Help me decide

[Durkane]

After a month or so of learning about all this stuff I have narrowed my choices down to these:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (with a Zalman CNPS7000A)
Asus K8V Deluxe

or

Intel Pentium 4 3.0C (with a Zalman CNPS7000A)
Abit IC7 Max2

This system will go into my ThermalTake Xaser III V2420 Aluminum case.
The case has 7 fans and I hear that the zalman heatsink cools well. So I will be overclocking quite a bit. The only aspect I care about as far as performance goes is gaming, so I want the best system for gaming purposes out of those two. Any replies would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

 

[magomago]

If its for gaming, Athlon64 all the way....really anything beyond media encoding you should be using an Athlon64 if you want the best preformance (though I wonder when things will start to be optimized for 64bit...AMD should toss the creators of VirtualDub a FX-51 for free like Intel did with their P4s that led to a lot of SSE2 optimized programs )

Especially if you consider that the 3000+ is quite competative with the 3.2C and beats it here and there

 

[Durkane]

Ok thanks, would my choice of motherboard be a good one? And do you know if the zalman heatsink is good too?

 

[magomago]

Yeah the motherboard is good...As for heatsink, if you've seen others use it and reccomend it for the Athlon64 and the K8V then go for it. I don't know much about that heatsink since I've never felt the need to get a zalman, so make sure the thing works fine (b/c I don't doubt the cooling ability of the Zalman) and will attach to the Mobo....

You might wanna check out NFS4's rig b/c I think he is using a Zalman-- don't hold me 2 that

 

[DaveSimmons]

A64 will be faster for gaming, and several people here have the K8V and have said good things about it.

I'm not sure about the Zalman vs. AMD retail either -- you might edit your original post and change the thread title to "Help me decide (A64 heatsink)" to get some A64-owner responses.