AMD fan, taking a look at Intel

[bob]

Ive made the switch to AMD in about 1999, with my K7. I was amazed at how it beat my 1ghz PIII gateway. The gateway even had a 133mhz bus, with the K7 only 100mhz.

But Im no longer "in to" buying new games. I bought NFS underground, and used it on my 500mhz athlon without speed issues. But megaherts does matter when your not gaming. The amd was slow for other things like encoding MPEG and big MP3's. The fastest AMD cpu is somewhere abit over 2Ghz? I know a 2Ghz amd means fun with games, but only for a 140$ processor...

Since I have been out of the "Intel" loop for almost 6 years now (cant believe its been that long) I know just about nothing when someone talks about pentiums made after 1999-2000.

Im very dissapointed with the multitasking power of my 600mhz celeron on my laptop. It encodes MP3's the same rate as my 225Mhz K6 amd. But yet, the Celeron flies when I am running XP Keygen. Looking at the current prices for a 2Ghz pentium IV, makes me yell "Aye Carumba!". 200$ for a 2Ghz P4? Is that fast?

My other concern is heat. I see people with those jumbo copper Zalman coolers running with temps hotter than my laptop (its fan doesnt turn on till 68C).


At newegg.com, 400$ could get me:
Athon 2600+ Barton mobile, a 3000+ barton, or a 2800+ 64 bit
200gb hard drive
512mb DDR333
256mb DDR333
350W PSU
Micro ATX case
big huge zalman copper heatsink

(i have no idea what the plus'es mean in terms of performace.)

I need some good credible websites to do some up-to-date research on, in order to justify spending more money on a pentum cpu. I would like to stick to a 400$ budget, and go with a micro atx, or even a bookPC case.

 

[Black Morty Rackham]

Athlon64s aren't really slower than Pentiums at everything but games. That's just a silly myth. Which is best varies greatly. Go look at Anandtech, they have system guides and benchmarks.

 

[CzarDestructo]

for the most part the last few generations of AMDs have been just as good, if not always better than P4s when it comes to all around use. this including video encoding. the myth that everyone loves to turn a blind eye to is the fact of optimization. more and more software is either netural to optimizing, or geared toward P4. its a matter of figured out what software you plan to use on the system and figure it out from there.

the P4 will be unbeatable in encoding(or any software for that matter) if the program itself, the encoder, and the transcoder are heavily optimized for SEE3 and HT.

 

[CaiNaM]

for the most part atthlon64's are just as fast if not faster in general applications and most games (10-15% faster is realistic). as far as games, to make that statement one must assume with most games you're running at lower resolutions where the 'bottleneck' is the cpu and not the video card.

while intel may have more of an advantage in encoding, it's probably minor, and it depends on the particular application (multithreaded apps will run much faster with intel), and then even on what those applications are doing (my a64 compresses files in winrar faster than my intel, but decompresses them slower). thier one real weakspot is handling 2 applications which both reqeust high cpu time.

so browsing the interenet and reading email while listening to mp3s will work fine, but the a64 struggles if you doing something more intesive such as compressing/decompressing rar archives while endcoding videos in the background, or playing HL2 while encoding video, etc.

it may or may not affect you depending on how you use you pc. hope that helps.