New Upgrade = Athlon Vs. P4 ?!?

[N14]

No, i'm not trying to generate a comparative antagonism between the 2 systems, i just need good argumentations to aid me in making a choise.

I don't have a budged limit (reasonably speaking ) , i just don't know if now it's the time to spend big money.

If i go P4, i'll propably pick a P4 2.4c or 2.8c with a Asus P4C800-E and a pair of 3500 512mb modules (possibly Kingstone since they have a sale right now).

This system is about 200$ more expensive then a Athlon 2800+ equal system, and though P4 seems like a better choise i'm not sure if it's worth the extra money, expecially with the Athlon 64 coming out, which might be a better contenter for that extra budged (albiet i don't generally trust brand new hardware upon first release).

My original idea was to choose a mid-range AMD system and then upgrade to a Athlon64 (or P5) next year, but i'm just itching to buy the best system right now, expecially considering by the time next year will come i won't have a budged anymore ( schools cost more then what their worth ).

To further my problems, i'm pushed to upgrade like right right now in order to use my old parts (an Athlon 1800+ with 512mb of memory and a Readon 8500) to upgrade yet another machine for my Father.

Ha, decisions decisions...

 

[Nebor]

Lockxxored.

 

[mrgoblin]

Well Whatever you do, get pc3700, p4c 2.4 abit ic7 max3 and dont ever ask that question here again because the thread will get locked.

 

[EeyoreX]

Before everyone goes on about locking the thread and everything (it will be though, if it turns into a flame war, but that is often the fault of fanatical respondants rather than the original question. Often, but certainly not always.) Anyhow... To seriously answer this question (since I am assuming this isn't a flame-bait thread for the moment), we need to know what you will do with the system. What is the primary role? Is it gameing, video editing, office/productivity, or what? Without that information it is impossible to help, and the thread will become a silly flame war and will most certainly be locked...

\Dan

 

[sandorski]

Oh no you di'n't!!

Pick one or the other, they're both good, though the P4 will have an edge.

 

[brettjrob]

2.4C with PC3500/3700/4000 and a good ABIT IS7/IC7 or ASUS P4P800/P4C800 board will easily overclock on air to speeds that will allow better performance in most situations than the fastest Athlon you can find. More than likely you're looking at a minimum of 3.0GHz with any given 2.4C chip, but that's being conservative as many are able to push 3.2 or even 3.4GHz with stock or slightly upped voltage simply with a good aftermarket heatsink/fan like Zalman 7000 or SLK900. Considering that raw clock speed, and throwing in the incredible memory bandwidth and HyperThreading, I doubt even a majorly overclocked Barton can keep up. BTW, I am far from an Intel fanboy as I've owned multiple AMD systems... but from the day the P4C hit the shelves up until at least September 23rd, they have had/will have the best bang for the buck out there with the 2.4C/2.6C.

Just as a reference, my Philippine 2.4C on an IS7 with Geil PC3500 runs stable up to 3.3GHz, giving Sandra Arithmetic scores of ~10300, mem bandwidth ~5900MB/sec. Q3A timedemo flies by at 530fps in lowres w/o sound, although in general gaming is its "weak" point when compared with the Athlon.

 

[MasterFlash]

You're not sure if you're ready to spend big money on a new comp, but if you were you want us to help you decide what it should be? What? If you're looking at a high end CPU, benchmarks show that the P4C's have the edge over the Athlon XP's for gaming/multi-media, but are worse at General Use performance. Read this article!!! I wouldn't hold your breath, thinking that you'll be able to upgrade from an Athlon XP to the 64. I'm pretty sure it's going to be a different pin interface. My recommendation would be to give us a budget, and we could make a few recommendations. But you're questions are so open ended, they're hard to address.

 

[Nebor]

OMG You r all morons intel is teh roxxor for life n stuff! Amd is teh suxxor and ur mom likes amd you no where!

There, this thread is a flame war, lock this sh**.

 

[EeyoreX]

OMG You r all morons intel is teh roxxor for life n stuff! Amd is teh suxxor and ur mom likes amd you no where!

There, this thread is a flame war, lock this sh**.

\Dan

 

[justly]

Nothing against Masterflash but the article he referanced "Anandtech - The Real Slim Shady" should be questioned for its accuracy. That article has many inconsistencies when compared to the Anandtech article "The First 800MHz FSB CPU" that uses identical hardware and benchmarks for the Athlons and the 3 Intel CPUs tested on the Canterwood chipset. According to Anandtech and these two articles, in a two month time span the Athlon got slower on most benchmarks, sometimes by more than 10%, at the same time the P4 got faster in all the benchmarks, don't forget we are talking about identical hardware and benchmarks tested on the same website.

This is also a quote from the article "The Real Slim Shady" Date: June 23rd, 2003
quote "We used the latest DiVX codec (5.03) in conjunction with Xmpeg 4.5 to perform the encoding at 720 x 480."
You may be wondering what does this have to do with anything, well I'm about to show you.
On the same date, June 23, 2003 www.firingsquad.com posted their article on the Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz, the only thig is, they tested DivX encoding using Xmpeg 5.0RC2 & DivX 5.05.

I'm not trying to say that Anandtech willfully lied and used an older version when they knew a newer version was available, what I am trying to say is that I question the accuracy of any article that has these types of discrepancies with no explanation.

This is why it is allways good to use more than one reference when doing research on hardware.

 

[MasterFlash]

That's an interesting review from firingsquad.com. Note that the tests were done with single channel RAM (see test setup). The results would have been much more in favor of the new Intel platforms if dual channel RAM was used. See this review from Tom's Hardware. This review is more in line with Anandtech's, probably because of the use of dual channel RAM. I'm a big fan of AMD chips, but they don't have the top performance anymore. If you're on a budget, AMD is the way to go. If you need top performance and can afford it, then one of the Hyperthreading 800MHz Intel chips are for you.

 

[wetcat007]

should be on par with performance or damn close..

 

[Ketchup]

This doesn't really answer your question, but you may want to wait for Athlon64 and Prescott to come out, since they are so very close. Even if you don't buy them, AthlonXP and P4 prices are sure to drop once the new chips are released.

 

[Tegeril]

No no no...Do not purchase a Prescott processor. Either buy a P4 now, and Athlon 64 soon, or a Tejas later.

 

[bob4432]

save a couple greenback (or should i say peachbacks?) and get an amd... don't worry about upgrading in the future, because everything changes so fast, whichever you buy now, the companies will probably not be offering chips for the same sockets in a 8-14 months... unless you really need to say i have a Pentium 4, overcompensation....just kidding

what is the pc going to be used for?

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: Nebor
OMG You r all morons intel is teh roxxor for life n stuff! Amd is teh suxxor and ur mom likes amd you no where!

There, this thread is a flame war, lock this sh**.

Maybe 2 weeks vacation would be good for you.

 

[magomago]

If you are concerned with price for college then go ahead and save yourself some $$$ and go AthlonXP.

 

[Shad0hawK]

hold out another month and get an athlon 64.

at 2.2 ghz in comes within the all time record on 3dmark01 set by a kryocooled p4 running at 4ghz, it(the athlon 64) scored almost 25,000.

 

[orion7144]

This has been beaten into the ground so many times... We are talking less than $70 to get a much better performing P4C processor that will OC 30-40% .