No clear performance winner between Athlon XP and P4

[d4n13l]

Well said.
You forgot to mention the Athlons thermal issues though, but Im just going to sit back and watch the flames roll in -
hehe. I think many people are devoid of subjectivity and have no REAL knowledge of hardware anyway, just blindly follow the current trend like sheep. oh well...

My work system I use for compiling is Intel based, any code that I compile is Intel optimised. Thats just the way it is where I work...
My "leisure" system will probably be an Athlon when I get around to buying a new one.
But then hey, most people with an AMD home system "know far more" than professionals do...

[snowmoon]

Just to add more gas to the fire.

I love athlons for thier price/performace marks, so why am I not running one...

I hate VIA motherboards.

I have had nothing but trouble with any VIA MB I owned or anyone else I know owned. I know they are getting better, and with the new mpeg2 encoding benchmarks I might actually give it another shot. VIA appears to be the only wat to get real perfomance out of these suckers, as the AMD chipsets just don't support the same feature set.

A rock solid stable chipset is worth the 20% worse price/performace reduction because you pay for the hardware ONCE, you keep paying for the support. $200 for a full featured P4 system is worth it if I have 1 day of downtime because the chipset drivers don't work right.

[DiViNeLeFT]

ok, a reply to jdgrabb... your post was to big to put it in quotes.

you have some good points... but are mistaken on a few things...

1. the thing about dell not touching them... you think they have good judgement on good hardware? they put connexiant modems in their top of the line comps... i dont trust them!

2. new athlons have SSE that works like a charm acording to what ive read... next generation is going to have SSE2 instructions as well... so then athlons will be able to utilize intel writen code.

3. top of the line versus top of the line there isnt a huge price difference... but the athlon drops in price seriously if you go for second of third best speed.

4. AMD's K6 2 could be multi-cpu... the reason why you never heard about it... VIA never came out with a mobo, or no one else for that matter.

[gf]

I don't want this message to start a war. But I would like to clear some myths that jdgrabb posted. I built quite a few Athlon/Duron for people I know with no cpu or software failures. I don't know of any company that have such a high failure rate to stay in business. And for liquid metal comming out of a computer case, well I want some of that stuff you were on to have those visions. As far as software, well there is some that don't even support MMX,SSE, or SSE2. So they won't support 3DNow. Maybe that's why AMD is supporting SSE in the new Athlons/Durons. And as far as benchmarks PLEASE check out this website.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1543

Here is a good test report with the same stuff inside.

Windows XP Test System

Hardware

CPU(s)
AMD Athlon XP 1.53GHz (1800+)
AMD Athlon XP 1.47GHz (1700+)
AMD Athlon XP 1.40GHz (1600+)
AMD Athlon XP 1.33GHz (1500+)
AMD Athlon-C 1.40GHz Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz
Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz
Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz
Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz
Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz
Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz
Motherboard(s) EPoX EP-8KHA+ ABIT TH7-II RAID (Intel 850)
Memory 256MB PC800 Mushkin RDRAM
256MB DDR266 Crucial (CAS2) DDR SDRAM

Hard Drive IBM Deskstar 30GB 75GXP 7200 RPM Ultra ATA/100

CDROM Phillips 48X

Video Card(s) NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB DDR

Ethernet Linksys LNE100TX 100Mbit PCI Ethernet Adapter

Software

Operating System
Windows XP

Video Drivers NVIDIA Detonator 4 v21.80

And if you like Intel thats fine and other people may not.

[nfl2k2]

On that sites gaming part, P4 got severly wasted by Athlon's.

[gf]

Anand usally give good and unbiased reports.