So lets see it folks! Remember This NOT smackdown.

SJ

PS. I'm an AMD man from way back. I dont care how many meganinnies you can turn over. What I want is a stable, reliable chip. To date, AMD has always done this for me at a better price that Intel...currently I run an AMD 6400+ X2 BlackBox Edition.

amd since the k6-2.

My first AMD was a 286 HT-16...
It had such muscle I could run Windows 3.1 in enhanced mode!

Also started with amd k62, Home built is with the barton unlocked 2500.I run it at 1.8 seems to be perfect and has been running non stop for 5 or so years now ,never off. The othere pcs are intel and even celeron , so I guess I have them all but home built is my fav..I was going to rebuild but you cant beat the prices anymore for basic stuff ,it seems.

I have been an AMD fan since the AMD 386 DX40 chip but honestly they are falling behind in price for power. They are also running hotter and consuming more energy than the Intels. The best bang for the buck is the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 45 nanometer technology Dual-Core Processor. Microcenter (local for me) has this for $189.99.

Mostly AMD since Cyrix went out of the PC CPU business.

My main rig is a single core 1.8 mhz Athlon 64.
Have had it for 2 or 3 yrs.
does everything I want.

I can upgrade it to a dual core cpu dirt cheap & will shortly.
I just need to prepare for the XP re-install.

I own two 2.6 ghz celerons just because I build PC's for people on the side & I wound up with different spare parts that I couldn't sell so I just finished them up & use them for my HTPC's.

They do the job well.

I have a bunch of P3 systems & some P4 systems just because these are what people give me when they upgrade.

I'm looking at the core2duo systems but I havn't yet run accross anything my current system can't handle so I might as well go with the cheaper upgrade.

The high support for AMD here makes sense, retrospectively.

We are all DIYers here. This means we all probably built our own computers at one time or other. That means we all probably bought our parts based on price-performance value. In the past AMD has always had the better price-performance value. They may not have had the better technology per se. But when you're looking for the best cpu bang for...let's say $100... then you ultimately end up with an AMD.

That was always why I ended up with AMD. Simply put, I never could afford (or "would" is a better word) a $250 cpu. I simply took the best cpu for a given amount of money.

although, I haven't built a new computer in some time. I don't know what the lay of the land currently is.

I always buy the high mid end. I have used amd exclusively for the past 7 years. My most recent chips have been a 2500+ a 2800+ a 3500+ clawhammer a operon 170 was my brief bit with dual core. I have a 360 that I used to have to encode for. All of my amd chips were VERY VERY VERY slow at this. I went to upgrade a few months ago, and even though it hurt me I went with intel. My intel q6600 outperforms my opty by more than 250% on encoding and aplication speed. It also bumped up my fps average in games about 15%. It more than doubled my fps in crysis however (do not buy a cpu for crysis... nothing out yet can run it, it remains to be seen if these current cpus will keep up with the gpu that will run crysis on ultra high at playable frame rates).

My feeling as a long time amd supporter is... amd better get their stuff together soon cuz I really dont wanna feed the intel beast any longer.

That being said, intel right now is a no brainer, even if you want to go economy it is all intel. AMD is still a decent choice, but intel IS the better processor right now. This is the conlcusion I came to anyway after about 3 months of research starting last october.

Just upgraded my system to an AMD6400+ dual core black box myself. That was a little above the price point that I usually aim for, but it works out well, and it was time to upgrade from the old single core 3500+. Then I ended up keeping the 3500+ anyway, since the upgrade ended up being the processor, motherboard, RAM, and video card, so I spent the extra $90 and bought another 500G drive, too.

I also upgraded the graphics, I have an ATI 3870 video card, since it was cheaper than the nVidia 8800 that I was looking at, and is supposed to be faster, too. 'twas a sad day, I've had nothing but nVidia since I bought an MX440 to replace the ATI piece of crap that I couldn't keep a driver stable on for more than a couple of games.

Current systems:

• AMD64 6400+ w/ ATI 3870 (Main PC)
• AMD64 3500+ w/ nVidia 7950 (Old main PC, now second game station)
• AMD 2800+ w/ nVidia 7900GS (Old second game station, now thord game station)
• AMD 2800+ w/ nVidia 7300GS (Glorified PVR)
• Intel 3GHzHT w/ nVidia 5700LE (Family PC) -- Motherboard, CPU and RAM were free, salvaged from a machine that had a hard drive crash, and it would have cost more for me to rebuild at work than Dell would charge for a replacement.
• AMD 2400+ w/nVidia 5200 (Old Media server, redundant now that I've moved all my media to portable drives, though it still has some stuff on it. Used now for ripping DVDs.)

Actually switched to AMD when I built my HTPC for the PJ. First computer I built.

Wow, the only "I use Intel" post I see is Camman's where he said it hurt to do so... As phutton already said, it only makes sense that a DIY forum will be heavily for AMD.

Welp, chalk me up as another AMDer, my current computer is an AMD 4800+ 64 bit dual core (on the old socket, I forget the name, it's NOT the AM2 version) which does everything I need (I'm now using Vista x64). It was almost the top of the line when I got it (Feb of '06).

When it comes time to build a new computer I'll weigh my options, if it appears even (or even if there's a slight lead by intel) I'll probably go AMD again, we'll see.

Well... I voted Intel because I'm one poor bastard.
Previously, I was running a PIII 550mhz PC with 756mb of RAM that I bought in 2000 for $4000.
This past Boxing Day (the day after Christmas), I upgraded to a "refurbished" HP A6120N that I picked up from BestBuy.ca for a whoppin' $350.
Refurbished, I suspect, because it was pre-loaded with Vista Home Basic and from the online reviews I read, a lot of people were returning them because it was slow as molasses.
I promptly made my recovery DVDs, added a 80GB drive that I had sitting around gathering dust (to use as my system drive), reformatted and installed XP Media Center 2005.
I recently purchased a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer soundcard and a GeForce 8400GS videocard for about $150 to replace the onboard sound and video.

It suits my purposes and I'll probably not need to upgrade for another couple of years.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16883107394

I’m using an Intel P2 333 I think at the moment, now don’t get too jealous. I just found it on the shed floor and thought it will do. It’s sloooooooooooooooow and it is driving me crazy. The HDs are nearly full and I get daily system messages saying that something or other is low. I just clean out the trashcan and it’s right for another day or two. The video card is maxed out to1152 * 864 16 bit. Trying to watch anything on youtube is painful.
I have the same attitude towards PCs as I do for cars. It’s either a soopty doopty hotted up version or a piece of junk there is no in-between. I’ve got a candy apple blue HT show car at my parents(long term project, very long term) but I drive around in a junked Ford Falcon that never gets serviced, if something breaks I just stick a new second hand thingy in.


DJ

The last thing I want to hear about is you sticking your second hand thingy in something!!!

AMD dual core 4400+ OCd to 5200.. go AMD

Intel's of varying age and power.
Last one was a P4 3GHz.
I was gonna try a AMD, but there are so many processors out today that it's very hard to figure out what to buy. PITA doing research for a day/week/month just to buy a damn processor these days. The internet is rife with opinions rather than actual truth as well, not making it easy to decide. Maybe someday i'll give the AMD a whirl, but typically I go with whatever's on sale. ... which up to now has always seemed to be the Intel...

I honestly think that varying styles of computer operation lend themselves to different processors. Some folks want it all right now, in a straight line like a Mustang. Others enjoy the curves and a smooth powerband with extra stiff swaybars.

Im not saying one is better that the other, but I have had a better time with AMD than Intel from an economic standpoint. One thing I do know: The continuing fight between them has allowed for us to enjoy lower proc prices than we did in Intel's 400 hayday.

SJ

Same here! I'd love to support AMD, but 2 things; 1) There was an Intel computer on sale so I bought it, a few years ago now... and 2) I've heard Intels are better for 'raw processing power', which comes in useful for encoding/editing audio, which is my primary use for my computer.

I've currently got a 3.06GHz Pentium 4, and it works fine as long as I don't load too many plugin effects on it.

I'm not sure which way to vote though

You might want to check out www.MaximumPC.com for their reviews. They give no-nonsense reviews and are not afraid to call BS on their advertisers.

I take offense to this quote(not really)... I have 3 mustangs, and all three of them corner over .9g. I have one that will do 1.2 on super sticky f1's. Also, there is alot of area under the torque curve if you know what I mean. So what I am saying is not ALL mustangs are only quick going straight... just most of them stock ones.

Back to the original thread, I only said it hurt me to buy intel because I hate their business practices as of late. As far as performance goes... well im definetally not hurt, it rocks. Bottom line is... pretty much every modern multi-core processor is blazingly fast so if your not doing something really intensive(ie video encoding, lots o cad work etc).. anything really will do.


Edit: also a funny note, I remember telling my dad if he bought me a dx2 66mhz computer it would be the last one I would ever need

Heh. In that case, Camman, I apologise for the picking on Mustangs that I do as well.

I've met quite a few Mustangs that'd beat me to the end of a quarter mile, but an awful lot fewer that could beat me around a couple of road course laps, and of those two, one could do it on raw power coming out of the corners and out-accellerating me.

I can hit 1g on the skidpad on street rubber consistently. Didn't measure when I had the stickies on, but there were a lot of people at the track that day looking at my suspension after I ran. I did most of this before dropping in my current motor.

Anyway, it's true that each processor has differnet strengths.

Intel WAS better at things like video rendering, when they were running signifigantly higher clock speeds than AMD. Since the later generation of Intel chips seems to have come down in clocks, but has a more efficient core (Like AMD used to) this seems to have actually evened out some. Still, I think that the upper end Intels run faster clock speeds, so processes like video rendering which doesn't lend itself to predictive branching well tend to run better on the faster clock speeds.

AMD processors still tend to perform better with gaming and multimedia. There's a lot more performance boost there from the predictive branching, and the AMD multimedia command extensions seem to be better suited to the task. Since this is still the vast majority of what I demand a lot of CPU for, this works better for me.

Still, the Intel PC that I have I originally put together as a single purpose machine: It was to render video to DVD. The 3 GHz HT P4 did this measurably faster than my AMD Athlon 2800+ did.

Can only speak for the quad-cores running number crunching proggys like SolidWorks....AMD is so spanked it's humiliating...(and we have an AMD Q, it's the traveling demo because no one will give up the quads). I always liked AMD, just can't deny what the eyes see.

intel all day long. amd has been doomed since the first C2d rolled off the shelf. their quads are plagued with problems. i used to only use amd chips but i refuse to go with ant of their new stuff it is simply outclassed atm by intels offerings. i would love to see amd come out with some new better cpu's to spark some competition between themselves and intel. if they can get their act togeather id be happy to but their products again

Gosh, I'm surprised to see so many AMD fans. I'm currently Intel, running a q6600 for my digital multimedia production type stuff, and god is this thing fast. I had open 30 firefox windows, crysis, photoshop, illustrator, premiere pro, and after effects and had no slugishness at all and used less that half my CPU power. AMD is a good company, but lately they just need to get their crap together, because they are getting spanked by the performance of intel.

Most of this sentiment that AMD is getting spanked is just plain silly. Yes AMD doesn't have offerings to compete at the absolute top range of CPUs (the ones that are stupidly expensive anyhow), but they still maintain the power/price advantage right up to the q6700 they have always had since the K6 hit the markets. It's not surprising that people in a diy community are primarily value shoppers.

My dad in the 1990s got a computer at Wallmart , it was an AST, had a CYRIX chip,
and was slower than the 486 it was to replace

And for a long time I thought about that when buying a CPU

Around the time the P3 CPU came out I was reading all the good reviews of AMD
chips and made a desktop with one - used them ever since

Agreed.

I have a long history of buying both AMD and Intel (and a few Cyrix/Via) chips. I usually buy at the sweet spot between price/performance. This means a couple of versions down from the top. Historically AMD has usually has better deals in this area. I prefer AMD over Intel, but will buy whichever one is better (for me) at the time.

When I built my WhiteBox notebook, however, I (of course) went with the Intel cpu. I ended up with a T7200 (Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz), which has been an awesome choice. AMD doesn't have a good mobile presence right now, although they are supposedly working on it (i.e. the PUMA platform)

On a related note... how about AMD's announcements yesterday? The new B3 revision Phenoms (x3 and x4) have finally been launched. The prices look pretty good too. It might finally be time for quad-core. I was holding out for an Intel Q9300, but they seem to be non-existant for now. Also, I really like the new AMD 780 chipset/motherboards that were recently released. As a whole, I think AMD still has the overall better platform at the moment (for my needs at least).

Phenom 9500 atm
I started with a vic20. My first "real" pc was an 8088 maxed out tho w/ amber video to boot

currently running AMD 9600 Phenom
gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5 mobo
4gb OCZ pc2-8500 ram
evga 8800 gt oced 735/1950 (running fan at 65% with rivatuner because this card is HOTTTT....and stock fan speed is 29%.....and replaced the stock thermal paste with as5)
vista home premium- of coursed indexed at 5.9 on everything

i have always been a fan of AMD, and while im speaking about amd i cant wait for the 4870x2 to come out.........can anyone say quad crossfire with two of those bad boys

I've flip flopped..most of my PC's have been AMD due to price/performance ratio. The core2duo's seem to be really spanking the AMD's right now performance-wise but I just went from a p4 3.0 ghz to an AMD dual core 5200+ just because of the new 780g boards. I paired it with 4gb ddr2 800 ram, a 160gb sata2 system drive and a 200gb IDE scratch drive (from my old setup).

I tried vista business x64 but it was really buggy and half my programs wouldn't install even from a clean load so I went back to XP and I'm really noticing the performance boost now.

I think my first PC was a 286 with a monochrome monitor so not as old school as some here . I remember when I had a 486 dx4 120mhz (I think that's what it was) with a 1/2mb video card. Doom was playing choppy and I was considering paying the $80 or so dollars to buy another 1/2mb chip for the video card . We've come a long way in the past 15 or so years.

I remember when my friends uncle mailed him a computer..it was something like a 386/486 and when it got to us the processor had come out of the socket and banged around all in the case. I told him all was not lost, got out a butterknife, straightened all the pins on the processor and got it to boot!

listen to me, I sound like an old man talking about the way things used to be...I'm 28 i'm not old!

Gizmodo - what a bunch of copycats!

Question of the Day: Do You Prefer AMD or Intel CPUs?

hmmm.... so.... my MB is *just* about done... HD errors, 1/2 the Sata ports don't work, and my DVD drive has stopped responding to anything put into it... so, while while the immediate need may be to replace MB, I will like as much flexibility as possible, so, that either entails being able to use the current Intel processor and having the new MB able to take a new multi-core, or changing over to AMD. Intel processors i've been looking at include the Quad Core Q6600, and the Duo Core E8200, E8400 or E6850. I notice that AMD processor prices are pretty good ~$100 mark, but my question is, What would be a comparable AMD processor to those Intel's ? For the price it's hard to overlook upgrading my processor to AMD for not *too much* more now.

... Anyone? anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Thanks everyone.
gs

i have been an AMD guy for a very long time, but right now Intel is trulyy the way to go...

this is how it all started for me:

1) my first computer, Intel 386 33mhz 4mb ram and a hard drive?

2) Intel 486 66Mhz Oc'ed to i think it was 83MHz? 16mb ram

3) AMD 133MHz 32MB ram, replaced with an Intel 100MHz cause it was faster

4) Intel 233MHz MMX OC'ed to 266MHz, 128MB ram

5) AMD 500MHz K6-2 OC'ed to 633MHz on water cooling, 384MB ram and 30GB Hard Drive and a 16MB Voodoo #, i think

6) 800MHz Intel P3, OC'ed to 1,333MHz on water cooling, 30GB hard drive, 512MB ram(my buddy had stolen them from our school one summer, i didnt know it until a few months later), geforce2 32MB

7) AMD 1700+(Palimno), OC'ed to 1,900MHz, on water cooling, 1GB RAM, SOYO kt333 dragon MB, Geforce4 420 Ti, OC'ed to 4800ti, eventually upgraded to a 2100+ Palimino which overclocked to 2,300MHz on water cooled TEC cooling

8) AMD Barton 2500+, OC'ed to 2,675MHz on homebuilt triple casscade freon cooling, 2GB DDR, nForce 2 ABIT nf7-s rev 2.0, volt moded, Geforce 6800GTS 256MB, volt modded and watter cooled, hella OC'ed

9) AMD Operteron 142? 939, would only OC to 2.3GHz on water, 2GB DDR, nForce 3

10) Intel e4300 @ 3.6GHz on DIY water cooling, 4gb DDR2, 500GB hard drive, 680i sli LT, modded to full SLI

My first computers had no keyboard and used a tape recorder for storage (I think it ran at 4k). After that it was Trash 80s, XTs, and my very favourite, Commodore 64s, Since then I have built, overclocked and fried just about everything.

I use to like AMD but now prefer mid to high Intel chips. Particularly for laptops. My favourite MBs are made by ASUS. My favourite video cars use the 8800gts chipset. There are faster cards but this one runs the latest game software on my 30" monitor with no problems does directx 10 also. If I ever break down and convert to vista It might be time for a new card but refuse to go the sli / crossfire route. It's just a gimick to sell more cards. by the way Intel is posed to enter the video card arena so watch for more competition in the field.

I just saw this on Gizmodo.com and thought I'd share it:

NOT surprised in the least. What does surprise me is the email, you'd think they would have dark ally meetings or secret decoder rings or something.

First I built was a amd 450, man that thing rocked - played half life all day. Hell it even OC'ed to 500MHZ!!!!

now I have a p4c 2.8ghz with HT, oc'ed to 3ghz. I built it for EQ2 when I heard about it. The move was just to see what an intell machine could do. In truth, not sure if its the mobo or the cpu but it just "feels" better to me. Next I plan on, for now, a c2q as this rig is getting to be the minimum req of most games on the pc now. Jan 09's tax season I'm building, so by then who knows what will be on the market. I like to future proof my systems as much as possable when I build, sure its an arm and a leg however it pays off. This machine is 4 years and counting - only thing I cant play is DX10 only stuff and thats rare at best. (for now)

EDIT:

BTW - I saw AMD chipsets along side the pixelworks on the controller's pcb

I know the chip, my laptop up until about 6 months ago ran on a pentium 2 366

to the question at hand,
use intel, want amd

I use a p4ht 2.8ghz but when i get around to building my pc I will probably go with an AMD quad core.

Wow, thinking the P4 3.0GHz is still being used by people to this day. I have a laptop I got back in highschool running one of those. (like 6-7 years ago). With ATI graphics. The thing is piece compared to my 2CoreDuo I have now ($220 mobo+cpu combo like 2 years ago).