Sitting back in my chair I take a moment to reflect upon the happenings of the last 5 and a half months or so since my first editorial on the Athlon. At the time it was based on the Asus K7M + K7-500 combination and was far exceeding the current spate of Pentium3-500's shipping around the market. Since then a lot has happened, Intel and AMD got into several price wars, Pentium3's went 0.18micron - drastically hitting AMD and CPU Speeds finally decided to reach the big one-zero-zero-zero or 1000Mhz (1Ghz) if you prefer.

If anything this bitter rivalry between AMD and Intel has invariably managed to clamp the consumer right in the middle. As any sporting man or women would acknowledge, it's better to be at the front or the back than in the middle where you can quite easily be squashed. Never the less AMD and Intel continue to do battle, each raising the stakes a little bit higher every month. While consumers have to just sit and watch, confused by the mass of CPU Power and technology that seems to almost throw itself in the face of anybody who cares to cast a casual glance. Believe it or not, we the consumers rather dislike that.

Much has changed, or has it?

Many will remember how happy I was to own the K7-500 and Asus motherboard - bar a few problems, that thanks to our readers, were resolved. Since then the AGP problem with Asus K7M boards has forced be to back step onto a slower yet fairly stable, Microstar 6167, which was brought from http://www.powercomputing.co.uk.

My rather bulky K7-500 has also been swapped for a K7-550; the reason behind this move will soon become clear. At around the same time Intel swapped to copper processors and thus reduced the micron to 0.18, then bringing out a new range of Pentium3 CPUs to combat AMDs currently leading Athlons. Suddenly Intel was back in the running, although more expensive then AMD, they still managed to pull the market back into their favour.

Next >>