidia chipsets) then we advise installing Nvidias ATHLON ONLY v3.62 drivers. Newer drivers are supposed to work with Athlons as well, but we have only found these to work so far.

Another possibility is that the tiny fans on GeForce cards may not be enough to cool their CPUs, we tried reducing the speed of GeForces but the problem still exists. After installing the AMD only Nvidia drivers it went away, however things are A LOT slower in comparison. Just to remind you that this is an editorial and so it's the views of a single individual, please don't E-Mail me saying I got this or that wrong - everybody's systems are different.

That said the Athlon is still an extremely good CPU, we have found that the 3D SSE instructions on the Pentium3 are actually faster than 3Dnow on the K7, though that doesn't matter much with GeForces. We think it's worth the small investment just to have your Athlon 500 or 550 run @ 700Mhz because it ROCKS!!! YEAH!

*Update* Thanks loads for those of you that helped to set me strait with a few things on my Athlon article. For a start VIA makes the KX133 Chipset and not AMD, not only that but Intel's 'Coppermine' processors are cunningly NOT made with copper in them at all.. now isn't that just so.. clever, maybe they forgot it?

by Mark 'KILLZAT' Jackson

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