AMD vs. Intel - let the battle commence!

[srynznfyra]

This thread is for the amd and intel geeks to give PROPER REASONS for loving or hating either side - AMD or Intel, and certainly A LITTLE BIT OF FLAMING ALONG THE WAY! :D

Personally, I'm going with AMD on my next build, but that's only cause of the price. :mad: i would get intel if it was cheaper. Also i found a relatively good board for what I want that supports socket AM2 (amd) processors.

I think intels only processor that's actually REALLY alot better than AMD is its Core i7, but right now that processor runs into the hundreds of pounds per processor, and you also need DDR3 memory which breaks the bank aswell. And you need one of those fancy new socket 1366 motherboards, another half grand easily.

[RecT]

Are you kidding that AMD is cheaper than Intel??????

Even the low-end intel dual cores can out pace the AMD equivalents and have oodles of overclocking headroom! (For those who like to play with fire that is....) I currently use a Core2Duo with no probs and with only DDR2 Ram - all for a very low cost and no performance worries at all.

[RecT]

BTW... welcome to the forum!! Let the flaming commence.... :-)

[srynznfyra]

Are you kidding that AMD is cheaper than Intel??????

Even the low-end intel dual cores can out pace the AMD equivalents and have oodles of overclocking headroom! (For those who like to play with fire that is....) I currently use a Core2Duo with no probs and with only DDR2 Ram - all for a very low cost and no performance worries at all.

Hi
Give me the price of all your components.

AMD 6000+ dual core athlon x2 3.1GHz 89W costs £70. Its competitor not including O/C is a Core2Duo around 3GHz (not below that figure). I don't include overclocking cause A) some motherboards don't support it, B) that often voids the warranty, C) most people don't O/C and D) for a review of overclocking what you need to do is overclock each CPU that your comparing to its limits and compare them then.

Nice hearing from you (we always need 2 sides to an argument :P),
Fela

[RecT]

Pentium E2160 is £40 (in terms of absolute basic) (what my laptop uses)

Core 2 Quad Q6600 is £108 - albeit slightly more expensive, but i think more bang for the buck. (For desktop)

Of course, if we're going nuts, there is the QX9775 @ a shade under £2000! (I can dream!)

[WWP]

Being British is all about supporting the underdog.... something very non-British about supporting Intel, but even so... I'm an Intel chap.

[srynznfyra]

An AMD 6000 CPU is roughly the same performance as a Core2Duo 3Ghz isn't it?

I could find a C2d for £100+, and a AMD 6000 for £70. How is intel not more expensive?

For my new build I'm gonna have to go amd anyway cause i got a amd board ha! :P

[srynznfyra]

the cheapest athlon over 2GHz that i could find was just over £20. Beat that with intel! plus the athlon has some nice system performance. Especially compared with the Pentium4. Don't get me started on that. BTW I'm posting this with a computer running with a Pentium 4. I'm in the process of building a new, AMD, computer.

[Federalli]

amd (and some more since i have to do a min of 10 characters)

[srynznfyra]

amd (and some more since i have to do a min of 10 characters)

OK, why is that? I choose AMD cause it's cheap for performance (but so is intel in some categories i hear), but also because I have an amd motherboard.

[Federalli]

to be honest, its simply because its a brand i know and trust.

when i first started building my own pcs in the late 90's, amd were by far the best for the least cost. plus there was something cool about being one of the first to have a 1ghz processor!

also, i made the switch to 64bit XP and recently vista and used their 64bit chip - before intel went mainstream with theirs. i feel that they're always ahead of the game so will continue to buy them until i learn otherwise.

[srynznfyra]

to be honest, its simply because its a brand i know and trust.

when i first started building my own pcs in the late 90's, amd were by far the best for the least cost. plus there was something cool about being one of the first to have a 1ghz processor!

also, i made the switch to 64bit XP and recently vista and used their 64bit chip - before intel went mainstream with theirs. i feel that they're always ahead of the game so will continue to buy them until i learn otherwise.

OK. My friend uses an AMD system from 2005 that still runs pretty well for normal desktop apps, so I guess my decision to go AMD is probably partly similar to yours, as I've seen loads of intel systems that run really poorly including the one I'm on right now. I guess it's cause intel was really behind AMD for a while until the Core2 came out.

[Chris]

until the Core2 came out.

Ha - so you admit it! :-D

[srynznfyra]

Ha - so you admit it! :-D

I'm never gonna be biased about which company I choose (not on purpose anyway), but I have seen a AMD system which performs really well and doesn't break down (well it does sometimes but not to do with the processor, always a software problem). So, I judge by experience.

And - now that the core2 has come out i think AMD and intel have a fair match and are both playing it very well - before it was always AMD for good performance. I just choose AMD, as I said, out of experience coupled with finding a cheap good amd board. Well kinda good for what I want, the only thing i regret is it only has 2 SATA ports...I can always get an expansion card when or if need be.

For those gamers who always rant on about benchmarks, my motto is - you'll never tell the difference between 100 fps and 1000 fps, unless you have 20/20 very good vision, which many gamers/power users don't have due to excessive gaming/computing (a bit ironic really). Above a certain fps the naked eye won't tell the difference. Both chips provide very good FPS performance.

As for good chip architecture - AMD sorta has it right now - e.g. the Core2Duo still uses the age old Front Side Bus (FSB), but the AMD chip has the memory controller built into the CPU - for much faster RAM access. I know I know - the brand spanking new Core i7 has this too - but right now it's too expensive to be worthwhile IMHO and it also exclusively uses DDR3 RAM which is also too expensive to be worthwhile IMPHO (in many people's humble opinions) and you even need a new motherboard for it.

AMD is no match for intel though when it comes to overclocking - but I'm not planning on overclocking my system.

Number crunching - I could save 30 quid and wait 2 minutes longer calculating pi to the 34695833th digit any day.


The bottom line is: both intel and AMD manufacture extremely good quality chips, and whether you choose AMD or intel won't really make that much difference to your computing performance - besides it also depends on so many other factors. So if you want to have the very best performance you would also have to get the fastest HDD, the fastest RAM, the fastest everything. Most people don't have the money for that and don't even want that, so whether most people choose AMD or intel IMHO it won't matter either way. If you want REALLY superior number crunching/cpu intensive performance, you want to concentrate on super parallel systems.

[Chris]

A well balanced and thought out article. :thumbup:

I also believe that for extra performance, you wouldn't neccessarily need a better cpu anyway (obviously within reason!). On most computers in my experience the bottle neck is the hard drive. So a better hard drive - or even two mediocre hard drives in a RAID configuration - together with enough ram can provide a noticable speed increase.

(Though if you hadn't guessed from earlier post, I also use Intel - though not for any reason, more just because I tend to buy prebuilt computers)

[srynznfyra]

I also believe that for extra performance, you wouldn't neccessarily need a better cpu anyway (obviously within reason!). On most computers in my experience the bottle neck is the hard drive. So a better hard drive - or even two mediocre hard drives in a RAID configuration - together with enough ram can provide a noticable speed increase.

Absolutely - the CPUs nowadays are so fast that you'd need incredibly fast external hardware to make them a bottleneck.