AMD K7 (Athlon) > Reviews > What you gonna do now then Intel?????

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Very fast
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Manufacturer Support	Good
Instruction manual	Satisfactory
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	very very quick, getting cheaper all the time, much cheaper than equivalent offerings
Disadvantages:	Socket A motherboards still expensive

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I must admit to not being an Athlon user myself although I have plenty of mates who are and theres no doubting that the Athlon is the quickest chip around by a long way and is also very well priced against its main competitor, the Intel Pentium III.
If you want to spend the money on getting a fast PC for gaming and everything else you can throw at it then the Athlon is the way to go. The initial Athlon got AMD to the top of the tree in terms of speed over the PIII and now the Thunderbird has extended that lead. The Thunderbird is rumoured to be quicker than Intels soon to be latest offering, the Pentium 4 so this is going to be an interesting one for Intel, they really have to drop their prices because at the moment if you want an Intel then you are paying more for a chip at lower clockspeed and lower performance. You can almost guarantee that if you buy an equivalent performance Athlon and PIII, that the PIII will have set you back £100-00 more than the Athlon has so I dont know why people continue to buy Intel.
The arguament that Intel was more reliable than AMD and Cyrix has been shot out of the water long ago as all are equally stable. The only reason I think that people are buying Intel over AMD is because of the fear to change because Intel are the original CPU makers and have been the best for so long. At least when Intel had the quickest chips people had a reason to pay all the extra for Intel but now when AMD are a lot quicker I dont see how Intel can justify charging what they do.
Its the same at the lower end where the Duron thrashes the Celeron at much cheaper prices so Intel are in trouble as far as I can see.
As for the Athlon well there prices are falling all the time and so if your after a PC to play games on and that flies along then the Athlon is the chip to go for. Personally I am a Cyrix user and hence not a pro AMD person before people accuse me of being biased in that direction, I can just see Intel falling apart.