Athlon question

[filson]

@Jose

You should get a athlon xp. the 2000+ gives biggest bang for your buck. team it up with the ECS K7S5A is a super board that supports both old sdram and ddrram. I'm very pleased with my board, and I know a netcafe with 20 of them running stable. IDE/PCI transfers is also very fast. faster than via. and no soundblaster bugs.

[Jose]

@ GW
Thanks for all the details. Yes I'm lucky enouph that my motherboard (AsusK7M) has the AMD751 chipset and so it supports the Thunderbird  :-D  The downside is that it only supports PC100 SDRAM  :-x

@filson

Yeah, but I'd have to buy a new motherboard, like this it will be cheaper.  With a well done overclock it will do anything I want  :-D  And I'll save for future Amiga PPC hardware too.

[JetRacer]

Make shure you get a mobo that supports the faster 266MHz bus (or better). I used to have an older Athlon with 133MHz bus, but my mobo also supported running at 266MHz bus speed. Then I bought a newer Athlon with just 66% more GHz, and with a 266MHz bus. The difference was shocking. Like switching from a Wolkswagen beetle to a porsche.

And speaking of Parhelia. What got me hooked was the general IMAGE QUALITY. I clearly see the difference between f.ex. grey 127 and grey 128 in a greyscale gradient. Or any colored gradient too for that matter. 24-bit being beyond human vision is just qualified bullshit. More like beyond crappy hardware.

Don't buy a GF4 MX-200 (or whatever number comes after "MX") it's degraded crap. Any other GF4 will due.

[legion]

T_Bone:  where did you find a parhelia for $72???

[mikeymike]

re: Matrox Parhelia 2D image quality

I agree, Matrox has a long record of excellent 2D image quality, the best in the graphics card business or very close to it.  However the GeForce 4 (I'm using a Ti4200)'s 2D image quality is I think nearly as good as other Matrox cards I've seen in action, though I'd like to get another look to compare again.  The GF4 is certainly better than the GF2 GTS I had for 2D image quality.