f13.net

I've read a lot of stuff (mostly opinions) about the pro's and con's between the two, but once again I find myself wanting to know y'alls thoughts.  I'm looking at getting either a 3.2ghz P4 or 3200+ AthlonXP.  So, if you'll humor me a bit, please advise me as best you can.


(I'm also looking at buying from www.ibuypower.com.  Only person I know who's bought from them say they love what they got, etc.  Anyone here have experience or knowledge about them?)

Kthx.

www.sharkeyextreme.com
www.tomshardware.com

Sharkey has some nice buyers guides that they update on a monthly basis.

I plan to upgrade this month, and it will simply be a matter of which mb/cpu that Fry's has the best deal on.

The only reason I haven't upgraded yet, is I'm waiting for COH NDA to be lifted, so I can see if that game performs better with any paticular chipset.

Raven

At the high end especially, pentium will beat out the AMD for performance but AMD will be cheaper.  The AMD naming scheme hasn't been accurate since the somewhere around 2 ghz.  Since then it has been AMD grossly exaggerating their performance with their naming scheme.

AMD is pretty good performance for the price though.  I recall my AMD barton 2500+ lined up performance wise with a 2 or 2.2 ghz intel (I forget which) but it was a lot cheaper to go AMD chip with AMD motherboard.

Neither :)  -Amd 64 2800 or 3000 are the best performans /price (esepcially if u overclock 2800) . AMD XP are ok but  10%-15% slower than AMD 64 .

  AMD 64  are about 5-10% faster than similar Northwoods (e.g. AMD 64 3000+ vs 3GHz) and 5%-20% faster than Presscotts (and much cooler too) . of course that not trrue for all applications  ,but true for most performance critical applications (such as games) . -Video encoding I wouldnt call performance critical as most smart ppl do it in backround  anyway :) , not even counting that most users do not video encod much so 10% pentiums advantage is encoding would be deciding factor in any way.

Ignore Tomshardware guide, there are enough good and fair hardware reviewers out there that Toms is pretty much usless.

Tom is in on some hidden conspiracy to control the buying public stu?  Or is he taking bribes under the table?  Or is he afraid for his life after learning too much and the <nvidia/ati/amd/intel> goons would kill him if he told the TRUTH?  Or is he a 'sellout'?  Which conspiracy do you favor?  Just morbidly curious.

I prefer AMD's myself, simply because for the performance, they are much cheaper than Intel and I R BROKE.

Cool, thanks for the input.  I'm still up in the air about it though...

So nobody knows anything about ibuypower?

Apparently they're fine...

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller2001.html

Yeah, I was reading that site yesterday.... Thing is, cyberpowerinc.com gets decent ratings on there too and I've heard a lot of bad things about them.  Hmph.

My next PC will be from iBuyPower. Now I just need the money.

They have a bias towards Intel. I say this having never owned a AMD and actually being a bit of an Intel fanboy. Look at his original review of the AMD 64 then go look at any other hardware sites review and you will see what I'm talking about. Or just go make a post on HardOCP, Anandtech, Sharky, any other hardware site asking about Toms.

Yah, but you'll get that about any retailer.  People with bad experiences are typically a lot louder than those who have no problems.