Pentium 4 supporting 64 bit - any good?

[labrat]

Hello, new member here.
Just wondered whether this pentium 4: http://www.intel.com/products/serve...4/index.htm?iid=ipp_dlc_procp4f+proc_p4_em64&
is as good as an Athlon 64 3500? I want to use it mainly for gaming, plus all the other usual bits.

I ask because I wanted to get a motherboard with pci express ports to get a pci express graphics card which i hear is better than AGP? And I cant actually find an amd mobo with pci express. Im new to all this stuff so if you can just clear it up it would be very appreciated!

P.S. Is the Nvidia 6600 any good?

Thanks!

 

[ThirtySixBelow]

The 64bit AMD is most likely going to be better for gamming, i havn't seen or heard anything about 64 bit intels, so that is news to me. Just by a rule of thumb, AMD's fair better in games and P4's to better at number crunching like compression stuff or anything processor intensive. As of right now there are no PCI-e boards that support AMD 64's, so right now it's a toss up. 64 bit, or PCI-e. As far as that card, it all depends on what you want to do. It's a nice card for gamming as long as you arn't picky and what the very very best. I would recommend the GT version if you are looking for something in that price range from nvidia. A bunch of people will probably come in here and talk video cards and say that one is better than the next, but it's all really relative to your system, so just look at your budget and go with whatever you prefer. Nvidia is a good company and the 6600 GT is a good bang for the buck, well worth the extra for the better model.

 

[Blind_Arrow]

gaming = AMD

no game support 64-bit to date, as far as i know (better ask gamers for 64-bit supported games), if even it wasnt the 64-bit thing, i would have recommended AMD anyway.

else, wait a little, as AMD's PCI-E platform is yet to schedule this christmas.

and nVidia is definately getting leap this time. NV40 chips

 

[Apokalipse]

the AMD Athlon 64-s are better than th pentium 4's in many ways, they perform better, and they process 64-bit
as for the 6600, it is a damn good card; it performs about as well as the X800 Pro
but you need a PCI-E board to use it. I suggest you wait a bit for PCI-E boards to come out for Athlon 64's

 

[_SiLv3R_]

ok first off that processor is not a true 64 bit processor as it does not utilize the 64 bit pipe.. it has jsut copied amd's 64 bit instructions so that it can run things like windows xp 64 bit edition... and second of all u wont have to wait long for amd 64 mobos with pci-e support as dfi is int he finalizing stages of their two socket 939 mobos.. one with the nforce 3 chipset utillizing agp and regular pci slots and another with nforce 4 chipset utilizing the pci-e 16x and 1x interfaces.. im pretty sure that they are shipping them out to hardware reviewers pretty soon (magazines and websites and such) and it should be out in time for christmas shopping (november 1st is the official day that retailers consider the start of christmas shopping).. another note is that you would be much better off with something like an amd 3800+ or the best cpu i believe out there rite now the amd fx-53 and they BOTH cost less than that intel chip (they cost less than the EE version of their 3.0Ghz chip as well)... and yes the 6600GT is a good card for pci-e.. but when your talking about the two midrange cards that ati and nvidia have brought out (based on the x800 and 6800 series) the x700XT, for the same price, is a much better performer in my eyes... and with a few driver updates from ati the x series should be at par if not ahead of the 6 series because the both the x series (x700s and x800s) have more vertex pipes than the 6 series.. well thats my 2 cents hope i helped!


EDIT: also the amd 64s have a much better onboard memory controller than the p4s do which is kinda historic as the memory controllers of intel has always been far superior to that of amd but nowadays u never know who'll surprise u... soo my final is amd 64 3500+, 3800+, or fx-53.. with the new dfi pci-e supporting mobo coming out in a little while with an x700XT pci-e x16 card

 

[Apokalipse]

IMO the 6800 Gt is the best value card of the lot, it has SM 3.0 and it performs really well.
to be honest, even though there are big debates on whether X800 or 6800 cards perform better, I could not give a crap which one does, they will both play the high-end games.
I do however think that SM 3.0 is worth getting with the 6800 cards.

when ATI goes to SM 4.0 I might swing back my preference to their cards, unless they for some reason turn out to be dodgy or unless Nvidia have SM 4.5 or something but I will just have to see

 

[Nubius]

Why is damn intel is using .09 nanometer technology and AMD I believe the smallest they got is .13? Is it because AMD's usually run hotter or what? I mean don't you think if AMD perfected the smaller transistor technology they could make an even more monsterous beast of a CPU?

 

[Shadow9684]

nubius i think the fx55 is .9