[airspirit]

There is a trend I'm seeing that really pisses me off. I ran across a comparison between an Opteron 146 and a Barton 3200+ this morning that concludes that the Opteron has a bare advantage in power over the old Barton. What particularly bothered me about this is that they were testing this barton with dual DDR400 and they were testing the 146 with either dual channel DDR266 or single channel DDR333. Since that chip is designed to run dual channel DDR400, no freaking wonder it isn't running too much faster! The absolute stupidity is astounding, and the fact that they are spreading this BS around as fact is quite disheartening. In fact, I've only seen one review of an Opteron using quality memory in a "proper" configuration and it blew the rest of these reviewers out of the water ... and that was on a 146, not a 148. How can they expect to compare a, say, P4 with tricked out ultra LL memory on the latest and greatest board with, say, a 146 or 148 when they're using DDR266 or running in single channel mode or using DDR333/400 with CAS3-4-4-8 settings or some nonsense? I fscking hate reviewers sometimes.

When they are comparing top-of-the-line in one category, they should do it in this too, using CAS2-3-2-6 DDR400 in dual channel on a non-crippled board. That is what these chips were designed for, not the crap that was described above.

/rant