Guillaume

Yeh but cathode tubes die after less than one year, right ?

pariah

Mine haven't, but then again they aren't a year old yet...

It's 20 bucks a tube anyway, and you only need one.

It's not like you can use neon...the static electricity would fry the comp to hell.

Stiletto One

OK, first off: IT'S AMD VERSUS INTEL, DAMMIT!!!

If you want processor vs. processor, it's Athlon vs. Pentium 4.

If you want to get more specific, you have Classic/Thunderbird/Palomino/Thoroughbred/Barton vs. Willamette/Northwood-A/Northwood-B/Northwood-C.

Since you say you're in the market for a new computer, what kind of budget are you looking at?

Don't get a Celeron. It's just Godawful. Don't get a Duron either.

Anyway, it's a toss-up between AthlonXP and Pentium 4, until you get to absurd high-end, like the 2.8C and up�that's Pentium 4 territory. Conversely, at the low/mid range (<$120 or so per processor), it's AMD territory. Whatever.

NialScorva

Flip a coin or just compare prices. It doesn't matter anymore.

Sure, P4s benchmark faster. Unless you're doing numerical methods problems or calculation intense simulations, you'll never notice anything less than a 50% performance advantage. For the latest 3-d games get a bunch of fast RAM and a good video card. Processor doesn't really matter that much once you cross into the mid 2 ghz range, no matter what anyone tells you. The things that will determine how fast your computer is for most applications is:

Network Connection
Hard Drive
Video Card
Memory
Processor

In that order. That being said, Celeron is a rip-off.

pariah

ya know what? this article at good ol' toms should explain everything about the two top processors right now (the athalon and the p4)

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030623/index.html

To summarize, you will get equivilant performance from the athalon for about 200 dollars less.

Guillaume

Talk about twisting the meaning of an article....

Here is the conclusion of the article you quoted :

-----------------
In our extensive benchmark tests, the P4 is always in the lead - we talked about this in our last article High-Flying: AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Squares Off Against Intel P4 3 GHz. To be fair, it must be said that AMD offers a good performance/ price ratio with its Athlon processors, but it still cannot quite keep up with the Intel CPUs.

------------------

ex-xian

I was under the impression that some software wouldn't run on an athlon.

Anyway, I'm in the market for a laptop...I'll be going to grad school in a year, hopefully to the UK, but a move nonetheless, so the wife and I are downsizing now. I have a 4 year old computer that's doing me fine, I've added some ram and a video card, and updated the OS, and added a cdrw. So now it's 633 celeron, 20gig hd, 64 video ram, 192 ram, dvd and cdrw drives.

As for what I'll need, the most intesive programs I'll run will be ms office and mathematica. It'd be nice to have a laptop with dvd/cdrw drive. My budget is about $1000, unless someone knows somewhere that trades in old computers.

Any suggestions?

Guillaume

Laptop ? Well why didn't you tell us sooner ?

ex-xian

Umm...because I'm a devious wretch who enjoys wasting people's time?

Kinross

Then you want an iBook. Apple makes the best laptops.