Hi all, I apologize if this has been discussed before. I'm in the market to buy a top of the line computer, and I'm not so computer savvy as I used to be. I'm tossed up between pentium or athlon. What I use the computer for: Poser, rhino, CorelDraw and Corel Photopaint. Just got Poser 5, have not installed it yet. Internet: not so important to me, my present athlon system does fine. Ram: I could 1 gig, I've been using 512, is it helpful to have 1 gig. Games: I don't really play them, so that's not important. Graphics card: GeForce 3 with 128 megs ram, seems to work fine. I have noticed that my work computer: Dell p4 2ghz with 512 ram kicks all over my home computer, Athlon 1.4 ghz with 512 megs ram. However, the techs at the computer store all swear by the athlons. Soooo, if anybody has a good opion, or has some experience with this, please let me know. Thanks, Davo

I just put together a new system. ASUS333 board for $79, an athlon 2200 for around $200, 1 gig of ram, new case with power supply and fan. All for around $500 total including misc parts. Just add a video card, hard drive and OS. The asus board already has a sound drive. You do need an ethernet card since they didn't put one on the board but it comes with USB out the wasoo. I've been running XP and P5 and P4 on it for the last 2 weeks with no problems. Its fast plus the new 2200 is a different dye set so the chip is actually cooler than the 1800. I think internally the chip runs at 2.2 gig and externally its 1.8 gig. I would also highly recommend buying the removable drive bays for your hard drives, especially any drive past your boot drive. The drive bays are cheap and allow you to pull out a drive and slap a new one in. I have a boot drive, CD rom and two removable drive bays allows me to have poser on one removeable drive and a backup drive for the other removable drive. You can get a Maxtor 80gig drive now for $79 with rebate so drives are cheap now. BTW MadLab II is awesome!! Great work! And the sci fi scenes are outstanding.

For contrast, I've seen pretty good demonstrations that almost across the board show athlon kicking the poo outta pentium. On the other hand, OS and drivers are almost exclusively developed for intel chipsets, meaning that, while rare, the places the amd chipsets aren't the same can cause problems. In my experience, home users who are willing to risk minor stability issues for performance are better served by AMD chips, but businesses who can't afford the risk of downtime on their systems tend to go with the names they can rely on, ie. Intel for chips, HP for servers, etc. It's not that they don't care about performance, they don't want the small risk of having a complication, and need the reassurance of a formidable corporate troubleshooting and customer service department. Paul

My experience has been that the Athlon does better. I run computers with both chips you just mentions. One is a P4 2 ghz, 512 ram, and 128mb Radon video card, and has 3 scsi drives (older scsi but still 7200 rpm and 7.5 ms, -which is about what the 2 IDE drives on my other computer rate). The other computer is Athlon 1.4, 1 gb ram, 32mb Geforce video, and 2 IDE drives. Both run win2k. I ran side by side comparisons of both systems using the same files in Poser. I could open files quicker and render the same file, side by side, faster on the Athlon than on the P4. I have since swapped out the video cards and my Athlon really kicks now. Ok, I admit this was probably not a fair comparison of chips since both systems were configured differently. But the only real disadvantage the P4 system had was less ram. Otherwise, it had a faster cpu, a better video card, and the advantage of being a full-blown scsi system. So, what was the deciding factor? Did the Athlon 1.4 ghz chip just out perform the P4 2 ghz chip or was the difference in ram the deciding factor? If ram made the difference, I'd say save yourself the cost of the new computer and add some more ram. Oh, if anyone wants a slightly used scsi p4 system, with a 32mb geforce video card, let me know. :O)

Most new apps with P4 optimizations also seem to be optimized for the Athlon as well. Intel has narrowed the performance gap but the Athlon still seems to be able to more than hold its own. I've run a wide variety of shareware and commercial apps on my old SlotA 1GHz Athlon and not seen any incompatibility that I could attribute to the CPU. Since you obviously aren't hung up on having an 'Intel Inside' sticker, I can't see paying the extra money for the Pentium. Truly top of the line would be an Itanium but there is very little 64 bit software at this point.

We run Intel boxes here - but thats only because we tend to by systems from providers like Dell and so on - it has been a while since I have had the time to put my own systems together :) I am a big fan of the Intel brand... no particualr reason ot to like the Athlon stuff... lots of people love em, but I just never saw a compelling issue worth leaving the brand for. With the recent delays of the new AMD chips release it certainly looks liek Intel is on top of things for now... but that all could change. Get what you can afford :) BTW - that extra 512 meg will make a HUGE difference in poser, the video card won't matter at all.

I believe it was PhilC who did a benchmark poll a couple of months ago showing the Athalon beating Pentium (and Mac) hands down.

Well, until recently I had intel boxes. Abouta six months ago I got a athelon and and asus motherboard. and it was faster... when it worked. Turned out the compunation did not handle my multiple monitors even with a new dual head video card. Crashes whenever there was OpenGL call. Swapped out video cards, audio. Even upgraded from Win 98 to XP. Still crasjed regularly. about once a day when I doing sonething important. Two weeks ago went back to intel. bell running continously for a week without need for a reboot. Mybe it just bad luck but I'm sticking with intel

well... Ive just been doing a 3d graphics and 2d compositing job. They had a dual 2000 Intel XEON. It spanked serious butt!! But then again it cost loads of money. IM personally going for: Dual Athlon 2000+ MP Asus A7M266D mother Board The chips are fairly cheap and the mother board has onbaord 5 channel sound I believe. As for the graphics cards..the Ge Force 4 Ti 4200 128 MEG look nice and are coming down in price (Can any one confirm this is a wise choice?) If you are going to do any live video I can highly recommend a fast SCSI hard drive..but they are pretty pricey. -LW

the benchmarks for the newer chips are much closer than they have been in the past, but athlon still has the edge when the chipspeeds are the same. ( pc computing mag benchmark testing comparing both chips) there are some differences that can affect performance, but if the hardare works with the cpu you get, rather than having one incompatable, the cost savings for the athlon makes sense. the older chips an intel 1.4 was no faster than the athlon 800 now that difference in performance is going away.

I seem to recall a recent thread here in which some Athlon users with certain other configurations or apps were having P5 problems. I'll be searching the forum on that, as I'm also considering upgrading. Also, Intel just introduced the 2.4 GHz chip at the beginning of the month, so price cuts should be working their way through the supply chain (though I would guess AMD will adjust accordingly).

All of my new machines are Athlons. Both desktop PC and laptop.

The last Intel machine that I bought (and still have) was a 233MMX - the last of the Socket 7's. I keep the machine around for old time's sake. I ran Poser 2 and Bryce 2 on that machine.

Athlon. I can recommend it highly.

Thank you all for your input! I'm personally leaning toward the athlon system myself, there seems to be more bang for the buck. I run poser on an athlon system right now and haven't had any complaints so far. Thank you all again for your input :-) davo

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