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I'm thinking about buying a new computer, but I need information
on what stuff I should get, for example:

What's the difference in performance between
a Intel P4/Intel Celeron/Amd Athlon?

I'm talking about gaming and programming, somebody here said that
the Athlon processors has better legacy support (does that mean
running old stuff like DOS etc?)

Why are Athlon's so much cheaper than for example a P4?
What's the difference between Barton/Thorton/Thoroughbred,
in performance?

More questions to come...

AMD Athlons are fairly better. They outperform Pentium IVs and Pentium IVs HT. You can see how at the AMD site.

The differences are internal, having to do with data lines, functional units and cache sizes, as well as decoding circuitry, pipelining, vectorial units and legacy support. AMDs are simply better designed, from my (trained in the matter) point of view. They do more in less cycles, hence they perform better than a Pentium IV machine at the same speed. That's why, for example, an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ runs at 1.47 Ghz but outperforms a 2 Ghz Pentium IV (hence the 2000+ name).

AMD's outperforms P4 HT's when running a SINGLE app only.

If you play for example Quake 3 on an AMD and on a P4 HT then the AMD will have higher FPS.

BUT, if you star rendering a movie in the background, and switch back to Q3, then:
AMD: 3FPS
P4 HT: 7FPS

HT is good when you multitask a lot, as it basicaly tricks the computer into thinking there is 2 (o more) CPU's present, making them switch betveen apps, making it a lot faster, WHEN multitasking.

But if you don't plan to do a lot of heavy stuff then the cheaper AMD is perfect.

More important than CPU is LOTS of RAM!!!! People complain their CPUs are slow and they only have 256MBs of RAM :roll: Invest in RAM, it's pretty cheap nowadays

Quote:More important than CPU is LOTS of RAM!!!! People complain their CPUs are slow and they only have 256MBs of RAM :roll: Invest in RAM, it's pretty cheap nowadays

Only 256 megs?
Back in the day 64 megs of ram was all you'd ever need...
Why, back in my day--
Wait, I can't say that yet. :wink:

Quote:

Rhiannon Wrote:More important than CPU is LOTS of RAM!!!! People complain their CPUs are slow and they only have 256MBs of RAM :roll: Invest in RAM, it's pretty cheap nowadays

Only 256 megs?
Back in the day 64 megs of ram was all you'd ever need...
Why, back in my day--
Wait, I can't say that yet. :wink:

Back in my day 640K was all you needed! Why, when I used Logo all I needed was 64K and a 5 1/4 inch floppy!

5 1/4 inch?
We used to have 5 1/4 FOOT floppies!
And they were small and compact, too!
A huge change from the big ol' mile-and-a-half floppies...
Those were tiny compared to the...
I'll stop now.

Quote:5 1/4 inch?
We used to have 5 1/4 FOOT floppies!
And they were small and compact, too!
A huge change from the big ol' mile-and-a-half floppies...
Those were tiny compared to the...
I'll stop now.

heh... unless you lying on your birthday this IS your day =P

and let me see one of those 1.5 mile floppies :roll:

Yeah, well... I'm lying for comedy's sake. 8)
And I could only find a pic of one of those old 30-footers:
(cheap photoshop hack alert)

:rotfl: too funny