PIII, P4 or Athlon???

FUNCTOR

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I'll be in the market for a new system in January 2001, and I am currently weighing my options. Which is best?
P4 with RDRam
Wait for P4 with DDR Ram
PIII 1.0Ghz with RDRam
Wait for PIII 1.0Ghz with DDR Ram
or AMD 1.2Ghz with DDR Ram?
Which is best for performance, and which is best band for buck? If you have any suggestions, let me know! Thanks

Functor
 
G

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AMD Athlon 1.2 Ghz + DDR SDRAM is the best you can get (BOTH bang of buck and performance compared to PIII and P4!) in January

Also, one bonus with an Athlon DDR board is that later on when 1.7 ~ 2.0 Ghz Palominos are out and dropped in price you can upgrade :p
 

Killerkris

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Its not worth paying the extra price for a Pentium 4 as its not very good and according to tom not as good as the P3/Thunderbird 1GHz. Get The T-Bird 1.2GHz with DDR RAM

Please dont hurt me.....please
 
G

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Probably AMD 1.2 Ghz with DDR RAM, although we'll have to wait to see the showdown between AMD 1.2 Ghz DDR RAM vs P4 DDR RAM.
 

Killerkris

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apart from a Thunderbird 1.2GHz with DDR RAM, dual CPUs only work in so few things..........

Please dont hurt me.....please
 

smn198

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If you need a system which will be good in the long term get a P4 with RDRAM, otherwise athlons or even better, durons give the best performance price ratio
 
G

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I think the p4 is a sleeper, but the price cannot justify the performace and the "now" factors of the p3 or Athlon. I do find the p3 to faster than the Athlon, I have a p3 933, p3 800 and an athlon 1ghz. When I was rendering in lightwave, the p3 800 was almost the same speed as the Ahlon 1gig, go figure, and photshop as well as most other applications are just as fast on the p3 800, my 933 rips the athlon to pieces.

I am sure that in most benchmarks the Athlon will win, because they stress one system at a time, or because they are optimized for the cpu, but most software is optimized for p3.

The sleeper part about the p4 is as follows. We all read how much faster it was than anything else with a simply compile, so why wouldn't software venders put out patches for the p4, I mean they do it almost weekly now anyway for bugs or enhancements. Even games have patches within a week of them hitting the shelves. Corel and adobe put out MMX and sse patches, and most servers are still Intel based, so most server apps will be put in the new compiler if they want the market.

I think with a little time, and a little price drop, the p4 willreally start to show of its muscle.

RS
 

JoeHead

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In the long run a P4 RD would be fastest but so expensive. Now if what you are concerned about is Games then:

go with a 700 or 800 or so ... now hold on you crazies

if you play above 800x600 and with some eye candy then your graphic card is going to limit you not the CPU

I saw a 500 mhz sys equal a 1.2ghz sys at decent graphic settings ... they all flat line (equal each other) due to the bottleneck being the Graphics card

Save the money and go nuts with the Graphics end Hell a NV20 may be out this spring (prob at a grand) tehn a faster cpu may be needed.

<b> Fragg at will!!! </b>
 
G

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P4 + RDRAM: not a good choice for present and the near future, with very bad upgradability;

P4 + DDR RAM: not available. AND, a dual-channel PC1600 config will be needed to match the 3.2GBytes/s bandwidth of P4's quad-pumped system bus;

PIII 1GHz + RDRAM: bad choice.

PIII 1GHz + DDR RAM: very probably a bad choice. current PIII does not have adequate system-bus bandwidth to match the DDR RAM.

AMD 1.2GHz + DDR RAM: very probably a good choice. but the price of DDR RAM and the stability of chipsets also need to be considered;

plus, my recommendation, AMD 1.2GHz + SDRAM: this is actually the best choice available for the time being. it is very high-end, rock stable, performs only a little bit behind the DDR version and has almost all the incompatibility issues fixed out already. i know it would be less cool than options listed above. however, it is surely the best bang for the buck.

just my $0.02...:)


-----------------------------
Some are ignorantly happy,
While some, happily ignorant.
 

girish

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you have to consider upgrade options as well. p4 right now hardly has any, apart from being costly.

i think your best bet right now would be the Asus A7V with a Duron 800 or so, with 128 MB SDRAM, with upgrade options till Athlon Thunderbird 1.2 GHz.

You might get DDR-RAM and compatible motherboards by next quarter, then Athlon 1 GHz on a Asus DDR Slot A motherboard and 128 MB of DDR-RAM would be much better.

Checkout for the newer ALiMagik 1 based motherboards, it supports both PC-100/133 SDRAMs as well as the DDR266 SDRAMs (dunno whether the motherboard will support both) it might be the best bet since you wont be changing your motherboard again.

girish