Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. May 4th, 2001-Running Linux? Thinking about upgrading to a Gigahertz CPU? Don't know whether to go with AMD or Intel? Then this article is for you. Kris Kersey at Linuxhardware.org has written a two part article to try to get to the bottom of the question: "Which Gigahertz CPU is best for my Linux system?"
To do it expertly and scientifically he needed two test units that were both comparable in power, stability and performance. Which motherboards did he use for the systems? ABIT motherboards of course.
For the Intel based system, Kris used ABIT's SA6R, (the "R" stands for RAID) an 815e based board that supports socket 370 PentiumR III 100 & 133 MHz FSB processors up to 1GHz. And for the AMD based system he used the now famous ABIT KT7A-RAID, an AMD socket A board that supports AMD Athlon 700-1.2 GHz 200/266 MHz FSB processors.
Kris designed a set of tests to really push the CPUs to see how they compared to one another. For that he needed super stable boards that could handle the pressure and he needed the features and tweakability when he decided to overclock the CPUs for another test. "The ABIT boards used were excellent boards to attempt this overclock. You couldn't ask for more options in a BIOS. While the SA6R provided all the basic options you would expect plus some, the KT7A-RAID provided more options than I've ever seen in a BIOS."
So what about the results? Well we wouldn't want to spoil it for you. Check out the link below to go see the full article and what the conclusions were. One other point, guess which graphics card Kris used in both systems. That's right, the ABIT Siluro GeForce2 MX |