AMD vs Intel [Was:Re:OT: PIII vs Celeron]

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 09:38:42AM -0400, John Moniz wrote:
> You're right Lennart. By coincidence, I now have the opportunity through 
> my employer to buy some Compaq Presarios and HP Pavilions. I have never 
> bought a brand name PC before, but the prices are not bad.

I would highly recommend NOT getting one of those.  Probably among the
crappiest PCs you can get, ranking up there with eMachines, Packard Bell,
MDG, etc.

> The biggest choice I have to make is whether to go for an Intel Pentium 
> Dual Core or an AMD 64x2 Dual Core. The AMD's available seem to be 
> higher speeds (eg. Intel dual core 1.6 & 1.8GHz vs AMD dual core 2.3, 
> 2.6 & 2.7 GHz). Naturally, the price goes up the faster the CPU.

An intel Core 2 is a very nice CPU, the pentium dual core is a bit weird
in that some of them are pentium4 based, and others are core 2's with
less L2 cache.  The core 2 based ones are pretty good, the P4 based ones
should be avoided.

The best bang for the buck these days is probably a Core 2 Q6600.  I use
one in my mythtv box.  They can be had for just over $200, and run quad
2.4GHz, which is just a silly amount of processing power for the money.
Building a complete machine with one should be posible for $400 to $600
(not including monitor of course).

> I haven't seen much discussion lately on AMD vs Intel dual cores. Are 
> they about equivalent?

AMD is currently having issues keeping up due to the very well designed
Core 2.

> I think one more concern is whether I should expect problems with the 
> SATA drives (they all come with large SATA drives).

I have only used SATA drives in new machines for the last 4 years.  I
would not consider IDE.  So far I have had very little trouble with WD
drives, except the 120GB drives which seemed to fail frequently (and
were discontinued long ago).  Seagate has had a lot of trouble making
correct SATA firmware and have had issues working with a lot of
controllers.  I just avoid them.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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