RE: PIII 550 or Athlon 950?

["Steve Shockley" <Steve.Shockley@shockley.net>]

> At this point, you have LOTS of processor, modest memory, and 
> unknown disk and unknown link speed.  The slowest of these 
> things will determine your machine's ability to do 
> work...odds are, it won't be the processor.

Another variable to throw in is that (as I understand it) the Athlon chips use a 200MHz front-side bus (or 266 on the newer models), where the P3 is limited to 100 or 133 (assuming no overclocking in either case).  They also have a full-speed (200,266) L2 cache, while I believe the P3-550's cache runs at half-speed.

In short, I don't know which is better, without knowing your application!  As someone else mentioned, your best bet would be to get one of each, and test it out in your application.  On the support issue, for servers I always like to use the "hit by a truck" test -- if I set up a server and get hit by a truck on the way home, can someone else come in tomorrow and run my server?  If not, then the server's too expensive for the business, no matter how cheap it is.