PCTech Forums

im looking to upgrade my system and am looking at a sony rx514 desktop and want to know the difference between the AMD athlon and the pentium processors ..............which is the best etc, the athlon is about 200 pounds cheaper too!

If you are buying a retal system, it really does not matter which processor you get. An amd 2000+ will run about as fast as a 2ghz pentium processor. The difference comes in when you go to overclock (which you'll probably not want to do on a retal system) and pricing. The FASTEST processors are now about the same between amd and intel, but anything a few models back amd will be the cheaper price.

I'd say the person who buys the latest and the greatest shouldn't. As soon as the next processor comes out the now fastest processors will fall in price about 100 bucks.

That said, buy about the 1800 - 2400 mhz speed.. and that will be cheaper for an AMD chip. If you are gaming make sure you ge a decent card with 128mb of video ram. I like the ATI cards myself

Im running the Amd XP 2000 and i'm satisfied with it.Its been very stable for me in conjunction with a gforce 128mb video card.For the money AMD gives you more bang for your buck.

I pretty much agree with the others - the AMD chips are slightly slower clock-rate for clock-rate (ie an athlon Xp 2000 may not be quite as fast as a 2GHz P4) but they are MUCH better value for money. This means you can spend your remaining money making sure the rest of the machine is well specified. This may more than make up for the slightly slower chip

This battle between AMD & INTEL has alot of heated debates going on. Kind of like the Civil War (Brother vs Brother). I have always had PC with Intel chips at home and at work (That includes several Servers we use). Although at the current time AMD may be giving INTEL a run for the money. The advance of hyperthreading could be a plus for Intel in the US market as they are not available in Europe right now. So AMD has an upper hand in Europe. I myself am still looking at both sides to see if one will take the lead and set a few new hurdles for the other to meet.

The amd vs. Intel is the ancient battle of computer geeks. It almost gets as heated as abortion arguments.

Each will serve you well. My preference is AMD, mostly because I root for the underdog in alot of situations. I have built dozens of AMD systems, and only once had a processor fail on me, and that was because the power supply on my crappy Abit KA7 fried, and took the proc with it.

For a review of AMD vs Intel, goto www.unitedteamplayers-inc.com. Personally, I like the AMD chip.