sure its done before but with price parity is it intel or AMD

[joely]

Am about to slap a load of new stuff in my box including a new CPU, now i have always been a AMD fan largely because of the value for money aspect but also because of the 3D performance advantages. Whilst looking at CPU prices etc i have noticed tha P4s are now starting to come into line with Athlon costs and as overclocking is a factor my decision may be swayed. I hear that you can put a LOT of mhz on a p4 without much trauma. Obviously you can OC athlons too but not to the same degree 200 odd mhz (of course its all relative as athlons speed is slower physical speed but equivilent computational speed if you see what i mean). So if i OC a p4 and an equivielent athlon to the max which wins the race?

[GreenPiggy]

i guess it depends which CPU you're getting. I'd say the current overclocking king is the mobile 2400+ which you should get another 600Mhz out of with ease plus it is unlocked so you don't have to go nuts on the memory(unlike newer cpus which all require 3200 memory at the bare minimum)

[BUFF]

£65 gets you an XP-M that will clock to ~2.6GHz (could be higher or lower) on air.
800fsb P4 2.8 ~£125 (there may be some 2.6 still around but you'll have to hunt) ~3.6GHz on air.

As you say a direct comparison between the clockspeeds isn't valid because of different architecture but in value terms the Athlon XP-M walks it imho.

[Captain Fizz]

Yep - With an nForce 2 board and the XP Mobile CPU's - Can't go wrong IMHO.

I can get 2500MHz out of my mobile but not Prime95 stable. (Fails after 30 mins)
Once it's burned in a bit I think I'll be able to get 2500MHz.

So that's the equiv of an XP3400/3500?? (Can't remember their formula)
And it will at a minimum match the P4's in terms of crunching numbers whilst being cheaper.

[Stewart]

Also, at the higher end, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition does nothing to justify its insane price tag, against the FX-53, 3800+ and even the 3500+, in a lot of benchmarks. Its up there with them most of the time, and obviously beat the 3500+, but not as much as its price tag suggests it should.

[Donny John]

Go AMD, nuff said

[joely]

hmmm cheers for that, well i got me current rig which is xp 2000 which i think is the anoyingly un-overclockable version (without fiddly bridge cutting etc) am thinking now i might leave it for a while, stick on a 6800GT graphics and a gig of 3200 and wait till sock 939 cpu's become cheaper

[iranu]

hmmm cheers for that, well i got me current rig which is xp 2000 which i think is the anoyingly un-overclockable version (without fiddly bridge cutting etc) am thinking now i might leave it for a while, stick on a 6800GT graphics and a gig of 3200 and wait till sock 939 cpu's become cheaper

I think that you won't see the performance increase that you want. I believe that you need a faster CPU to get the best out of the gfx card. Your cpu is a large block in that system.

For example I was running an xp1700 (palimino) oc'ed to 1.7g (xp2200ish) and a Radeon 9700 pro. I was suffering low fps in UT2004, Halo etc. As soon as I switched to xp2800, fps increased by atleast a third.

what's your system atm and how much do you want to spend, if I may ask.

[Tom]

i'd say get an xp-m...if my tbred B wasnt so great (2.4ghz on air) then id get one too that cost me £45 a year and a half ago....that has to be the best value chip ever sold.

[joely]

I think that you won't see the performance increase that you want. I believe that you need a faster CPU to get the best out of the gfx card. Your cpu is a large block in that system.

For example I was running an xp1700 (palimino) oc'ed to 1.7g (xp2200ish) and a Radeon 9700 pro. I was suffering low fps in UT2004, Halo etc. As soon as I switched to xp2800, fps increased by atleast a third.

what's your system atm and how much do you want to spend, if I may ask.

currently xp 2000 with 512 mb of pc512 (crucial) radeon 128 meg 9500 all on a asus a7 v8x

have got the cash (800 odd quid) to go stick a lot of fun toys on but was gonna hold out for 939 chips to drop in price a bit. If i UG now was gonna go for athlon 64 3000+ and OC it to 2.45 stick in 1 gig of crucial baltix on a MSI NEO platinum (nforce 3) plus the graphics card and a few bits and bobs. As i say though the upgrade path on the 754s is very limited (to my knowledge) so was thinking of waiting a bit, as with all upgrading though it is always hard to know when to spend the cash as you can end up waiting forever for something to come along by which time it is out of date and something else has come along. But at the mo it looks like athlon's long term future is 939 pin, hence the resistance to go now