Forget I am the comp mod, take it from a guy who has owned a cpu from every single series in either companies history starting with the pentium 1 and k6-2 processors, repsectively.
For the longest time I was an intel fan. In fact, that is even how this particular part of the forum was born. One day Sir Auron and I got in a fight over which was better, I for Intel and ATI, he for AMD and Nvidia. After the discussion ended, I found my name on a forum discription.
If it was before, with an average pentium 4 533/800 and an athlon xp, I would have surely said Intel. However, AMD shocked me (and the world) with the release of the Athlon 64 series. Forget about windows xp 64 bit, I am talking current 32 bit extreme performance.
How extreme? Well, it's biggest lead is games. And by lead, I mean pure ownage.
To give an example, a A64 3400+ Newcastle 2.4ghz cpu will beat a pentium 4 3.8ghz in almost every game or gaming benchmark, and when it doesn't beat it, it is within 2% of pentium 4.
To further give insight, a pentium 4 3.8ghz costs roughly $750 USD, while a A64 3400+ newcastle only costs $230 USD.
So, yes, the A64's own the gaming world.
But what about business?
Well, the A64 beats the 3.8 in business too, despite what holycow said.
Business Winstone 2004
^^ look it up, a benchmark that uses:
. Microsoft Access 2002
. Microsoft Excel 2002
. Microsoft FrontPage 2002
. Microsoft Outlook 2002
. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
. Microsoft Project 2002
. Microsoft Word 2002
. Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
. WinZip 8.1
Who wins? The A64
Other programs benching with PC worldbench 5
Photoshop: 3.8ghz wins by 1%
Premiere: A64 wins by 4%
MusicMatch audio encoding: 3.8ghz wins by 6%
DIVX encoding: 3.8ghz wins by 20%~
3D rendering average:3.8ghz wins by 9%
Visual Studio 6: A64 wins by 16%
Maya V5: A64 wins by 12%
And remember, a $230 AMD was just pitted against a $750 Intel...
Just in case anyone is wondering...
A64 3400+ CH
DFI LanParty UT250
2x512MB OCZ PC3700EB
BBA X800 Pro
A64 3200+ Clawhammer
2x512MB Mushkin lvl1 pc3500
eVGA 6800GT
Abit IC7
P4c 3.0ghz
1X512MB MUSHKIN "222"
BBA 9800XT
Abit NF7-S 2.0
AXP 2400-M @ 2.62ghz
2x256MB BH5
R9500 Pro
The two A64's systems I bought AFTER my pentium 4...
^^^^ that's called putting your money where your mouth is
EDIT
And before anyone gets a big head, yes I do realize my P4 is not running DC, it's that way for my own reasons (In other words, no bling bling to get another 512 lol)
