Athlon 64 3000+ or P4@2.8HT

[FrankieF21]

I was all set on building my computer when i went and visited my dad who told me he had met up with this guy who builds servers and works at best buy so i took a trip and visited him. I spent some time with him telling him about my system and what i wanted to do with it and he said that i should get a new Athlon 64 which kinda stunned me cause i had heard of it but never really thought much of AMD because i do more photoshop and premiere photo and video editing. I have also read reviews saying that it rivals the P4@3.2......is this true. I have also heard that the 1mb of cache will not help much with my proformance. What do u guys think i should do. I am on a limited budget only being 16 and having to work for and sellin my old computers to do this. I kinda want the best bang for the buck. i am plannin on putting 2 WD raptors in a raid config along with a gig of corsair ram. Does the fact that it cant do dual channel memory affect the proformance much. Is it worth it. I know that there will be a windows 64 bit OS but that wont help much because there arent many 64 bit programs. I just want a strait answer because i have been thinking about this for a couple days now and its eritating me. Will the 64 bit chip proform better than a P4@2.8HT
in programs like PS and Premiere along with everyday apps like word and IE. I will also be doing a wireless network but i dont think that this computer will matter much in the overal proformance of the network. Thanks for any imput or webpages you can gimme.

Any suggestions on mobos.thanks again

[slinky]

The Athlon 64 3000+ has 512KB cache, not 1MB. Like you said there are barely any 64-bit programs out there that are must have, so buying a 64-bit processor would probably only make you feel better for awhile until 64-bit is finally mainstream. If your computer's performance is fine, why spend more money?

[FrankieF21]

my pc proformance isnt really fine the computer often freezes up and it is very slow. I would just like to start over and build from the ground up. I didnt build the first one i bought it from dell like a year and a half ago so i wasnt as tech savvy as i am now. made a few wrong choises that i shouldnt have and now i have a 4200 rpm 80gig hard drive. hahaha

[pinipig523]

look at it this way, i just built a computer this week based on the intel p4C 2.8. i overclocked it to 3.4ghz and it wasnt all that it was cracked up to be. for gaming, there was no real difference between this and a 3200+xp.. however, for encoding, im sure the p4 is much faster.

however, we are talking about the a64 here.. which is decently faster than a standard 3200+ axp... so, i would recommend the a64 3000+.

[batmeat]

i have a 4200 rpm 80gig hard drive. hahaha

i think you mean 7200 rpm. You'll love the Raptor SATA drives. I have one and it screams

[FrankieF21]

no i mean 4200 i mean this thing is really slow. What do u mean by encoding. Im relatively new to this and have heard that word tossed around but never really figured it out. So i think that the at athlon chip woul dbe the better choice.

[samwichse]

I would go with the Athlon 64 3000+ any day of the week. It benches better than the P4 WITHOUT optimized software, and some will be released soon. And it's more future proof

Sam

[Darthgary]

I would go with the 2.8 but only if your going to OC, if your sticking with stock speed then go with the 64 3000+.