Intel or AMD? Looking to build a new comp.

1. Athlons are generally regarded as better for gaming and Pentium 4's are regarded as better for encoding, so its up to you which one you want to do more of (and be faster at it) or how much money you're willing to put into for shaving a couple of seconds (or minutes, I forget the details exactly) off of encoding.

Athlons are numbered to reflect how well they would perform against a Pentium 4 clocked that way. So if you get a 3200 it should be similar to a Pentium 4 3.2 as clockspeed isn't the only way to judge the speed of a CPU by.

If you're interested in better gaming performance and want to be ready for the 64 bit Windows XP there's always the Athlon 64 3200+ which is priced about the same as Pentium 4.

2. From what I know PCI Express will help your computer run faster by increasing the data transfer rate from the pieces connected to your computer so if you're interested in having the latest in technology then you should get a motherboard with PCI Express. Only Pentium 4s have motherboards with PCI Express last I checked, so you'll have to wait a bit for the Athlons.

3. I don't know much about hard drives.

If I were in your shoes I'd get an Athlon 64 (w/ PCI Express) rather than a Pentium 4 (w/ PCI Express), but if I were on a budget I'd go with an overclocked Athlon XP 2500+ (overclocked to 3200), this is assuming that you're on a budget of course.

I tracked down some comparison benchmarks off the web. These compare the Athlon 64 FX 51 vs Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.2 vs Intel Pentium 4 3.2 vs Athlon XP 3200+.

Before I show comparison scores, I'd like to qoute the most current prices for the above chips. All prices are from www.pricewatch.com and include processor, fan & heatsink, retail boxed.

AMD Athlon 64 FX 51 : $725.00
Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.2 GHz : $846
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz: $273
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ : $278

Now to the benchmarks:

Quake 3



Quake 3 w/ Optimized AMD .dll's



Unreal Tournament 2003



Photoshop



Finally, 3DMark03



The writer of the article pointed out that they believe the Pentium 4 outperforms the AMD chips due to nVidia driver optimization in favor of the Pentium 4 for NetBurst architecture (whatever that means).

At the very top end AMD Athlon 64 FX 51 goes neck and neck with the Pentium 4 3.2 EE in most benchmarks and costs about $120 less. However, the Pentium 4 3.2 without EE does keep up with all 4 processors (close enough I doubt any of us could tell if competing systems were sitting in front of us at the same time). And it's a bit cheaper than any of the other models.

The complete article from which I got this information can be found here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...on64-fx51.html

if you do this make sure you get a mobility 2500+... the amdxp 2500+ desktop version is locked so you won't get a great oc.. but you can plug the mobile version into a desktop motherboard.

uhh why nothing about the FX-53?

..

The article I got the information from only had comparison's of the FX 51. I assume at the time it was written the FX 53 was not available.

Whoops.. that quote was for the Athlon 64 3200. The Athlon XP 3200+ is as low as $139.

My bad.

Mentioning your budget would be a nice to know.

Oh yeah, a pretty detailed article on this can be found here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030623/index.html

Looks like the P4 is the winner is all aspects over the Athlon XP 3200.