My girlfriend's getting a new PC and wants to know, overall, which processor is supposed to be better. I keep hearing all sorts of pros and cons in both directions. Some of you fuckers are pretty smart, so please help her out.
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My girlfriend's getting a new PC and wants to know, overall, which processor is supposed to be better. I keep hearing all sorts of pros and cons in both directions. Some of you fuckers are pretty smart, so please help her out.
Depends on what you want to do. PC Gamers = Athlon 64 (especially their great dual core cpu's). I'm building an Opteron based pc for myself at the moment. Some business applications and other programs still favor Intel for some ungodly reason.
Intel cpu's (especially their high end stuff) are overpriced...AMD consistantly gets praise for their new cpu's so I'd rather go for a nice AMD Athlon 64 based cpu. I'm sure there are some that are around the $120 to $200 range..depends on what kind of cpu you want.
I'm sure there will be a few here and elsewhere that still swear by Intel so you'll get lots of opinions. Since this is for your girlfriend she'll probably just need something modest like a AMD Sempron or lower end Intel P4. What programs does she use?? What will the pc be used for?
She wants it for playing games (mostly stuff like The Sims 2), running Photoshop and Illustrator, and storing/editing pictures.
I personally picked up a PC with a Pentium D recently (dual core CPU with both cores running at 2.8 and a gig of RAM) and it kicks all sorts of ass. However, I'm not using it for games at all, just for editing video with Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as Photoshop and Illustrator stuff.
I built myself a decent machine last summer. It's a P4. One of the uber-ones (dated a few years ago) with 800 FSB and lots of cache. It also runs at about 70ºC most of the time. =\ Aside from the heat issue, it's extremely stable and I get very few program crashes. Like Raystorm said, it's overpriced. I think I paid less for mine than it says here now on the site:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116185
For gaming performance, always go with AMD 64. Here's one that will absolutely destroy my CPU and for only 20 bucks more:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103539
And if she's not gonna be playing games or running business apps and whatnot, just get one of those cheapo Dells with the Celerons.
So, Athlons tend to be better for gaming, otherwise Pentiums are as good?
Yeah, but it should be noted that Athlons basically tend to be good at the kinds of things that actually demand a good CPU. Productivity benchmarks might indicate that MS Word runs better on a Pentium 4, but MS Word runs fine on a Pentium II. So it's dumb to favor Pentium 4 because of its performance running things that aren't CPU intensive to begin with.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dolemite
Athlon 64s are absolutely the better value.
The performance gains of Pentiums over AMD for business aps is negligible in real use. Go AMD. Thier chips are better designed. They use less power and heat, so they'll last longer and potentially be more stable, or you can go overclock them like crazy. Intel is dropping the netburst architecture, that's how bad they got spanked by AMD this gen. And I believe they still have a little price advantage too. I'm using my first AMD system, a 3500+ right now and it's tight.
AMD's tend to run hotter. If you're not building it yourself, that's less of an issue.
This is falseQuote:
Originally Posted by Rumpy
since when?Quote:
Originally Posted by Rumpy