I'm in the market for an economy PC to hold me over for a year or so.
I see Price Watch lists several vendors that can sell a complete
Athlon 3000, 2800 and Intel P4 2.66 system (without OS) for around
$200. I do a little video editing, but gaming performance is my main
priority. I found a few benchmark comparisons that showed the Athlon
2800 beating the 3000 in several areas, but it wasn't clear whether it
was overclocked. Other web sites conflicted with that info & said the
3000 does out-perform the 2800 in most areas, but only marginally.
Both Athlon's out-performed the P4 2.66 benchmarks in most areas that
matter to me. Cost being equal, is the Athlon 3000 the best best?

JeffLaw wrote:
> I'm in the market for an economy PC to hold me over for a year or so.
> I see Price Watch lists several vendors that can sell a complete
> Athlon 3000, 2800 and Intel P4 2.66 system (without OS) for around
> $200. I do a little video editing, but gaming performance is my main
> priority. I found a few benchmark comparisons that showed the Athlon
> 2800 beating the 3000 in several areas, but it wasn't clear whether it
> was overclocked. Other web sites conflicted with that info & said the
> 3000 does out-perform the 2800 in most areas, but only marginally.
> Both Athlon's out-performed the P4 2.66 benchmarks in most areas that
> matter to me. Cost being equal, is the Athlon 3000 the best best?

yes

Athlon has fewer pipeline stages.

On 29 Feb 2004 13:35:15 -0800, (E-Mail Removed) (JeffLaw) wrote:
>I'm in the market for an economy PC to hold me over for a year or so.
>I see Price Watch lists several vendors that can sell a complete
>Athlon 3000, 2800 and Intel P4 2.66 system (without OS) for around

I would HIGHLY recommend AGAINST buying any one of these systems from
a price-watch bottom feeder. They WILL sell you a complete
piece-of-**** motherboard to go along with the processor.

>$200. I do a little video editing, but gaming performance is my main
>priority. I found a few benchmark comparisons that showed the Athlon
>2800 beating the 3000 in several areas, but it wasn't clear whether it
>was overclocked.

It was almost certainly overclocked, though there are some VERY rare
situations where a regularly clocked AthlonXP 2800+ "Thoroughbred"
chip might be a bit faster than an AthlonXP 3000+ "Barton" chip.

> Other web sites conflicted with that info & said the
>3000 does out-perform the 2800 in most areas, but only marginally.
>Both Athlon's out-performed the P4 2.66 benchmarks in most areas that
>matter to me. Cost being equal, is the Athlon 3000 the best best?

Of those three systems, yes. However you might want to dig around a
bit for a P4 2.6C GHz system (800MT/s bus speed), as that should be a
fair bit faster than the 2.66GHz P4 (533MT/s bus speed) but should
sell for the same price, particularly if you avoid the price-watch
bottom feeders (Pricewatch is all about cheap, and by that I really do
mean "cheap" and not just "low-cost").

My recommendation, go to www.resellerratings.com and find a few
on-line vendors with a decent ratings and compare some offerings from
them. Your best bet is to look for either an AMD AthlonXP processor
with a decent nVidia nForce2 motherboard or an Intel P4 800MT/s bus
speed processor (either the 2.6C or even the 2.8C) and a motherboard
using the Intel i865PE chipset. For motherboards, in my experience
MSI is the best bang for you buck. They usually have very reasonable
prices but very good quality boards. Asus makes good boards as well,
but they are usually much more expensive. ECS makes very cheap
boards, but they are REAL hit-and-miss in terms of both overall
quality and quality control.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca