AMD or Intel?

You can try www.tomshardware.com

They usually have the best information on hardware.

Many Thanks Charlie R!

Hello Elektric

As always, much depends on your intended use as to which is best.

This site has an eye opening 8 part comparison article on lower end standard and overclocked CPU's from both AMD and Intel as well as other good articles.

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-370-1.htm

Hope this helps you a little.

Thanks for the info snygolfgs. I'm now more confident to buy a new unit.

The "Best" chips from either firm have varied over the years, sometimes one is ahead in performance, the next year the other. At this moment intel is in the lead. I would surmise that this will change agin within the next year....

I personally ONLY buy AMD for other reasons:-

1) Marketing department of intel has used some very low tricks to increase market share, there are some serious court cases being prepared right now against them.

2) intel in 1999 I think it was, cut off a pin of one of their cheaper chips to prevent the chip being used in a dual CPU mainboard and to achieve (at that time) performances way beyond the actual cost of the two chips....the boards performed better than their own chips with a much higher price and clock rate!

t did not help them as the board manufacturers concerned were able to "reproduce" the missing signal from other sources......but it clearly showed the way and what intel thinks of its customers!

3) AMD chips can handle far higher temperatures than most intel chips before damage occurrs.

i have used both and watched how they worked. and found that amd can be abused (not recomended) and will survive , not so much with intel, also it appears to preform quicker than intel while being at lower speeds. my first choise would be amd. i have now in use the intel 2.6 gig celeron which works better than pentium because of short cut logics yet i have an upgraded hp that i put in a 1 gig cpu and it out runs my intel and i have intel problems of the heat doing in the compounds for heat sinking, doesnt seem to be a prob. with amd. i would say its not the speed thats important in a cpu but the engineering that goes into the curcuitry,along with the quality of manufacturing. they have cpu's out there that make any ones that anyone is aware of look like an old xt computer.

I too have generally chosen AMD by default since the late 90's. They had their heat issues, and voltage hog issues, but never have I seen them put out something I believe to be shady. The performance difference these days is minimal. Basically if you want the absolute best I agree with cheking out Toms hardware.

But honestly a computers biggest bottleneck is not the processor. If speed is what you want in terms of raw calcs, make sure you have the best front side bus/ram frenquency.(Something I admittedly beilieve intel has surpassed amd on at points for a few chipsets)

If you just want your system to be able to not hang on loading stuff, ensure you have enough ram and a fast enough hard drive/hd array. Once the system has to deal with mechanical data aquisition you lose the speed no matter how fast your processor can handle operations.

Hey man:

Do it easy. The best CPU for you is not the top one CPU, is the best system that accomplish your requirements.

Select your goals or parameters, put´em in a matrix row, put the candidates CPU AMD or Intel, on column and select a porcentage for each parameter (must be 100%) ( Ponder) and evaluate.

Example:

Speed, price, Power, max temp, Benchamarck in your applications to be used, cache,

bus speed, cpu upgrade (no change of motherboard).

My last computer was made, looking low power (Eco) at max performance, and upgrading capability changing only de CPU, from Sempron to Atlhon to Phenom with AM2+ .I like to use AMD for HI speed Gaming and cheap computers, with a bit more of Heat and ATI´s Video card as first option, but Envidia VIDEO cards are allways better.

Price with AMD are lower at similar performances and upgrading very easy than using INTEL..

For my Office desktop, I have INTEL, is not technical rule, its corporate decision, Allway working lower speed software but never fails.

I have a amd on my desk. The computer dept loaded it with Microsoft service pack 3. Amd chips in this rev are not compatible with service pack 3.

It's a good thing I do my own backups.

Something to think about.

That was not the real problem. I have an AMD X2 4400 and it is running with XP and ALL the updates.....your computer staff probably F****D it up!!!