About CPUs There isn't much difference between Athlon XP, and Pentium 4. Basically they are made by two different manufacturers, each with their own vision on how the PC will turn out. AMD makes several chips: -Athlon XP -Athlon 64. -Athon FX -Athlon Opteron (servers) Intel makes several chips: -Pentium 4 -Pentium 4 LGA775 -Pentium Mobile (Split into two divisions) --Banias --Dothan -Pentium Xeon Athlon XP is what you see right now and basically is pretty much the equalvent comparsion to the Pentium 4. They perform generally the same. The biggest difference is 2% from what I've seen. Performance is mainly affected by the type of memory. Usually gaming memory helps (ones with heat spreaders). And don't get sucked into people who slap on heat spreaders cause you still need to see the timings to see how fast it is. Just because it has heat spreader doesn't necessarily means it is fast. It has to do with how the memory was designed. Athlon Opteron and Pentium Xeon are server processors. Not recommended for normal end-user desktop usage. Athlon FX/Athlon64/Pentium 4 LGA775 are generally competitors. Athlon 64 & FX processors has 64 bit extensions on the CPU, however after examining them, it appears they are nothing more but 32 bit cpus, running with 64 extensions. Pentium 4 LGA775 is basically a revision to the current Pentium 4 CPU, with enhanced cache and several new instructions (SSE3). From the performance charts I've seen, they are generally equal. The hype has been the 64bit extensions would be helpful. Yea it is true...if you have a 64 bit application and as of the moment, there is none. So it basically boils down to personal preference. I personally like both. If you are a budget conscience person, perhaps you should go for AMD. I am a little more about acoustics and preferred to have a more silent system. The basic heatsink/fan that comes with the P4 is a lot more quieter not to mention Intel has a built in feature that can reduce the clock if the CPU gets too hot. [font=Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif]I've seen too many amateur system builders fry the CPU because of improper fan/heatsink application and ending up loose a three hundred dollar CPU. [/font]
I prefer Intel over Athalon for some reason. My friend has an athalon and he hates it, but thats probably not the proccessors fault. I'm getting a P4 as my new computer anyway.
