AMD or Intel?

[birddogj59]

Hi everyone,
I am trying to decide which CPU to go with.
I am not a gamer. I run apps., email and surf the net. Some of the applications that I like to run are pretty memory intensive.
Recently, I read that AMD is not great with memory intensive applications. I always thought that I wanted an AMD athlon.
Now, I am not sure.
I want to get the cpu that will best suit my needs.
If it's Intel P4, then that's what I'll buy.
I am presently running an Intel Celeron. It's sloooow.lol.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions. birddogj

[eweruk]

P4 with DDR memory all the way!!

[Yankees4]

if price is not a concern go with the new pentiums with the new RDRAM if not, you still might want to go with an older pentium 4 with the older RDRAM since it is better for memory intensive applications. the bottom line is though either (athlon or pentium 4) will blow away your celeron so something that might have been "memory intensive" for you could have just been that your celeron stunk

[otheos]

Why? The P4 is bandwidth sensitive not latency sensitive. RDRAM gives far more bandwidth than DDR at the moment and the P4 is a lot faster when used with RDRAM.

However a cheap little Athlon XP1800+ sounds a nice deal and you stay on track for some upgrade in a year or two. Intel changes sockets far too often. Performance wise the XP1800+ will cope against the P4 2000 just fine at a fraction of the cost.

If it's overclocking then wait for the T-bred newer steppings in a month (note for the "difficult to overclock" people: you don't really thing a CPU that will reach 2.6GHz is already capped at 2.0GHz)

If you go P4 the 1.6A sounds good.

[JoeCompUser]

If you put similarly clocked AMD and Intel CPUs side by side, there's not much of a performance difference. But there is a significant price difference. Yes, RDRAM has a much higher bandwidth than DDR, but RDRAM is pretty expensive too. Example: PC2100 DDR 256 MB costs $34, RDRAM 256 MB costs $77, and PC133 256 MB costs $28 (prices are from PriceWatch). But you do get better performance.

My personal recommendation would be to go for an Athlon XP 1800. At PriceWatch, they are listed for $84. The next step up for AMD is a 1900, which costs $112. On the other side, a P4 1.8 Ghz costs $136 and a P4 1.9 Ghz costs $161. The XP 1800 is the cheapest of the four and has a better performance/price ratio.

[fatal]

a

[fatal]

a

[originel]

well i just upgraded to an xp1700+ from a p2 400 (not the same as a 600, but still). i saw an amazing jump in performance. also i tend to run games just as fast or faster than my intel friends. in fact a friend of mine with an alienware w/ a p4 1700 can't run games as fast as me (in q3 i had about 15 fps on him). i also beat him out in pcmark scores, he had a 3900 cpu score and i had a 4500 score. also i've never seen my cpu get above 115 degrees F and i only spent 20 bucks on my hsf and only have 2 case fans. the p4's are nice, and sometimes a little faster. but for me i was completely unable to justify the higher price (i am a college student after all). so the AMD was a no-brainer for me. also i spent only 450 to upgrade, and that includes 256mb DDR, 8KHA+ mobo, XP1700+, Tt Dragon Orb 3+ hsf, Antec sx1030b w/ 300w AMD approved ps. the intel equiv system would have set me back around 700.

[OPC|Jody]

Also you may want to note this. Yes the Intels are more expensive and when used with rdram they are fast. The AMDS are justa s fast and I think faster in alot of instances. The AMD Processors use Short-branch predicition and the Intels still use long branch prediction. I have two Machines here at home. I have my AMD Athlon XP 2100+ based PC and I just built a new Intel P4 1.6A Northie overclocked to 2720. Far more megahertz than the AMD but the AMD owns the intel Hands down on every benchmark except for Quake III Arena where the Intel dominates.

Also the P4 im using at home is a DDR board (Abit IT7 RAID)
The Motherboard on the AMD machine is an (MSI KT333 Ultra-ARU)

The intel is running at 16 x 170 with voltage at 1.75
And My AMD machine is not overclocked at all

[Cruez]

Just from my experiences....Out of the 6 systems I have had, 3 Intel systems died on me... all of the AMD's are still running. (since 1997) One of them running 750 o/c to 950 running 24/7 for over a year.