Amanda Athlon

Amanda is my current desktop machine, as you might guess from the name its powered by an AMD CPU, the Athlon specifically. When I was looking to build a new machine when Celeronda started to get long in the tooth I fancied the idea of an alternative to Intel and really the only option these days is AMD. A Sun or HP was kinda outta the question.

Here's some detailed guff on the h/w setup:

Gigabyte 7n400 motherboard

The GA-7N400 is the platform for the AMD Athlon XP 400MHz FSB Socket A mounting processor. Has a dual channel DDR controller and AGP8X graphics interface. Onboard Ethernet LAN connection, IEEE 1394, and USB2.0 interfaces. Built-in sound card and the usual serial and parallel ports. Nothing out of the ordinary really, just a well priced and reasonably viewed m/b

CPU: AMD Athlon 1500XP (p/no: AX1500DMT3C)

I've always been a bit of a Luddite when it comes to hardware, and combined with my sympathy for the underdog it was a no brainer to choose an AMD chip and motherboard combo. So it was I ended up with the Athlon XP 1500.

The 1500XP actually runs at 1333 MHz, has a Socket-A/462 pin interface, 256k internal cache. Bus frequency is 133 MHz and the processor uses Double Data Rate bus so the effective bus speed is 266 MHz. It was the slowest of the original "Palomino" chips the quickest of which was the 2100.

Memory

The Gigabyte m/b has 4 DIMM slots which I've loaded with a matched pair of Kingston 256MB DIMMs for a grand total of 512MB (in case your maths ain't too good). This seemed like a ridiculously large amount of memory to me, hell even 128MB seems like a lot, but it was worth it coz I can even play UT2004 on the machine under Windows XP now.

Power Supply

Moving to a machine with an ATX power supply was a fairly exciting event for me, I've always had older AT style cases with PSUs putting out the likes of 200W of power, to be recommended to buy a PSU that was capable of 485W amazed me. The Enermax model I bought has SATA connectors, has very flash looking EMI shielding, has adjustable fan speed and separate 12V rails. All very impressive I'm sure.

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See Also: Hardware Stuff | Celeronda | Dolly Duo | Notes Index

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