Please help me make up my mind!!

[madu]

Ho fellows..

I'm in a very diabolical situation.
I am going for a new system and I was waving between Intel and AMD and finally from some help from this forum I went towards AMD64 +3700.
I am quite a multitasking person. I will be running a file sharing program like BearShare, MSN messenger, WORD and a simulation program like MATLAB. Matlab takes up quite some memory and this is the main reason I decided to go for a new system because my Celeron D makes me wanna smash it when running Matlab on that.
Anyway Matlab needs lot of memory and also good memory control because the program itself is very poor in memory handling and stalls all the running apps.
Anyways I was happy to go for a AMD64 +3700 and was settled to go for a DFI Lanparty because it seems quite good in ocing.
But just few moments back I read a reply on this forum that if thinking about multitasking, the Intel 640EE is the one and not AMD.
Now I'm confused again. Will 640EE give a significant performance over the AMD64 +3700?
Also doesnt HyperTransport give equivalence performance as HyperThreading?
If going for a Intel, I would have to go for somethin in the range of AMD64 +3700. I dont think I can get a Intel 3.8G one for the price of the AMD.
Do you guys have any idea? Can forget this and happily go for a AMD64 +3700?
Is it true San diego is not good at OCing as the Venice?
Please help me guys.. Will my needs be better done with Intel or AMD?

Thanks a lot..

Cheers..!

 

[fishmahn]

640EE??? Could you mean 840EE? I don't think there is an 'EE' version of the 640.

Hypertransport is not hyperthreading -they are very different. One is a replacement for the FSB, the other is to help responsiveness in the face of the extra-long pipeline of the P4.

San Diego is reported to OC as good as or better than Venice that I've heard.

P4's Hyperthreading does make a system more responsive and give some performance improvement. The reason is that inside the CPU there are several 'processor units' one does floating point math, one does simple arithmetic, etc. Not all these PUs are busy all the time when running a single thread. HT gives the computer a second entrance to those PUs. Makes it look like there's 2 CPUs, and if the PU isn't busy doing the first thread, it can do something off the 2nd thread.

Not knowing matlab, but I expect it to be a massive single-thread program. (could be multi-threaded - have to ask the Matlab people). So, Intel's HT may give you some boost, but you have to deal with heat and power issues. Don't know what to recommend.

Mike.

 

[RichPLS]

An Opteron 175 ~ X2-4400 and a board like the Asus A8R-MVP would be great for multi-tasking and you could overclock it a good bit for extra performance. Also it runs cooler than an Intel solution, and draws less power yet well outperform the 3200 and 3400 dual core Intels.
Opt 175 is around $500, and the board is about $140, and uses DDR memory.