Originally posted by: Varun
"I use my cast off CPUs and mobos in my family's rigs, which upgrades them for free. I also swap those parts between my current rigs. If I threw an AMD in the mix, I wouldn't be able to do that. I also prefer the most stable mobos and chipsets. Last I heard, that was ASUS and Intel."
The P4 will not be swapable into the old systems without a motherboard. If you change the motherboard for the P4 it is no different than changing it for an Athlon. Also, there are these things called standards, and all of the motherboards have them, AMD or Intel. IDE, PCI, AGP, same ATX connector (though the P4 has an extra connector now), DDR RAM fits in either board, etc etc.
Everyone wants a stable motherboard, and problems can occur with any chipset. Asus does make great boards, but so does Abit, Aopen, Shuttle and others. It has been said many times that the Nforce 2 is a great chipset.
Obviously you are very stuck on Intel, and whatever, it is your money you can do with it what you want. Of course when you come here asking for some advice and then ignore everything everyone tells you, that is a bit rude. You have this idea stuck in your head that AMD is an inferior CPU and company. This has never been the case. I have had no problems ever with any of my AMD systems, and I have been running them since way back when I got my first K6-233. My current rig (XP 1800+) is a very very stable system that has never given me grief. Even the "dreaded" VIA chipset in the motherboard has been 100% for almost 2 years now (KT333).
If you truly want to do your son a favor, it is time to get your head out of the sand that the Intel commercial machine has been covering you with. You seem to have a lot of misinformation floating about in your head such as the burning Athlon of death. Lets discredit some of these ideas right now.
1) Burning Athlon of Death- While it is true that some Athlons would burn up instantly if the heatsink was not attached, this has been fixed for a long long time now. Also, having no heat sink on a CPU die is a far cry from a CPU fan quitting. If the fan quit it would take a long time for the heatsink to overheat, giving the motherboard plenty of time to shut down the system.
2) AMD systems are buggy and unstable-Some systems are not stable, obviously. Plenty of people post P4 problems on these boards as well as AMD issuse. I'm going as far to say that 99% of the time or more it has nothing to do with the CPU at all. Cheap parts make poor machines.
3) AMD systems need expensive power supplies- It is very very true that AMD recommended quality power supplies long before Intel. The original Athlon was a pretty power hungry CPU for it's time. Recall that when the Athlon came out people still used 200watt no name power supplies. People are sometimes unaware of how big of an issue that a power supply can be, but you need to look at the entire system, not just the CPU. First, P4s and Athlons both use a lot of power, but at the moment, the P4 is the current (pun intended) leader in power usage. The Intel spec for motherboards is a power system able to deliver 90 Amps. To put that in context, the main circuit breaker in many homes is 100 Amps. The P4 will dissipate 90-100 watts of heat. That is 1/3 to 1/4 of the power available in most quality power supplies. The Athlon uses a bit less, but it is no slouch either. Add in a fast Hard Disk Drive, a couple optical drives, power hungry RAM, and GPU's that now require a seperate power connection, and I think we have come to realise why a quality power supply is needed.
4) AMD parts are not swapable into Intel systems- I already covered the fact that all of the components are standardized, but I wanted to bring this up again. There is no way a P4 can be put in a Celeron board, but all of the other components other than the CPU, Motherboard, and RAM, are as easy to connect to a P4 motherboard as an Athlon motherboard.
Hopefully this will clear up some of the issues you have, but I actually doubt it. Sometimes even though someone can be shown all the facts they still have their mind made up, and you seem like one of these people. The reason people on the boards here don't like to see people spend thier money on brand name PCs is because very very often, the parts in these machines are not the best quality. Sure, they will hopefully build it well enough that it is fairly stable, but it will often be slower than home built PCs with quality components. The deals they give often sound too good to be true, but often they are too good to be true. Something is always missing.
