Thursday, July 01, 2004

The Astonishing Athlon

I have been building my own computers for a long time now. It's really very easy - anyone who can put together a Lego toy could make one. The skill really only lies in selecting the right components.

Thus I was saddened to read recently in the The Inquirer that AMD's Athlon series is going to be phased out. I'm talking about the 32-bit Athlon K7 here - not the new Athlon 64 K8 series (in itself a wonderful processor).

Almost every machine I have built has been based around an Athlon, starting with a 850 MHz Thunderbird and ending up with an Athlon XP Mobile Barton which I am overclocking to 2.2GHz. Quite a performance leap, and they have kept pace with every game that I have chosen to play (mostly IL-2 & Forgotten Battles). I have very warm feelings towards these fabulously reasonably priced, high-performing, reliable chips. I will be sorry to see them go, but they will be powering my computers for a while yet.

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