P4 3.4 vs AMD X2 5600+

[cordless89]

Currently using a P4 3.4 with 2GB PC3200 ram... thinking of going to a cheap setup of a AMD X2 5600 with 2GB PC2 6400 ram. Will I experience any gain in speed and/or performance? No games to speak of, just general XP & Vista use with a little movie compression and photoshop tinkering.

Any help is appreciated. BTW - AMD vs Intel -- I really don't care. Just cost vs performance.

 

[myocardia]

Yeah, the X2 5600 is considerably faster than a 3.4 Ghz P4 at nearly everything, except possibly for video editing/transcoding. The P4's were the king of audio/video stuff, back in their day, like the C2D's are today.

 

[cordless89]

No video editing... yet. Just the usual DVD backups. Looking for something cheap and the 5600 setup can be bought for about $120 plus shipping.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Without making the effort to check, I'd bet the AMD X2s include at least the same SSEx optimizations as an old P4.

Dual-core is a very nice step up from single-core, it makes everything more snappy and is especially useful when some rogue application or web page Flash ad goes berserk and pegs one core to 100% -- ctrl-alt-del brings up task manager in the second core where you can kill the bad app.

Under $100 the AMD dual cores are the best value in CPUs for most applications, especially if you are getting a cheap motherboard with integrated graphics (try Biostar, they make good mATX boards). Over $100 you might think about intel core 2.

 

[myocardia]

Dave makes a good point. If your P4 is of the single core variety, then you will notice a large difference with the X2 5600. If it's a Pentium D (or any of the other dual cores), then not so much.