Need Advice--AMD Athlon XP Processor or Intel Pentium IV 1.8

[amyt92]

I am looking to purchase a new computer and I am undecided between two machines.

So, tell me...Which is better?
1) AMD Athlon™ XP processor 2000+ with QuantiSpeed™ architecture*; 266MHz system bus for a powerful CPU-to-memory connection
*QuantiSpeed architecture operates at 1.67GHz
OR
2)Intel® Pentium® 4 processor 1.8GHz, with 400MHz system bus for a powerful CPU-to-memory connection

From here, both machines have basically the same memory, hard-drives, features, etc.

The AMD athlon is $100 cheaper, but I want the best since I have started doing more and more downloading ,encoding, conversions, etc.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

[SteveDVD]

I am an Athlon XP fan myslef. But it looks like you should go with the P4 becuase of the FSB and it's faster... Encoding will be quicker than that Athlon

[mrtristan]

I would go with the Athlon, for two reasons.

1. It's cheaper and the performance will be similar.

2. I prefer AMD to Intel.

[Faustus]

My XP 2200 just rocks so very hard... previous to that I've been all intel in the past (except for my 486dx120 amd way back) and now that I've seen how great an XP is I'm not planing on going back soon.

[Kennyshin]

Athlon XP is cheaper and it's faster especially with the latest 3-D games. Pentium 4 is still the best for MP3 and MPEG-4 video encoding.

Northwood-based Pentium 4 1.8GHz is relatively easily overclockable to over 2.4GHz.

[sterno]

Like people are saying, P4 is generally faster than AMD for most multimedia encoding work. Make sure you get one with decent memory, there are a lot of cheap mass-market P4 systems that use PC133 SDRAM which absolutely kills your performance. DDR-SDRAM is acceptable, but the last time I looked it seemed like horrendously expensive PC1066 RDRAM was still the fastest. I'm not sure how the newer DDR-333 stacks up against RDRAM.

[tgpo]

If it must be a PC, then AMD AMD AMD AMD AMD AMD AMD