March 5, 2006
CATCHING UP
First of all, let me apologize for not at least sending you a pricelist in the past several months. As you may already know we are short handed here and I am wearing many hats. I used to do updates on Saturdays and send out a newsletter and priceist at that time. Lately, when 5:00 shows up I just want my freedom. The pressure of “doing it all” for 8 hours a day is too much. So let me just say, if your pricelist looks like it has mold growing on it, pick up the phone and call. Our “verbal” pricing is always current. For those of you who only shop the website, I’m sorry. It is generally the last thing to get updated. It is now, for the most part, current. We will try to stay current on these things now.
Here is a mish-mash of stuff coming off the top of my head that I haven’t shared with all of you lately:
AMD XP processors are gone. 100%. I have never seen an end of life product dry up so fast in my life. It was almost overnight. Socket 462 is dead. We have 1 or 2 motherboards for the platform but that’s all. They will not be around much longer. There are a couple of Sempron 462’s if your board will take it. They won’t be around much longer either. All Semprons are now 754 pin.
Athlon64 is kickin’ butt. If you’ve read these letters over the past 5 years or so, you know that I am not a whore to any brand. When Intel is on top, we tell you. They have been on top for the past couple of years. The Athlon64 didn’t really kick into high gear until the release of Windows XP x64. Now that the O/S is main stream everyone seems to be leaning towards the A64. Intel didn’t have a 64 bit processor available until after Win XP x64 release. At that point they simply said “Hey, our P4’s are 64 bit now”. There wasn’t any fanfare and there wasn’t a new offering. Boring! The P4 and Celeron 64 bit CPU’s are ho-hum. The pricing is higher than AMD (as always) and the performance is…well…not there. The Athlon64 939 pin runs at 1000Mhz FSB vs. the Intel at 800Mhz FSB. That alone makes a world of difference. By the way, the Athlon 754 pin processors are now end of life as well. The only 754 pin will be Sempron. Oh by the way, there is Extreme dual core 1066Mhz FSB P4’s available. How deep are your pockets?
Intel recently announced the “Death of single core processors”. This is not entirely true. As usual when Intel announces something give it about 6 months or so to actually happen. Dual core processors are not all they are cracked up to be. The price is (still) high and the performance is (still) ho-hum. The best bang for the buck right now in P4 is still the single core 3.0Ghz. But now all the single cores are 2MB cache.
Don’t call me or write me to say that I’m Intel bashing. I’m not. I just speak my mind about what I see. If you don’t agree that’s OK. You are entitled to your opinion. Besides, give me a couple more years and I will probably be praising Intel again. As you know Intel and AMD constantly leap-frog each other.
ATI has entered the chipset market. Take a look at the motherboard on the pricelist and you will see a new player with Intel, SIS, VIA, and Nvidia. The ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset has really blown us away. The performance is phenomenal. It has rock solid stability and compatibility. With integrated ATI graphics sharing up to 256MB the integrated board has come a long way. Currently they are only available for the Athlon64 platform.
ATI crossfire and Nvidia SLI technologies are making a lot of appearances lately. Multiple desktops are becoming commonplace. Cool stuff too. Check it out.
I could go on an on but I guess I’ll have to just start sending this newsletter out on a regular basis again. Sorry about the delay. We are still here and running strong. Please stop by and say hello or just pick up the phone. It seems like every day I get a phone call from someone who I haven’t talked to in months or years. It’s nice to see people starting to come back to the industry. The times they are a changin’
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