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Whats better AMD XP or Pentium IV

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NavjotG

MIS
Feb 11, 2002
40
GB
Hi, im think of building my own PC and am not sure which proccesor to use.Also im new to building my own PC and would be greatful for any advice or links to web sites that provided info.

Rgrds
 
I used to say INTEL is always better. but here latetly AMD has gotten pretty awesome. I dont know the specs fully on this comparison. but Ill bet the XP is as good or better and less... anyone know the REAL answer? js error; 67 on line; 36 of signature.class
 
Kind of hard to say. I personally like the Intel P4 better but just from a history of doing better with Intel P3's and P4's over the AMD's. AMD's usually cost less. However with the 2.whatever GHz out, the 1.5 and 1.6 are almost nothing as far as cost goes. What are you going to be doing with this - general use / gaming / etc?

I do not think there is a real answer here.
 
For the money, the Athlon XP is untouchable. Even the slowest XPs outperform the P4 2.0Ghz. Check out the benchmarks at the "respectable" sites like and
If you must have the very fastest performance, the P4 2.4Gb wears the crown.

However, I put together a system with a Via 333 chipset, XP1700+, DDR RAM and GeForce4 DDR gfx recently, and I can't see a good reason to build a faster system - it booted Windows in 20 seconds flat from power on, and applications operated in real time (no Please Waits here).

I'm sure that future Microsoft bloatware will slow it down, however...;-) CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk
 
Real basic comparison:

AMD XP procs does better at floating-point calculations. This means that you may see a better 3D experience overall in speed. AMD uses 3DNow!, MMX, and SSE instructions.

Intel P4 chips aren't very consistent. The newer Northwood chips have been given more L2 cache (512kb) which has significantly improved speeds in office apps and similar apps that involve educated guessing by the proc. Overall, the P4 beats the XP proc in terms of "chugging away" so to speak. Whenever the task is simple but involves large shunks of data (such as when encoding an MP3), you'll see better performance on the P4 due to its long pipeline.


I guess that wasn't very basic, but here's my point:

Both have their advantages and disadvantages. If your budget isn't small, I'd recommend one of the newer northwood P4's (2.0 or 2.2 GHz). If you want to concentrate on gaming and investing most of your money into sound and video, save some $ by getting an Athlon XP. Both are good procs...
 
sorry about the typos above:

"AMD XP procs does do better..."

"large shunks chunks of data..."

 
When I built my own system a year or so ago, I use an AMD 750 Duron processor just cause it was cheap and drasticly out performed the celeron.

In general I like AMD better than Intel one of the reasons is that they listed thier compeditors processors on the benchmarks while Intel didn't also I find them less confusing in regards to Motherboards because there isn't so many different sockets for AMD processors.
 
It's kinda like asking who's makes the better truck, Ford or Chevy? There are people who think either one is superior.

The best P4 and the best Athlon XP are roughly equal in performance, and both are excellent in reliablitity. On a note with that, it's not the processor's fault if a system is unreliable, it's more the operating systems faults; were I work we've got a Novell server running of an AMD K5-100 cpu. In 4 years that server has been down for one single day, and that was because a lightning hit blew out the motherboard's interrupt controller. That's reliability.

In my opinion, Intel tries to control the market too much (think of Rambus for an example), and thus I have and always will buy AMD. Going with an AMD processor you will find better motherboard and ram options at lower prices. I still find it interesting that Intel has not yet adopted the technology that began its downslide: 3DNow!
 
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