First off, mikelou, could you PLEASE try to adhere a little bit more to the standard English grammatic rules? This is not a chat room, and writing without any punctuation makes it harder (oh well more uncomfortable at least) to read and understand what you're trying to say. No offense meant.
Anyways, to get on topic, the general opinion througout this board is, as far as I can tell:
In most current 3D games, Intel
slightly beats AMD on a clock per clock base. It leads by a few FPS, which is not something you can notice when playing. Ie a 1 Ghz Intel is
slightly faster than a 1 Ghz Thunderbird. This is not because of Intel's architecture is far better than AMD's, but rather because games are optimised for the market leader, which, of course, is Intel. Many current games are also optimised for 3dfx, the (previous?) market leader in the 3d sector - same reason. Raw tests show that the AMD FPU beats on a clock-per-clock base, but those are not real life situations, of course.
The fastest (consumer) CPU available right now is an AMD. The 1.2 Ghz might lose a battle against a 1.2 Ghz P3 - however there is NO 1.2 Ghz P3 as everyone knows. The P3 architecture has proven not to to be as scalable as the current AMD architecture; the TB get quite hot at high clocks, but in contrast to the P3s, they don't crash.
A 1.2 Ghz TB is faster than the 1 Ghz P3, while being about $40 more expensive.
Which leads us to the main difference, the price. Intel CPUs are plainly expensive when compared to AMD CPUs. Even though the speed is
about the same, they are WAY cheaper than their Intel counterpart. You can invest the money you saved in whatever you want ... since todays games base their speed mainly on the graphics card, buying for instance a GTS instead of the MX would be a good idea. A 1 Ghz TB with a GTS would be WAY faster than a 1 Ghz Intel with a MX.
On low-cost CPUs there is no question. The Celeron always looses against a Duron of the same clock. Not sure about the prices over there, but here in Germany the Durons are not only faster than the Celerons, they are also cheaper.
So as for the high-end CPUs, TB is fast and cheap and Intel is fast and expensive. On the "low-end" side, Duron is quite fast and extremely cheap, while Celeron has medicocre speed and mediocre price.
Both TBs and Durons are very overclockable, especially the cheapest available Durons o/c amazingly. O/cing get's even better with the new chipsets running a 133 Mhz FSB. Don't know about Intel on this issue.
Stability is another funny thing. The AMD CPUs of the current generation are stable. The mobos of the current generation based on the KT133 chipset are stable. So what?
True, the high-quality KT133 boards are not cheap, however neither are the upper-end P3 mainboards I'd say. There are mobos in the middle price range for AMDs, but those don't o/c well (if at all). In case of AMD mobos, you generally get what you pay for, but not completely either - the MSI K7T Pro2 is as good as and will probably be cheaper than eg the ASUS A7V. Brands sell.
Whew. This has gotten far longer than I thought it'd be. Going to save it and post it whenever I see anyone shouting "INTEL CPUS 0wN AMD CPUS" (or the other way round, for that matter). Hope someone actually reads this, although it doesn't offer anything new, of course.
