CDRLabs.com

I'm very interested in starting over with a completely new PC. I don't want the latest or greates--just something that is realiable and does want
I want. Is that too much to ask???
I've heard diferent tales about AMD chips being "just as good as" Intel.
Is this true and really worth concidering when getting my system.
I looking at a P4 2.0 Ghz vs AMD 2000 (or whatever they call it). There is
about $100 diference in price.
Ever since I had an 80GB HDD installed there have been many problems.
I've thrown away $175 on tech "support" and nothing to show for it except
a few lost files! I'm not very happy with all this upgrade nonsense!
Any input would be grateful.

AMD is just as good as Intel. AMD Athlon chips are better suited for gamers, while Intel Pentium chips are better in the productivity area. Either chip is good, but I would get the AMD CPU and spend the extra $100 on some other hardware that needs to be upgraded in your system. RAM would be an excellent choice to spend the saved money on.

Here's two other threads that talk about Pentium 4's vs Athlons XP's
1.) http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=6346
2.) http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=7341

BuddhaTB wrote: AMD Athlon chips are better suited for gamers, while Intel Pentium chips are better in the productivity area.

I always though it was the other way around. Most benchmarks show the Athlon's been better at "office" type apps, while the P4's excel at multimedia. But really they are very close now, at least in the high-end chips (the AMD's with the 266MHz bus are no where near as fast as the 333MHz FSB versions).

The big thing is, though, just what are you going to be running? If the software you have is tweaked for the P4, it'll smoke an Athlon. But if the software is tweaked for the Athlon, it'll smoke a P4.

Personnaly I'd go with AMD for a "budget" system and P4's for a performance system. Keep in mind that the Athlons over about 2200 and less than the 2700 are not using the new 333MHz FSB and will NOT perform optiminally. Check out www.tomshardware.com. Look at the benchmarks for some of the P4/AMD boards. They do quite comprehensive comparisions.

Me? I'll wait for the 800MHz FSB Intel chips. Pentium 4 or 5 or whatever they call it. I've given up all hope of ever seeing a Clawhammer system, since they keep pushing the stupid thing back.

yeah, i want clawhammer too

Actually, I'd be happy with a normal-sized desktop computer that's just as fast as the NEC Earth Simulator.

Then maybe WinXP would actually run FAST

Well, maybe not.

As glock20rocks pointed out, there is a reason why an Athlon XP 2000 is $100 less than a P4 2.4GHz, the front side bus is much slower (not to mention the processor speed, although with overclocking you never know). Athlon XP 2000 = 266FSB, P4 2.4GHz = 533FSB. Plus the P4 has a bigger onboard cache (512KB). So, the extra $100 you are spending is for extras that really make a difference (i.e. increased FSB and cache). IMO, you can't even compare an Athlon XP 2000 to a P4 2.4GHz, you need to compare a faster Athlon processor with the P4.

One thing I think we can all agree upon, get lots of RAM if you are building a performance system. With an Athlon XP 2000+ or P4 2.4GHz, 512MB is a minimum, or step it up to 1GB. I did.

You can't even compare the XP 2400+ with the P4 2.4GHz. The mid-range (2100-2600) XP's are basically junk-they are massively handicapped by the slow bus. The FSB speed isn't as much of a factor with the slower chips, but it really is a problem with the "faster" ones. They XP's just don't scale well w/o the 333Mhz bus.

Basically:
If you want to play games/do multimedia: Get a P4
If you want to save $, get an Athlon.

Besides, mid-to-high end P4's and Athlons are almost the same cost. And if you get a 3.06GHz P4, you get Hyperthreading-which may or may not help you. I know it'd double the speed of the stuff I run.

Thanks for the input. I've had Intel all along and feel more secure with it.

What exactly do FSB readings involve? What performance do they affect?

The FSB is how fast the processor can talk to the memory in the system. The faster it is, the faster the overall system will perform. If you are running a program, say a DivX or MP3 compressor, the program is continually neededing data to process. If the data it needs is not in the CPU's cache, then it must get it from RAM. When you're dealing with a CPU running, say, 1.7 GHz (my system), and talking to memory at only 266Mhz, you can plainly see the performance bottleneck in all PC's now. And it just gets worse the faster the CPU gets. The new Intel P4 motherboards can do a 533Mhz FSB, using standard DDR266 memory (it uses two chips in parallel).
You could also get a system with RD-RAM (Rambus), but it's much more expensive and not really much faster than the dual-DDR approach.

On a side note, note that RD-RAM is clocked *much* higher than DDR: 800Mhz and 1066MHz. However RD-RAM is only 16-bit, while DDR is 64-bit, so the bandwidth is about equal (DDR400 or dual-DDR200=PC800, dual DDR266=PC1066). Intel's phasing out RD-RAM, so stick with DDR.

Hope that helps and isn't to cryptic!