CPUs

[babyboss]

What is the difference between Pentium and Athlon CPUs?
what other CPUs? I am looking for a cheap, but reliable CPU, which can hold me for a few years. Is it neccessary to purchase a extra cooling fan for my CPU?

[ntrlsur]

I hate to answer a question with a question but i have to in order to get a little more information from you. Are you refering to Pentium as intel and Athlon as AMD or the specific processor familys? I am going to take for granted that you mean the diffrences between intel and amd. personally I don't see a big diffrence between amd and intel CPUs. I run amds and intels in my LAN and either one is good for your typical home uses or even some business uses. The only other major chip maker out there is cyrix which i believe was bought by ibm a while back. you can usally find there processors at microcenters or compusa's and they are typically cheeper then intels and amds. the reliablity issue depends on what other hardware you put with the CPU. The motherboard the memory and others can make a big diffrence. I purchased a cyrix processor for my linux RedHat server and it runs great. I had it up for 117 days before I had to reboot it for a hardware install. People that i know generally go for an amd processor cause it is cheeper. As for cooling. Any processor you buy should come with a heatsink and CPU fan which should be alright. I would suggest adding 2 case fans into your system. 1 for the air intake and 1 for exhaust. I suggest taking a look at http://www.tomshardware.com/ you can do a search for computer cooling and it will return several options for processor cooling and case cooling I hope this has been a bit of a help to you.