AMD Athlon System Test - Unpacking the First System
June 20, 2000
by Eric Svetcov
I received 3 brand new Athlon 700 systems yesterday from Midwest Micro and eagerly unpacked the first system.
So far I’m impressed.
Pros: Excellent case, great speed and no trouble getting the first system setup and running. I have been using recently a 600MHz Dell Inspiron laptop and was amazed how I fast this system was in comparison just from the gut feel level. It also seemed much faster than other systems that have come across my desk recently, including a dual processor P3/700.
Cons: I took their suggestion on a low-cost monitor (Futura 19”) and found it unacceptable for business use (it might be just fine for the home). This shouldn’t reflect on the system as a whole, it was my poor choice (I was trying to be too cheap). The other problem was that the 20GB drive was partitioned into a 16GB section and then the rest of the drive. I personally feel that for business systems this is unacceptable, end users seem to get confused when giving them the option of two drive letters on their computer. I will probably repartition the drive today before deploying one to an end user.
I didn’t have time yesterday to play with the system much, Stay tuned, I will continue my reports as I learn more about these new systems and place them into a production IT environment.