All these PC's w/500-800FSB

[newuser]

Well, I am considering building a $900 system with an AMD athlon xp 2600xp
(-Epox Motherboard for AMD Athlon/Athlon XP/Duron Processors, Model# EP-8RDA+ $85
-ENERMAX EG365P-VE(FM). 350W Power supply for AMD K7 & Pentium4 $47
-AMD ATHLON XP 2600 /333 FSB PROCESSOR $93
-KINGSTON HyperX Series 184-pin 512MB DDR333 (PC2700) 64X64 DDR RAM modules, Model# KHX2700/512 2x$75 $151, Thermalright AX-7 Socket A Cooler $18
Enermax Whisper Fan 80x25mm $8,)

Anyway, I wanted to check out the pre-bulit gateways' dell's and hp's. They were all about $1300-$1500 for a comparable system, but most of them had like 500-800MHz FSB's
I find this a little hard to believe, are they really that fast or is it just deceptive marketing.

How much faster (in the real world) would one of these machines run compared to mine w/the athlon (Most of the pre-bulits I configured were "P4. 2.6GHz, 512K/800MHz FSB or P4 2.4GHz w/800MHz and 512MB Ram (PC2100).)

 

[SinfulWeeper]

First off the P4's FSB arcitecture is quad pumped. So a '800' MHz FSB is in reality a 200FSB.
Your XP on the other hand is not 333MHz FSB either, but ddr 166FSB.

Real world performance? What do you plan to do?

The Intel setup is more future proof... but coming from the likes of Dell, HP etc etc... it might not be all too upgradable.
If you do things like encode MP3's, DivX and what not. Go the P4 route as it can and will reign supreme over it's AMD counterpart. But if all your going to do is surf the net and do occasional word stuff's. Go for the custom built.

But in all, considering your getting a computer from the ground up with those prebuilt systems (software and everything), they are a much better deal.