Pentium 4 vs. Athlon 64

Considerable varies from person to person; the difference in price is not in anyway substantial and paid back in the life and strength of the Processor. I'm not sure why people buy 400Watt+ Power Supplies then moan about power consumtion :D If its there; use it.
 
LOL.

I reckon you should just say how much you are willing to spend on a PC. The P4 still has a lead in Video encoding, and dispite what people say, it's about a 20% difference compared to a Athlon 64. For raw CPU computational power, the Athlon has the edge by a lot. As for people saying that the Athlon 64 has equal or near equal multitasking power than a P4, that's rubbish. Have you ever played Halflife 2 while encoding a 1GB wave file to MP3 and still getting 30FPS on an A64? Nope. A comparison between the 2 was done (can't remember the link, it's on an older thread) and the Athlon 64 stuck at about 7-9 FPS. In saying that though, when they was no multitasking being done, the Athlon wiped the floor with the P4.

If money is no option, and it's not for gaming, then there is not much in it between the two. Also, the P4 has features that are currently not being used as of yet, so things can only get better for it. Really, there is no difference between the two in my eyes, but if you have the money, It think that the P4 6xx series (Only the 6xx series) would be the better buy.

I'll see if I can find that benchmark sometime if anyone requests it.

As for going near a G5, god I wouldn't touch it. Apple adverts were band in the UK because of the unfair testing when they compared them to PC alternatives. Once they were independantly tested, things got interesting and the Athlon FX55 and the P4 EE wiped the floor with the Dual G5 in most things. The Duel Xeon and Opteron knocked it out into space. Don't touch.

Well, that's my 2p.

C ya!
 
Wow, thanks, connchri! I only have a budget of around £150. I plan to get 512MB DDR400 SDRAM, a motherboard and a CPU. I'm wondering whether i should go for the Sempron on the Athlon 64. I saw an A64 2800+ on eBuyer for £72, but i've seen a Sempron 2200+ for £34 including box ,fansink and 3 year warranty.
Mostly, i just browse the web, listen to music, play videos and use office applications, but it would be nice if i could encode some songs once in a while, whilst still browsing the web at the same time. I intend to use my new PC with Linux Fedora Core 2, which pretty fast on my PII 450MHz PC, so i don't think i need a lot of power. Can anyone recommend me a good CPU for the activities i mentioned?
 
On a Budget of £150 a Sempron is your only option for a full build; or is that all you need to get on the £150?

On your budget however which is, if you only want a CPU Motherboard and RAM really looking for more than a 2200 Sempron but not quite so much as an AMD64 2800; I would hope you'd seriously consider a 2.4 Celeron D. Its the middle group and cheaper than the middle of the two. For just over the middle you could get a 2.6 if you were after it here.
 
If you have a budget of £150, get a £83 Sempron 3100+ on the Socket 754 platform. They are twice as good as the 2800+ which uses the Socket A platform. Then if you really want you can overclock them to high heaven and back. The Socket A Semprons are just Throughbred-B cored Athlon XPs but not as good.

There are hundreds of Socket 754 motherboards out, so it won't be hard finding one for £70. You should be able to get a lot for your money in fact.

If you are really daring, get a Athlon 64 2800+ and overclock it. It can overclock the most out of the range, the performance will be around the same as a 3200+ and I'm being pessimistic. Personally I won't get a Celeron D, but I haven't looked at them much so don't ask me my opinion on them too much. Our school computers use them and they seem quite slow.
 
I ain't getting a Celeron D, cuz the benchmarks i've seen it do again Semprons and Athlon XPs are pretty poor and i don't know much about them really. I think i'll go with a socket A CPU. What about an nForce2 motherboard with a sempron 2200? I saw an nForce2 for about £40 the other day.
 
Nooooo! Honestly, don't get a Socket A Sempron. If you really want a Socket A, buy an older Athlon XP. The Socket A Sempron's are Throughbred-B cored XPs which have been downgraded, like I said before. I'll find some results for you and post them. Sorry if I double post.
 
(Sorry for double-posting)

This is what Custom PC said about Socket A Sempron's in Issue 17 :

"It get worse when you compare it to the Sempron 2800+ (that is the XP Barton) which runs at 2GHz with a 166MHz FSB, with the last Athlon XP 3200+ which also ran at 2GHz but had a 200MHz FSB and an extra 256KB of Level 2 cache (totaling 512KB).

The only thing the Sempron 2800+ has going for it is its low cost, but you could buy a faster and much more overclockable Socket 754 Sempron 3100+ for just £10 more.

The Socket A Semprons also lack the features of a modern CPU, such as a heatspreader. And you'd be dreaming if you thought it supported anything as useful as Cool n Quiet."

They also benchmarked the Athlon XP 3200+ in the same motherboard as a Socket A Sempron 2800+ and the XP beat the Sempron in every test they did.

Here, like I said, are the comparitive results between the 3100+ (Socket 754) and the 2800+ (Socket A) :

MPEG-2 encoding 3100+ 0.94 - 2800+ 0.91
Image editing 3100+ 1.19 - 2800+ 1.17
Doom 3 3100+ 58fps - 2800+ 47.3fps
PiFast (lower is better) 71.91secs 2800+ 79.83secs

As you can see, the main differences are in the performence based tests. If you are planning to overclock it, I can post the results for that if you want. I will just say that the Sempron 3100+ overclocked amazingly in all tests.
 
Thanks for taking the time to help me, NFS, but all i need to do with my PC is browse the internet and listen to music/play a video(at the same time). It'd be nice to do some music encoding, but i don't think i have time for video encoding. I'll be installing FC2 on my PC anyway, and that runs a lot faster than Windows XP, so i think i could get away with a Sempron 2200 at just £34. I could always overclock it a bit if i need to, right? All the Athlon XPs i look for are all expensive though. At least expensive enough for me to say "Nah, i'd rather get an Athlon 64". So unless Sempron 2200s really aren't capable of running FC2, doing the things i stated, then i think it's fine.

Now, i need a socket A motherboard. What does anyone think of the 'ASRock K7VT4A+'? Sorry, i'm not an expert in MBs, so i have no idea about what the name is about and what names/chipsets are best, so here, my decision will likely depend on your thoughts.

Thanks to everyone who's helped so far.
 
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