Skip the Athlon64 and go with your original plan.
According to
www.pricewatch.com, same price range at the moment would be:
P4 3.2 Prescott vs. Athlon64 3200+ or
P4 3.4 Prescott vs. Athlon64 3400+
Beyond that range, you can pay up to several hundred dollars for either an
Intel or AMD chip, but hardly anybody gives a damn about those chips, as
hardly anybody spends as much on a processor as they do on the entire rest
of their system combined.
So the P4 3.2/3.4 and Athlon64 3200/3400 would be the best indicators of who
has the best bang for buck, at the moment.
Gaming: OpenGL: The Intel chips are much faster
Gaming: DX8: The AMD chips are faster, no doubt about it
Gaming: DX9: It's virtually a tie, as the AMD chips are two to three
TENTHS of a percentage point faster than Intel.
So on the gaming benchmarks, that's one win for Intel, one win for AMD and
one tie.
GAMING OVERALL: TIED
Business Applications: Office Applications: Intel blows AMD away
Business Applications: Internet Content Creation: Intel blows AMD away
Business Applications: Overall: Intel blows AMD away
Video Encoding: This one is so lopsided, AMD should have thrown in the
towel before entering the ring. Intel wins by a landslide.
Audio Encoding: Again, Intel wins by a landslide
Synthetic Benchmarks: (PC Mark 2004): Here, Intel blows AMD away on both
*CPU* and memory benchmarks
Even at the same price for CPU, an Intel system can be cheaper to
build, as the P4 boards are more mature at this point, and thus there are
better bargains to be found. Considering that an Intel system will likely
be cheaper to build and WILL perform better on all benchmarks except DX8,
it's kind of a no-brainer as to which chip to build with, at the moment.
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040322/index.html
The following is an article on the Athlon 64 2800+. But more interesting
is,
the benchmarks included in the article are a GREAT comparison of the 3.2GHz
P4
processors with the Athlon64 3200+. In this article, these two processors
are
pretty evenly matched, with Intel being faster on some benchmarks, and AMD
being faster on others.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2038&p=1
Now lets look at what Sharky Extreme has to report in their article about
the
3.4GHz Prescott processor. This one has benchmarks that are a great
comparison
of the 3.4GHz Intel chips with the Athlon64 3400+. Here, you have to be
careful,
as Sharky doesn't organize their charts in order of fastest to slowest. And
on
some charts, LOWER scores are better. But if you read all the benchmarks,
you
will again notice that the two chips are pretty evenly matched, with AMD
faster
on some and Intel faster on others.
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article.php/3261_3329681__1
Intel is better than AMD, at the moment. The only way AMD could change that
would be to drop their prices by 30% or better. -Dave, updated 10/2/04
Asus earned a