The two chipsets AREN'T totally different. To quote from one of Anand's reviews...
<<
The 8373 North Bridge is nearly identical to the 8371 of the KX133 with a few timing changes to support AMD's Socket-A CPU's >>
. Same chipset, just a timing tweak.
It makes sense for tripleshot to want a slot A chipset motherboard - you can get better cooling from slot CPU's, because you have more space with which to use a heatsink, leading to better surface area, thus leading to cooler temperatures (theoretically). Plus the issues that the KT-133 chipset has had with > 2 dimm slots (I'm not sure how it is now, as this is from a post on aceshardware at
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read_news.php?post_id=693&keyword_highlight=KT-133).
Okay, on to the bang/buck question....hehe
Take a look at Anands review of it....(most notably, the benchmarks which start here:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1261&p=7)
The duron is within about 10% (below) of an equivalently clocked Athlon (classic) in most cases, sometimes even attaining parity with it. The Thunderbird (compared to the classic) is about 10 % faster per clock. So, you decide for yourself, as YOU will be the judge as to which is better suited for your needs. One thing you may want to consider is that over time, programs are becoming more and more influenced by the memory subsystem, including L2 cache.....the Thunderbird will, over the long term, be better, because its performance in relation to the applications used at the time won't degrade as much as a Duron's.
It really depends on how long you are planning on keeping the computer as a main machine....if for a long time, and you want to buy NOW, Thunderbird....if you want it for a short time (a year or so), then a Duron
My opinion only
