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Originally Posted by andrewtayloruk
I blew a good deal of money on the original cartridge (slot A?) Athlon 1Ghz, an Abit KA7, 1GB of ram, 2 IBM deskstar 40GB UDMA133 hard-drives to run RAID0 and a GeForce2 with 64MB. I had horrendus problems with it (as did everyone else) USB was flaky, the RAID controller was flaky, everything was less than impressive. I struggled on at the bleeding ege for about 6 months then cashed in my chips (quite literally!) and sold the lot, monitor et al.
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Unfortunately this was a common experience with the early Athlons, and caused a lot of people to view AMD as a "knock-off" chip maker. The problems really boiled down to poor chipset designs (both from AMD and VIA) that caused the flaky performance with peripherals. The slot Athlons also ran very very hot, which made them pretty unstable for gaming.
I assure you that a LOT has changed since then. Motherboards based on nVidia's nForce2 and nForce3 chipsets, as well as VIA's K7 and K8 chipsets are much more stable than before. The key is to get a board from a reputable manufacturer, like Abit or Asus.
I can understand your desire to switch to Intel, however for a gaming rig, I believe you'll see that an AMD rig (especially one based on a socket 939 Athlon64 processor) will SMOKE anything Intel can throw at it for the same price.