AMD or PENTIUM

[Marc]

From a discussion forum:

What are you doing with the chip? What's it for? Gaming? Dev? Music/Video editing?

If it's AV editing (music/video), go for the Pentium - it's got a HUGE front side bus (twice as much as the Athlon) which will give you a crucial performance boost.

For example, I can work with 64 audio tracks simultaniously (in real time) using Logic on a P4 3.0Ghz whereas I have an Athlon XP 2.2 that can only handle 22 tracks before I start to get problems with synch. Both machines have idential RAM and HDD's (512Mb DDR | IBM DeskStar 80/60Gb) but the motherboard on the Athlon is an ASUS 333 (VERY GOOD!)

It's the same story with Premiere, except rendering full-screen uncompressed video is only marginally faster on the P4 than it is on the Athlon.

Gaming-wize, I don't really notice any difference on either of my machines - both run ATI Radeon 9700 pro's, and I know the graphics card accounts for a lot of the performance.

If you've got cash and you do AV editing, go for P4. If it's for games, then no question about it, do the Athlon!

nao