Advice on a PeeCee

[Hammer]

I wouldn't pay 2.50 for an AMD K(anything)
I pitched my K6/2-380(working-somewhat) because of the ceaseless irritation it gave me. The K6/2-450 soon followed.

What kind of irritation?

Note that Intel has its dark days e.g. FDIV bug(costed Intel about $500 million), early 1.1Ghz PIII Linux recompiling flaws and "Caminogate".

Happily replaced it all with an ASUS 440BX-LE board from ebay (cost me $45us with postage and celeron 667)

Such a setup would be considered matured i.e. I still have P6 microcode patches to fix some issues with the early P6s. 440 series chipset was based from on SOHO server targeted Pentium Pro based system (Socket8/i450 KX).

Timeline...
i450GX/KX (PPro) -> i440FX(PPro/PII) -> i440LX(PII) -> i440BX(PII/PIII) -> i440ZX100/66(PII/PIII)  

[Hammer]

Mainly crashing of software. Also th 3dnow/mmx issue at the time was still being sorted out.

What type of crash?

3DNow/MMX shouldn't be an issue except for timing loop issue (K6 issue) and JPEG/MPEG distortions issues i.e. any chip upto 1.2Ghz and prior to July 2001.

"the testing methods in past production cycles of the AMD-K6®, AMD Athlon™ and AMD Duron™ processor families did not detect a small number of processors that exhibited a minor manufacturing issue that could potentially cause the distortion of JPEG images or MPEG audio/video.  The issue is not design related and has been addressed through additional manufacturing tests AMD has implemented." - AMD spokesman Damon Muzny, July 21, 2001.

Such issues are not applicable to "Athlon XP", "Athlon 64", "Athlon 64 FX" and "Opteron" and "Geode" processors.  

Another issues are
1. Microsoft's wayward 3DNow optimizations in DirectX 8.1 runtimes libraries on AMD processors. Refer to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;321178

PS; Only applicable to Windows XP(pre-SP1 or pre-DX9).

2. "Hangs or Slow Performance on AMD System with VIA Chipset"
Refer to http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;274629

But when I switched to the BX440/celeron , 99.8% of all the problems went away. (yes I retained all other parts in the xfer, vid-card,net-card,ram..etc)

Note that, Windows has built-in support for Intel chipsets.

won't dispute that , they may have returned, thus the dropping of prescott for Pentium M.

Intel wouldn't be dropping Prescott core due to EMT64 considerations. It's still questionable if Dothan core contains the EMT64 extensions.

PM(P6+) vs A64(K8) battle royal would probably duplicate the earlier PIII(P6) vs K7 entanglements  i.e. clock speed (and factored in IPC issues) yield per die process.

For multiple "thin and light" X86 benchmarks refer to
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2004/04/040405_efficeon/040405_efficeon.htm

It contains
 
TM5600 @600Mhz
Efficeon @1Ghz
Crusoe @1Ghz
VIA C3s @1.33Ghz
P4 Celeron @2.4Ghz
Athlon 64 3200+ @2Ghz
Mobile Athlon XP  1800+ @1.5Ghz
AMD Geode GX2 @366Mhz