Anonymous Joe said:
there's plenty of reviews of non-overclocked amd's. check 'em out, compare
prices. if you feel intel would give you a better performance and are
willing to pay whatever it costs for that, then do it. if you feel amd
would give you a better peformance for what you're doing, then go with that.
generally, the prices are about the same.
o yes, i forgot to mention. if you have a budget to spend, then you will
definetly want to see what sort of configuration you can make with the two.
if, for example, amd is cheaper than intel (remember to compare CPUs of
equivelant performance, not equal price) by $80 with the motherboard & cpu,
that will mean you can jump into the next memory bracket. so, if, for
example you could get a P4 3.06ghz w/ 512mb, or a athlon 3000+ with 1gb of
ram, consider what that actually means for you. it may be worth it to get
the cpu that is on paper slower, 2.10 or 2.16ghz (depending on 400Mhz or
333Mhz bus) compared with 3.06ghz, but in terms of perfomance (for various
reasons, which you should be familiar with by now, including pipeline
length, particularly with a Prescott core P4, as that has been increased),
they are actually pretty equal. if intel wins 5 benchmarks, amd will win 5
as well, so each cpu has a stength and weakness. for example, in mpeg-4
encoding, intel works faster in divx, but amd works faster in xvid. rather
strange, but if you do that stuff and are codec loyal, consider that. games
are largely held back by graphic cards, so dont give those too much thought.
the price difference could also mean doing something like getting a geforce
5950 instead of 5900, or 5900 instead of 5700, if you're into games. if you
are, then you'd realize that a better videocard will make more difference
than if you have intel or amd cpu.
these questions often used to start wars, hopefully it won't now.....fwiw,
i've been using amds since around 1998, and have never had problems. anyone
who is foolish enough to tell you amds dont run all the program is an
unreliable fool. intel's p4 and amd's athlon are both x86 based cpus, and
windows is an x86 operating system. all windows programs are for x86 cpus,
so everything works fine. linux comes in various incarnations, including
x86, so obviously linux works on amd and intel cpus alike. my last purchase
was $500, to which i got a 3000+ / 400mhz bus, 512mb pc3200 ram, motherboard
w/ ide raid, serial ata (raid or normal), agp 8x (rather standard now, but
new to me), firewire, usb 2.0, 6-channel audio, and gigabit ethernet. if i
desired, i could use 10 internal drives, and a host of external devices
through the built-in 6 usb ports (4 are usb 1.1, 2 are usb 2.0, i believe),
or the 2 firewire ports (4-pin and 6-pin, 1 each). i am quite happy, and
the $500 included shipping, and a $30 heatsink, $50 450w powersupply
[quiet], and a case fan.
