Which is better?

Neither one,
Go with the 1Ghz P3 and the other parts you have there. (800Mhz if you want to save some money and overclock to 1ghz)
Also get a CUSL2-C from Asus.

You will want SSE extensions more than 3Dnow for games, AMD is switching to SSE2 very soon so the future of 3Dnow is uncertain.

Intel is about to change the P4 to a .13 micron chip and will obsolete the current P4. now is not a good time to buy P4 unless the price drops alot. Dont get me wrong, P4 is still a superior cpu than Tbird, just going thru some changes and you dont want current P4 for games.

Ignore fugger )... if you have to choose between the two, definitely go with the Athlon... the P4 isnt as good as the P3 is (even fugger agrees with that)...

-AMD's are not for the faint of heart... Intels? those are for newbies )-

I wouldn't pay too much attention to fugger. He seems to give really bad advice, biased at least! At least from my month on this board. Although that info on the P4 is interesting, I'd bet they'll raise the outrageous prices again, making it an even worse purchase.

The Athlon gives you the best bang for your buck. I'd go that route with todays market pricing.

P3 is not better than P4

http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/cpu2000.html

P4 clearly owning Tbird.

Everyone knows that Intel makes a better quake CPU =P

When it comes to office apps it really doesnt matter, you can run a cyrix and still pull 100+ FPS in MS word, woohoo

For ignoring me you sure do mention me alot =)

Actually, he did call it PC133 RAM so I would assume it wasn't DDR (PC2100). What would be interesting is to see what board he is getting to see if he could up it to a 266FSB.

All that aside, I think the better path is the Athlon system. The Ultra alone will make the system better than the P4. I don't see their being any question on this one. Oh, and as for fugker's recommendation, don't do it. There is NO reason to go w/ the P3 if you're buying the system. All this incompatibility b.s. is a non-sequitor in an OEM system.

GO back to school, that was in english.

Mavis beacon where are you?

Yes the P4 is better for gaming. I think the Athlon is the best bang for the buck. But if price isnt an issue and you want the best gaming chip P4 is it.

Who knows what game developers will do in the future. They will do whatever they think will sell the most copies.

The question is would you bet your hard earned cash on the chance that SOME developers in the future might support SSE2 for SOME games and that you might actually want those games and if you get those games that the combination of P4 plus Geforce 2 Pro will actually outperform the Athlon with the with a Geforce 2 Ultra? Or would you rather take the combination (Athlon plus Ultra) that has superior 3D game performance on games that exist now?

Sorry, Maw, but the only game the P4 beats the Athlon in is Quake 3. That's it!!!

Which ones? More specifically, which games, aside from Q3, does the P4 outperform the Athlon. I'm sure you must remember.

Hey, when the best gaming rigs available, made by Falcon Northwest run AMD exclusively, I think that's a pretty good indication of which is the better gaming processor. In fact, in a recent gaming machine competition, which you can read about on their web site, the Athlon trounced P4 systems in 3D games.

<A HREF="http://www.falcon-nw.com/site.htm" target="_new">http://www.falcon-nw.com/site.htm</A>

FYI, Maximum PC is on Intel's payroll.

Your shot about Maximum PC being on Intels payrolls just told me enough about you.

Are you naive enough to think he's lying? Intel influences many publications, ZDNET coming immediately to mind. His comment about Maximum PC being on Intel's payroll is, in a non-literal sense, probably true. Intel's advertising dollars and market muscle influences reviews.

How about clock for clock? He's comparing two 1GHz chips.

And you know what? It DOESN'T matter. He's not deciding between identical systems. He's trying to pick btwn a P4 w/ a lesser vid card and a Tbird (at the exact same clock speed) w/ an Ultra. There's NO competition here.

Falcon are just prebuilt machines, nothing special at all except the high pricetag.

I just hope they leave the oversized HSF on your system when they ship it! =P

I build better gaming machines than falcon, they are a joke IMO. "they simply work"

http://www.falcon-nw.com/systems/machv_e1.html

This system is only $2,200! OMFG HAHAHAHAHAHA and they give you the crappiest CDROM known to man with it. I can buid 2 kick ass Intel based machines for that.

CDROM is one of the most important parts of a gaming machine IMO, everything from fetching content to actually loading the games.

G1 Nikko, lots of stuff for me to rag =)

For a mere 7,500 (price of a O2 or Zx10 w/vivo) you can get this.

http://www.falcon-nw.com/systems/machv_e4.html
Does this come with vasaline? prob not.

If what you say is true you've just made an even more compelling arguement for buying an AMD system. All one has to do is look at the specs of an expensive Alienware and Falcon Northwest rig, buy the parts yourself and you have a gaming machine that will outrun the best P4 machines for a lot less money. Anyway, as usual, you missed the point. The point was that the best gaming machines use Athlons, not P4's.

You are quite correct, SPEC is most definitely unbiased, because they don't benchmark anything. The produce the source code for standardized benchmarks, they sell it to anyone who wants it, they set the ground rules for submitting results, and they publish them quarterly, that pretty much it. What these results do show for Intel, is that when software is optimized for their CPU's, they do quite good, as good as some Alpha's, and far better than AMD, but if you look closely, you'll also notice that the benchmark for AMD was compiled using Intel's C 5.0 compiler, as of course was Intel's. I can't be completely certain, but it looks like AMD doesn't have any compilers for it's processors, and thus, the SPEC benchmarks aren't optimized for their processors, they're optimized for Intel's. Here is where AMD fails, they don't seem to have any compilers that optimize C code for their Athlons, so this would definitely give Intel the upper hand. Unfortunately, these benchmarks don't reflect real world performance at all, but do show us the potential processing power of that particular CPU.

I would like to thank all of you for all of the info, suggestions, etc. It took me a long time but I finally decided to go with the Athlon primarily due to (as others have noted) the better video card performance, and double the ram(albeit only pc-133) in hopes that I will have a dependable system that will deliver excellent performance for more than just a year. I also wasn't aware of the "Intel changing the P-4 specs soon" thing, that helped sway me as well. It appears as though maybe Intel really is trying to play catch up to AMD. Who knows. I cant wait to play Q3 & Alice & Soldier of Fortune, etc on this baby! My old system is a P233MMX w/ Voodoo 3 3000 pci. I hope i'm satisfied!! Thanks again!!

PS dont be too hard on FUGGER, he cracks me up

Now Now Children... lets not fight.

Fugger, You are talking about obsolete, The p4 right now is a non-upgradable path. why the hell would anyone wanna buy a p4 now?

And who the f*ck told you ddr is more expensive than rd-ram?

First it's not true p4 beats athlon in games .. anybody who says so is bending the reality.

p4 beats athlon in quake at 640x480 res...

but with a GF2 ultra or not you wont be playing at less than 1280x1024x32 where the CPU doesn't affect the FPs but only how many polys the card can throw at the screen and the fill rate

SO SHUT WITH THE P4, it's only good for a frisbee !

by the way at my comp store..i can have a duron comp full equip at 650Mhz with screen and all for the price of the p4 1.5Ghz + 64 Meg ram LOL !!!

Well first of all, I cannot recommend buying any P4 system until the new P4 (Codenamed 'Northwood') comes out at the end of the years because once it and the new chipset for 'Northwood', which by the way would support DDR. See once it comes out the current P4 will become obselete. Read Tom's recent Intel roadmap for more info.

But now to answer your question. It depends. It really is a tough choice, now if the Athlon had DDR it would be that but because it has SDRAM that closes the gap, but I have to say the Athlon part because the GeForce Ultra, but also because the P4 has had trouble performing well in Office apps.

Something else to keep in mind is that also I think that once the newer Athlon's come out ('Palomino') those will need a new Motherboard, also. But also wait for the 1.3GHz Palomino Athlon with DDR. I know that many people would say "There's always something new on the Horizon", but I believe that DDR is the Memory technology of the future.

My point for all this is that you wouldn't be able to upgrade your CPU any higher on a current T-Bird based motherboard, now I admit there is a little more room on the P4 because the current core 'Willamette' will most likely go up to 2GHz. Hope this info helps.

Jacob

P.S. Sorry if I repeated some stuff, I didn't realize that there were 5 pages of posts on the discussion.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by ajwr_2000 on 02/16/01 11:25 PM.</EM></FONT></P>