The Athlons just run too hot, period. And from my recent experiences, I can safely say that, for at least the forseeable future, the Athlons will be on my $hit list.
At one time I used a P3-500e in my main pc. It was overclocked to 750MHz, and is still running strong at 750MHz in another pc i have in the house. I was in need for an upgrade. Now all my CPU's in the past had been Intels. The Pentium 4's were way to expensive, tho, for me to consider, and they fell behind the Athlon in terms of performance on a clock for clock basis. When the 1.3 GHz T'Birds came out, I decided to take the AMD plunge. I had the fastest CPU out there and it dumped all over Intel's early Pentium 4's. Now about a little less than a year ago, a buddy of mine was looking for an upgrade. He had an Intel P3 1GHz, and was seriously toying with getting a P4. I managed to convince him to go with an AthlonXP 1800+. Well, his first one was gradually dying. And it did eventually die. He ended up returning it to NewEgg and getting a new one. THAT one worked. dead.
Now I had noticed something about my CPU's temp. It had been running, at one time, at 42c i believe it was. Now it was running at 58c idle. Something was wrong with my CPU. Was it nearing the end of it's life?? You bet. SO rather than wait for the thing to croak an an inopertune time, i elected to upgrade to an AthlonXP. I bought a 2000+. And wouldn't you frikin' know it, the cpu ran for less tha 2 minutes, then completley shut down and refused to do anything. I thought it mught have been a bad board, (Asus A7V266E). So i sent it to my aforementioned friend and slapped it into his board. The thing was fried. AMD later confirmed this when I sent the retail packaged CPU back to them for replacement. The only problem was that I had to wait 3 weeks for a replacement as the retailer wouldn't do squat for me. But i still had that 1.33!!!! threw that in. Worked great for about a week. Then it refused to boot into Windows at 1.3GHz. I had to clock the damn thing down to 1GHz to do anything. It was obvious that this cpu wasnt going to cut for another machine i had plan to assemble for my youger sister to take to college this fall. I ended up picking up a 1700+ for cheap and ran that till i got the replacement 2000+. I recieved the new one, retail packaged like the original and all. I crossed just about every appendage on my body, hoping that it would work. And it did! Cool, I thought.
Now this brings us to 2 weeks ago. I started to have the same problem my friend did with his original 1800+. During ANY game, wether it was Tiger Woods 2002, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, NHL 2002....the list goes on, It would just crash right to my desktop for no appearant reason. Well, after several reformats, shuffeling of components to various PCI slots, drivers, etc. the damn thing refused to even install WindowsXP. You would not believe the four letter words flying from my mouth. I tell you it was worse than an episode of 'The Osbournes'.
But i had still had that 1700+ i was gonna put in my sister's pc for college. And just for $hits and giggles, I threw it in. BOOM! It had worked. you know what this meant don't you? Another DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! AMD ATHLON!!!! That new 2000+ was gone!!!! AAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
Guess what my next upgrade will be.......
C'Mon...take a guess.........
An Intel P4..... No more AMD for me. I was giving my buddy all sorts of friendly crap when he replaced his '2ND' 1800+ with a 2.26GHz Northwood. I was like, "What in the hell are you doing on the Darkside?" and what not. Just like you would if your friend is a Steelers fan and u are a Giants fan. Now I feel kinda bad. He had the right idea in going with the P4, and went through several less CPU's than I did before taking the next step.
There is something wrong with the current crop of AMD cpu's. They run WAY too hot, they get hotter, and they eventually will die. That has been my ex-perience with them. And that will end my experience with them. From what I have seen from my friends Northwood setup, it promises to be a faster, more stable, cooler running setup than anything has to offer at this time.