AMD & Intel Fanboiz Rejoice!!

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 6:50 am

This should end the ago-old debate once and for all.

burcakb · Post by **burcakb** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 7:49 am

I still fail to see the reason behind such a product.

Oh, OK, you buy a 3.4GHz pres-burner-cot, realize you can't stand the noise, get the AMD slot, spend more money on chip, slot board, memory, etc.

Duh

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 7:56 am

HEXUS.net wrote:Installing the card is a doddle as it’s a case of just switching three jumpers to disable the Intel support and enable the AMD card which then bypasses the mainboard’s Northbridge and uses the chipset built into the converter card. In one fell swoop, ECS are attempting to remove the cost problem inherent in switching between an Intel or AMD machine.

What a total useless piece of crap. What cost would it remove? Normally you have to buy a new mobo, somewhere between €75 and €150. Now you have to buy that add-on card. Which seeing the size and components, has about half the manufacturing costs of a mobo, so is probably three quarter of the price. This saves you a whopping €20 to €40, but only if you knew beforehand you made the wrong choice in buying an Intel chip

Just buy two mobo's. Then you can at least fit a decent cooler on the CPU.

nici · Post by **nici** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 8:49 am

Im not saying anything...

flyingsherpa · Post by **flyingsherpa** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 9:34 am

hmmm, reminds of some computers we had back in college. they were Macs of some sort, but if you pressed a certain key sequence they would boot as PCs. thing is, no one seemed to know about it. i used that lab all the time and didn't know it until i had a class in there and the prof mentioned it. never seen anything like that before or since (this was about 9 yrs ago).

anyway, this would almost be cool if you could have both cpu's running at the same time. of course that wouldn't work for a number of reasons but the geek factor if it did work would be pretty high. but your psu would probably not be to happy about it

nbac · Post by **nbac** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 9:44 am

At last, some humour added to the debate...

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 10:24 am

thats a nice board. I always wanted a heater to comfort my 64 bit processor during those long, lonely winter nights.

GrahamGarside · Post by **GrahamGarside** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 10:31 am

This is a gimmick that some system builders will use to target people who don't want to be bound to one platfor, who don't realise that it isn't a big deal to swap out a motherboard, bery often the motherboard is one of the cheaper components in a system

I could see it being of use to reviewers who need both platforms but don't want 2 systems or to have to disassemble the system everytime they need to change but other than that it's a gimmick

Straker · Post by **Straker** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 12:34 pm

flyingsherpa wrote:hmmm, reminds of some computers we had back in college. they were Macs of some sort, but if you pressed a certain key sequence they would boot as PCs.

yeah, OrangePC cards, those were basically NuBus cards with a 386/486 on them. was too young then to know/care much about the specifics (like what exactly was implemented on the card), still pretty slick though.

GrahamGarside · Post by **GrahamGarside** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 1:01 pm

The thing is being able to switch between mac and pc is infinately more sueful than switchingbetween intel or amd, especially as I don't think this implementation allows for both to be installed at once, it's one of the other

StarfishChris · Post by **StarfishChris** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 1:14 pm

I think this is a great idea. AMD for the summer, Intel for the winter...

JimK · Post by **JimK** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 1:39 pm

StarfishChris wrote:I think this is a great idea. AMD for the summer, Intel for the winter...

Finally, a use for it that I can understand.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 5:22 pm

GrahamGarside wrote:The thing is being able to switch between mac and pc is infinately more sueful than switchingbetween intel or amd, especially as I don't think this implementation allows for both to be installed at once, it's one of the other

But if you can have them both installed, you make a switch connected to the three mobo swithces and to two system disks. Before starting up, you simply choose AMD or Intel...

GrahamGarside · Post by **GrahamGarside** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 5:25 am

But what practicle use would that be to anyone other than a software developer?

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 5:33 am

Hello:

I wonder too, about the Windows installation -- wouldn't it have to reinstall all the chipset drivers each time you switched?

Also, one wonders about a socket converter? I wonder if the AMD daughterboard would suffer from any performance bottlenecks?

So many questions...why?

GrahamGarside · Post by **GrahamGarside** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 5:53 am

well it's the same chipset so I doubt it would look much differant to windows, they probably have drivers specifically to mask this process.
As for performance bottlenecks, well the HT bus only carries up to 8gb/s so a 16x pci-e slot would be able to handle this, plus the memory controller is on the A64 chip so memory transactions are handled on the riser card.

Post by **Rusty075** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 8:08 am

GrahamGarside wrote:But what practicle use would that be to anyone other than a software developer?

That's the only market I could think of either, but any software company that was worried about CPU compatibility wouldn't trust a hobbled-together system like that for testing anyway. If anything, that thing would induce more incompatibility than it would solve.

I dunno....

One interesting application of this concept may be a server cluster: Take one parent mobo with multiple 16x PCI-e slots, and plug in a whole stack of these things, each with their own CPU and RAM. That wouldn't work with this current device though, since it apparently doesn't allow simultaineous CPU's (of course, if you wanted to go that route you would just run blades anyway)

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:07 am

NeilBlanchard wrote:Hello:

I wonder too, about the Windows installation -- wouldn't it have to reinstall all the chipset drivers each time you switched? :?

But if you can have them both installed, you make a switch connected to the three mobo swithces and to two system disks.

I don't get it why so many people ask "why, why, why???". Do you really think that you will get an answer that makes you think "well maybe I should really get one of those"? The product is for those who immediately realizes they need/want it the first time they see it (or something like that). For the wast majority it's not worth it. There's a lot of unneccesary products out there, get over it.

I certainly don't need it, I just came up with an idea that should work if both CPU's can be installed in the same time.

Post by **Rusty075** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:26 am

Mats, I think you missed the point. People aren't asking because they're afraid they may want the thing but just haven't realised it yet. People are asking "Why?" because we're trying to figure who in the world would need or want it.

If you don't want to take part in the discussion, just don't post.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:43 am

Rusty075 wrote:If you don't want to take part in the discussion, just don't post.

Tell me, how can I come up with ideas for the product and not wanting to take part in the discussion?

No, it's not like that. I'm one of the few who actually have an idea about what you could do with it, but since people didn't read my post correctly my idea it just looked strange and complicated. I just can't come up with an easier way to switch between the two, but I'm still not interested in it, like most others here I think.

rocarpen · Post by **rocarpen** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 12:05 pm

Straker wrote:
flyingsherpa wrote:hmmm, reminds of some computers we had back in college. they were Macs of some sort, but if you pressed a certain key sequence they would boot as PCs.
yeah, OrangePC cards, those were basically NuBus cards with a 386/486 on them. was too young then to know/care much about the specifics (like what exactly was implemented on the card), still pretty slick though.

Woo... memories! After much insistent urging and whining, I convinced my family to make the jump from a Mac Plus to a PowerMac 6100. Inside the pizza-box beige design lurked a PC Compatibility card, as you describe above. I never used it, personally, except to marvel in horrified curiousity at the twin abominations that were Windows 3.0 and DOS (god, the Mac OS really was a billion miles ahead in those days). I eventually pulled the card out in order to drop in a GeoPort modem (Woohoo! Internet access!)

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:36 pm

rocarpen wrote:(god, the Mac OS really was a billion miles ahead in those days)

Aren't they still ahead, maybe not with a billion miles, but still? I never heard any bad about Mac OS X. I'd really like to try out Cherry OS or some other emulator, but I don't expect much from it, will search for some reviews.

Green Shoes · Post by **Green Shoes** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 3:15 pm

Mats wrote:
rocarpen wrote:(god, the Mac OS really was a billion miles ahead in those days)
Aren't they still ahead, maybe not with a billion miles, but still? I never heard any bad about Mac OS X. I'd really like to try out Cherry OS or some other emulator, but I don't expect much from it, will search for some reviews.

Eh, I agree that they used to be, but as one who uses both every day I'd call the 2 OS about even now. Apple continues to update OSX (Tiger, or 10.4, is due any day now) with features that look more and more like Windows, and Windows continues to update with features that look more and more like OSX. Expose is nice, but less games support isn't. I'd say the two platforms are about equal now; the only thing OSX really has going for it is higher security (simply b/c nobody uses it). 6 of one, half dozen of the other.

meglamaniac · Post by **meglamaniac** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 4:47 am

Heh - I can see no practical use for that motherboard whatsoever.
I work in a software development department, and of course we need to test software on AMD and Intel machines alike so we have an AMD and an Intel machine sat next to each other. Each machine has a removable harddrive caddy and 5 different harddrives (Windows NT, 95, 98, 2K and XP).
The major advantage of this setup is that you can run the software being tested on both machines at once, or you can use two different OSs, or both.

So that motherboard takes the one good part of the above setup and removes it. And frankly, we would never consider testing on something like that as it's so non-standard as to make any tests useless.

mathias · Post by **mathias** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 7:00 pm

Pfff, what garbage. Maybe if one of the sockets was for an Itanium or something, then there could be some kind of point to switching between two CPU's.

On the other hand, if it was possible to have both of the CPU's running at the same time, I'm sure some clever people would devise a way of offloading some stuff onto the one not active. Maybe if that card was put into the PCIE slot of another motherboard, it might detect it as a regular PCIE card?

I think this idea would make more sense if they implemented it the other way they used with 754 and 939 sockets, that is with both the sockets on the Mboard(to reduce total cost), and if the gap between the two CPU's was bigger, maybe socket A(so a duron could be used) and socket 939. Or perhaps it could be like those boards that have a CPU(a really cheap one) permenantly attached.

rocarpen · Post by **rocarpen** » Tue Mar 15, 2005 8:24 pm

Green Shoes wrote:
Mats wrote:
rocarpen wrote:(god, the Mac OS really was a billion miles ahead in those days)
Aren't they still ahead, maybe not with a billion miles, but still? I never heard any bad about Mac OS X. I'd really like to try out Cherry OS or some other emulator, but I don't expect much from it, will search for some reviews.
Eh, I agree that they used to be, but as one who uses both every day I'd call the 2 OS about even now. Apple continues to update OSX (Tiger, or 10.4, is due any day now) with features that look more and more like Windows, and Windows continues to update with features that look more and more like OSX. Expose is nice, but less games support isn't. I'd say the two platforms are about equal now; the only thing OSX really has going for it is higher security (simply b/c nobody uses it). 6 of one, half dozen of the other.

Sorry to wander off topic (I'll cease after this): I was a full-time Mac user for 10 years, until late 2003 when I built my first PC (needed raw 3D rendering power). Having used both OS' extensively, I'd really have to say that OSX is still leagues ahead of XP in a number of areas. It really is a much more elegant, approachable, tweakable, secure, stable OS. Use it for a bit, do some creative work, and you quickly come to appreciate how extensive and refined the experience is.

That being said, I also like XP well enough, and am satisfied with it. (The old adage about Windows being 'good enough' comes to mind).

cpemma · Post by **cpemma** » Thu Apr 07, 2005 12:47 pm

rocarpen wrote:
Straker wrote:
flyingsherpa wrote:hmmm, reminds of some computers we had back in college. they were Macs of some sort, but if you pressed a certain key sequence they would boot as PCs.
yeah, OrangePC cards, those were basically NuBus cards with a 386/486 on them. was too young then to know/care much about the specifics (like what exactly was implemented on the card), still pretty slick though.
Woo... memories! After much insistent urging and whining, I convinced my family to make the jump from a Mac Plus to a PowerMac 6100. Inside the pizza-box beige design lurked a PC Compatibility card...

Going back even further into medieval days, my works Apple IIe (1MHz 6502 cpu) had a plug-in Z80 card. We ran Visicalc and some Apple Basic programs in ProDos with the 6502, Wordstar and dBase II in CP/M using the Z80 cpu.