p4 or Athlon??

[TomEGunn]

I have a P4 on order, should I cancel it and get the Athlon or p3 at 1ghz? If anyone has links to tests on the p4 could you post them for me, Thanks!

 

[paulip88]

If you look at Anandtech or Tom's Hardware (or pretty much any decent hardware site), you'll find benchmarks. The summary is that although the P4 is currently faster in some applications, it is usually beaten out by both the Athlon and the PIII.

The overall value of the chip also blows right now.

 

[Fingers]

for now, i would get the athlon, or a P3 if you currently have a mobo that will accept one or the other. If you have your heart set on P4 at least wait until the new socet form comes out and prices fall.

 

[han888]

hmmmmm u compare the p4 with athlon? what a kidding mate

 

[TomEGunn]

I remember when the P3 came out people where saying the same things then too.

 

[paulip88]

Oh yeah... but the thing with the P4 is that the future versions may require new boards too, which really limits the ability for future upgrading. Remember the Pentium Pro?

 

[TomEGunn]

Why would the future versions need new boards?

 

[DeezNtz]

You'll need a new board for future P4 processors because the new P4's will have more pins. The current P4's are Socket 423 where the ones later on in 2001 will be Socket 478.

 

[TomEGunn]

What will be the difference other than the pins? Faster speed?

 

[GaryTcs]

It's true, that the P4 will have a new socket mid 2001, so if you have a motherboard that accepts either Athlon or P3, I would go that way. You otherwise are doomed to buying the most expensive CPU, Motherboard,and RAM-with no real life performance improvement over the P3 or Athlon- with no possible increase in cpu performance in the future.Of these three, you could only take the Rambus Ram with you to your next machine, and that may not be the Ram choice for socket 478 P4's anyway. (you would likely be limited to motherboards with Intel chopsets, and we all know how great they have been lately)

 

[TomEGunn]

I have heard that the Rambus is the only mem. out that will handle the bus speed of it for now.

 

[GaryTcs]

Right now that's true, sort of. DDR can handle it, but is not really available to us right now. (OEM's can get it though) Via, and ALi are going to be making DDR chipsets for the P4, but I'm unsure if they will support this interim socket 423 configuration. Intel will likely do the same, unless Rambus' lawsuits force them to honor their exclusivity agreement.

 

[TomEGunn]

I guess I'll just keep the P4 1.4Ghz. I have on order, gotta beat my P3 450!
I appreciate all of the info., I'll get on here when I get it and let you guys now what I think of it.