Help a very confused person, please..

[Raph]

Okay. I've gotten to money together to upgrade mobo/cpu and ram.

I was looking at either a Athlon XP 2000 or a P4.. Now my question is which one should I go with? I plan on getting a great motherboard, and about 512 ram pc2100 (2700 of possible) with the CPU. I hear bits and peice here and there, but never really a decent direction to follow.

Thnx for any help in advanced, sorry if this post is kinda blah.. but it's how I feel at this poing, lol

 

[minendo]

Do you plan on overclocking at all?

 

[Raph]

Overclocking is not my main concern, but it would be an option I wouldn't mind messing with later on when I can get a beefy colling system implimented - but not my primary focus.

 

[SlapAss]

I have been down the AMD road, trust me when I say go with Intel CPU's. They may cost a little more, but there is a reason for it. Intel has the best thermal solutions, and over all quality and build. AMD's do perform very well, but are not high quality build and they have no thermal solution at all. Just my experiance and opinion. Besides the CPU's, Intel chipsets can't be beat for reliability, compatability and quality. Basically, everybody has to buy whatever products give them that warm, fuzzy feeling!

 

[Duvie]

First off realise that an xp 2000+ will take a p4 of near 2.2ghz 400mhz fsb to compete...that being said I recommend getting a p4 1.6 or 1.8 "a" models and ocing....you can oc most of these chips to 2.2ghz with no real vcore adjustments and with stock cooling...

plus the intel based pc2700 ddr boards are far superior to the amd boards...p4 can take advantage of the extra bandwidth...anandtech himself said that the athlon needs to increase fsb of chips to really make the pc2700 work...get some corsair or kingmax and most all of these ram chips will do pc3200 (400mhz ddr)....


I am talking from experience as I have had both systems recently and amd systems for the last 1-1/2 years....


If no ocing you need to buy a 2.2ghz to get same performance and that is still a pretty penny and the amd clearly wins the bang for that buck in that category...


Just getting away from via products was the bonus incentive for me moving to and intel system....