I’m getting ready to pruchase a new desktop since my work laptop has had several restrictions put on it by mother abbott.
What is the difference between the P4 and athlon chips. I’ve noticed that 2 systems w/the same stuff vary by about $300-400, more if a P4 less if the athlon chip. Why?
There are a lot of factors you have to consider in order to determine what the overall system speed will be. Besides clock rate and instructions per clock, you need to consider cache size and hit percentages, bus speeds, memory amount and speed, pipeline stall penalties, etc. The Pentium IV class processors have a different architecture that allows them to scale much higher in frequency than a PIII. In any case, it is all too complex to determine which system is faster overall without running benchmarks. You can get some independent benchmark results at
http://www.tomshardware.com. For normal applications (non-game) you might consider this benchmark:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040106/athlon64_3400-27.html
As you can see, this does not support the statement that AMD is cheaper and faster. They attempt to be (because they need to be in order to attract large OEM customers) but in most cases you can make either AMD or Intel faster depending on how you run the tests. The Tom’s Hardware results show AMD faster on some of the “game” benchmarks, while Intel is faster for almost everything else (video, audio, applications, etc).
There is not $300-$400 difference in the price of the chips (AMD’s policy is 20% cheaper for competative chips), so look closely at the overall packages you are comparing. You can peruse www.HP.com, which is one of the few large vendors that offers both Intel and AMD systems to compare. However, it is no mistake the Dell is the largest PC company in the world.
If I were in the market right now, I would consider the following:
-if cost were the main thing and I don’t run a lot of photoshop, MP3 encoding, or high-tech games, I’d look at a celeron (AMD has a new competitor but it benchmarks a little slower).
- if I did do a lot of photo work, I’d look at a P4 (or Athlon), but also consider:
- how much memory and what speed
- front side bus speed
- graphics processor memory and speed
- hard drive type and size (IDE, SCSI, SATA?)
- expandability, which includes chipset type (ie, PCI vs PCI-Express, etc), max memory capacity, slots, built in’s (USB 2.0 vs USB, IEEE1394, Surrond sound, etc), socket type (do you want to upgrade to 4 GHz in a couple years?)
- a cool looking case (although Apple seems to own the market on these lately).
- what kind of support do I think I need.
To simplify it, go to Dell or Costco or wherever you want, pay what you want to pay, and you can’t go too wrong. With the amount of time we piddle away on slowtwitch, waiting 4 seconds longer to rip your CD isn’t going to matter. In 3 years your hard drive will be shredded by viruses and your applications and OS are out of date, so you will find it easier to buy a new system than upgrade.
Responding to laptops, power and size are important factors and the king is Intel’s PentiumM. I get 6 hours on my 3 pound Pentium M laptop, which is also wireless (must have!).
Dan (former Compaq and current Intel employee, but the opinions above are my own).
thanks guys. mainly just running 3-6 excel programs at a time along w/ the internet and burning a cd here and there.
Sounds like i’m not going wrong w/either.
My response was a little longer than I had planned, but you know, I couldn’t let a statement like yours go unchallenged! (being an Intel guy).
Yeah, for that you could just get a fast CD drive, enough memory to hold all your excel’s at once, and almost any processor.
FYI, if you want to test your internet connection, try this link.
http://www.intel.com/personal/do_more/broadband/speedtest.htm
My home DSL line is running between 180 and 480 Kbps (across a 54Mbps wireless connection). Who’s got the record?
Dan
If you’re looking for a project, building your own PC takes about an afternoon, and saves some cash, depending on how high end your anticipated computer will be - on the high end CPUs, the assemblers make a meaningfully larger margin, so if you’re planning on getting something that can run software at a pretty high level, then it might make some sense to put one together. Basically, about a week of research, and an afternoon of actual work and there you have it.
Plus that sense of accomplishment.
For the types of people that like to put their own bikes together, I guess.
The test is not accurate and only tests download time.
Why is it not ccurate? For example if you retest a few times performance will increase due to cached images.
The following test is more accurate:
http://adslguide.org/tools/speedtest.asp
Pluto