Dual Athlon boards review at Tom's

[Priit]

Link is here.. Just one big problem with that review: how the hell they managed to run linux kernel compilation slower with 2 CPU's than 1? Did they ran it as single thread or what? Smells very fishy, IMO...

 

[Athlon4all]

It's cool. You are right, that is fishy. "Runs off to lower my opinion of THG further."

 

[Armitage]

Yea, here's some more wierdness:

"To get to the point, both the Athlon MP and the Athlon XP currently available on the market are suited for dual operation. The old Athlon with its Thunderbird core (distinguishable by its ceramic case) and all Duron models (with Spitfire and Morgan core) do not function in dual operation."

I thought the Durons and Tbird core Athlons generally worked fine in the Tyan boards? They just weren't guarenteed to work in them. I'm sure I saw that on Tomshardware as well.

So, is this just a very sloppy review, of do the new boards not work with the non-palomino cpus?

 

[Armitage]

Ok, I finished reading the article. Very sloppy.

1. They mention that "Both boards have special electrical connections: AUX12 and P6." in fine print as a caption to a picture. But no mention of what these are for. Do you need a special power supply like on the first Tyan board???
2. No mention of the changes from the MP to MPX chipsets other then an offhand remark about the USB 2.0 card using one of the 64 bit PCI slots.
3. Choice of benchmarks is, as usual, disapointing. I mean really, whats the point of benchmarking Office and non-multi-threaded apps in a review of dual boards?
4. Conclusion. Does this guy have the first clue about what people use dual boards for? Barely.

 

[Priit]

<< 3. Choice of benchmarks is, as usual, disapointing. I mean really, whats the point of benchmarking Office and non-multi-threaded apps in a review of dual boards? >>



Yep, Tomshardware seems to have some kind of secret passion of running Quake on any hardware they got into their hands + all that office crap. There's no point of benchmarking a bunch of single-threaded apps on dual machine and drawing conclusions based on that. It should be pretty obvious that SMP is not very useful for gamers and word processor/spreadsheet users.

 

[joohang]

Didn't they benchmark Quake on their Xeon review as well?

Their review is suck. I only read Anand's and find links to other related reviews from AT news (thank you Brandon ).

 

[flood]

<< Article Info
3.2 GHz Athlon Power:
Dual Boards From ASUS and MSI


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Created:
February 11, 2002
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By:
Frank V&ouml;lkel
Bert T&ouml;pelt

>>

 

[Snoop]

[IMO]I find that both Aceshardware and anandtech to be in another league compared to toms. Glaring mistakes in methodology, semantics, and setups are too much to overlook lately, and in my mind their is no doubt tom needs to get rid of those two jokers he has writing for him and start writing the hardware reviews himself.[/IMO]

 

[kuk]

<< 3.2 GHz Athlon Power: >>



I just hate it when people sum up processor frequencies on dual setups. Talk about misleading ... :|

 

[BeauJangles]

<<

<< 3.2 GHz Athlon Power: >>



I just hate it when people sum up processor frequencies on dual setups. Talk about misleading ... :| >>



It's supposed to draw you in to read the damn thing...

 

[Athlon4all]

<< I find that both Aceshardware and anandtech to be in another league compared to toms. >>

I agree even since Tom stopped writing most of the reivews, this is the case. Anandtech, I like Anand's writing, but it's his benchmark suite that I love and Ace's hardware, he's just great as well.

 

[Dulanic]

<< 1. They mention that "Both boards have special electrical connections: AUX12 and P6." in fine print as a caption to a picture. But no mention of what these are for. Do you need a special power supply like on the first Tyan board?? >>



Its just the same thing as what they said was needed for the P4... just that little additional 4 pin power connector on basically any newer PSU.