Difference between P4 and Athlon?

[-=DFOX=-]

Im thinking about doing a little upgrading.

Right now I have an Intel P4

Will I see a big difference with something like this?

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ "Barton", 400MHz FSB, 512K Cache Processor -


Mostly for games and internet. Is there a big difference between Athlon and intel?

Score another newbie question

One more.

PCI and AGP. PCI is the regular slots where you plug stuff in, is AGP on the actual MB?

 

[Nubius]

both PCI and AGP Slots are on the motherboard. You only have one AGP Slot though and generally it's brown and is completely offset from the PCI Slots....

What kind of Intel processor do you have now meaning speedwise? If you get a board like the NF7-S v2 from ABit and a 35w 2400+ XP-M or even the 2600+ XP-M you'll get the barton core with 512k L2 Cache just like that 3200+ XP, the difference is the XP-M's are for 'mobile' hence the M, but they are all socket A, these chips are INSANELY easily overclockable, I got mine running at 2.6GHz at the moment...

There's always debates but generally the rule of thumb is:

AMD = Gaming
Intel = Application use


AMD has shorter pipelines and can do more per instruction clock, whereas Intel has fatter longer pipelines allowing those higher clockspeed, but they don't do as much per clock cycle so thats why they can have a 3GHz chip and AMD only have 2.2 and still be able to keep up...My current OC'd processor will out do a 3.6GHz Intel on some benchmarks, but of course every system varies.

I say if you've been with Intel atleast give AMD a shot

 

[TheMajor]

Search TF and you will find about 3,6million threads about (dis)-advantages of AMD and Intel.

 

[Leonidas]

intel for apps, and AMD for games is the rule of thumb around here... and major that 3dmark2001 score is hilarious, what type of games you play?

 

[TheMajor]

Currently I am not playing any games. I used to play Starcraft, C&C, Red Alert, Tib SUn, GT Sports Car, Toca2 and Sof1 on this comp. (and lots of other games I am to lazy to write down)