I'll probably get flamed for this, but go for the Coppermine, and get an i815e motherboard.
 
You might be just a bit slower, but you don't fall victim to VIA's shitty incompatiblity problems

I have a VIA board, and I keep hearing that VIA sucks, but that's all I hear, not why it sucks, just that it does. I have heard bad things about their older chipsets, but only good reviews about the ApollaPro, which I have [as does a friend].
 
Inferno, can you give examples, or drop some links to articles with actual reasons why VIA sucks?
 
Thanks,
-bZj

You probably won't find a huge amount of difference between the two processors (except for price). I would choose the Athlon - I have an 800 and find it very fast. All this stuff about Via boards is BS - I'm happily running an Abit KA7 under Win 2K, with no problems at all. Just make sure you install all the latest drivers and you'll be fine.

Yes I agree, The Athlon processor is great and as with any High-End system, tweaking and fine tuning is required. I have a K7-750
with the FIC SD11 ,motherboard. My system runs great and all my friends are envious.
 
AMD K7-750
Fic SD11 (NC611 Bios)
Kingston Cas2 256 Meg Ram
WD 13.5 Gig Drive
Fujitsu 10 Gig Drive
Radeon 32 DDR
SB Live! X-Gamer
NetGear FA310TX NIC
Creative 6X DVD Drive
HP 8320i CD-RW
Apc Back-ups 500
Linksys Dsl Router
Westtell Dsl Modem
Netgear 4 Port 10/100 hub
Mustek 600 III Plus Scanner
Quickcam VC USB
Epson 860 Printer
 
All works and all games play so far(the
ones I play)
 
Ned

Why do Via chipsets suck?
 
Undoubtedly, it can be tweaked, but despite a month of tweaking, I could not keep a stable system
 
and looking at my info for Obsidian(with the exception of the mobo and Cpu, everything is the same)...you'll notice that I have a GeForce, a SB Live, and Win2k. These are all known to cause problems...
 
and for my Athlon and Asus K7V, it was just too much
 
go for whatever you want
 
AMD makes fast processors, and I've happily used them
 
but for me, the VIA didn't work.

AMD finlay almoust learned how to make fast CPU's. Now they just have to make 256 cash and not 64 and AMD CPUs will rock... and use 8 way set assosiative cash.. not 4.
But they are getting their..
VIA is what AMD was with K6.. it works but you know Intel celeron is just better.

Older amd motherboards and stuff were having some interesting problems but with new chipsets and extremely improved drivers, I believe athlons/tbirds are pretty stable. However, the via chipset doesnt transfer memory too fast on the P3 via boards, and I think the amd ones suffer that problem also. If there are incompatability problems, they are normally addressed or fixed up eventually so basically theres no real advantage or disadvantage of each CPU. What you will want to take into consideration is that the amd cpu's will cost quite a bit less, but you may need to buy a new 300watt power supply, therefore the price difference being slim to none.
 
If you need to buy a new motherboard and cpu, I would probably reccomend getting an AMD cpu with a GOOD tbird socket a motherboard, such as the abit kt7 raid, unless you need to buy a new power supply. However, see how much the p3-800 and the asus cusl2(i815e board) costs, and if that is about the same or less than amd/board/powersupply, I would go for that instead.

The only real problem with Via is the 133 chipsets don't get along with Nvidia. Nvidia has promised to fix the problem. Other than that though the Via chipsets do a great job.

AMD processors bring compatibility problems.
 
All Kenwood True-X CD-ROMs will only operate in PIO mode because AMD bus-mastering software is not compatible. That is true even after the Kenwood Firmware update.
 
PL