AMD XP OR INTEL P4 ???

Hi,
I am upgrading my PC, can you guys enlighten me on which processor to
chose from. Should I go for AMD Athlon XP 2600 or Intel 2.8E HT???
Could you please suggest 1) motherboard 2) video card to go with your
suggestion? I am not a heavy gaming person, I do some home video
editing and I basically have a limited budget ($700).

Thank you for the help .

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On 22 Jul 2004 05:08:39 -0400, ken.RemoveThis@kennos-dot-com.no-spam.invalid
(kennos) wrote:
 >I am upgrading my PC, can you guys enlighten me on which processor to
 >chose from. Should I go for AMD Athlon XP 2600 or Intel 2.8E HT???

Err, well between those you're looking at the somewhat slower but
quite a bit cheaper AMD chip or a faster but quite a bit more
expensive Intel chip. The AthlonXP 3200+ is roughly the same price as
the P4 2.8E.

Ohh, and FWIW, if you can still get one, the P4 2.8C is a faster
processor than the 2.8E and it runs cooler to boot.

 >Could you please suggest 1) motherboard 2) video card to go with your
 >suggestion? I am not a heavy gaming person, I do some home video
 >editing and I basically have a limited budget ($700).

Given you're limited budget I suspect that you'll have a tough time
fitting the P4 in along with a good amount of memory (absolutely
crucial for video editing) and a halfway decent video card.

Here's a decent sample system though (all prices from <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.newegg.com," target="_blank">www.newegg.com,</a>
not the cheapest dealer but good prices and they're apparently fairly
reliable), with all the parts you are likely to really need to upgrade
your system:

AthlonXP 2600+ $94
MSI K7N2 Delta-L $64
Muskin 512MB PC3200 x2 $158
Maxtor 120GB/7200rpm/8MB cache $88
Sapphire Radeon 9600 $94
Antec True330W power supply $47

Total cost: $543

Add in the cost of shipping, any taxes and any "extra" new parts you
might need (maybe an extra case fan, floppy drive, CD-RW, possibly
even a case) and you'll be pushing right up against that $700 budget.
With any money you've got left over you could easily bump the
processor up to a 2700+ ($109) or 2800+ ($121).

If you go for the P4 then you're looking at all the above the same but
subtract the processor and motherboard and add in something like:

P4 2.8C $181
MSI 865PE NEO2-PLS $73

Total cost: $641

You would probably also want to swap out the Parallel ATA hard drive
for an SATA one on the Intel system (it's support basically for free
on the system board and only adds a few extra dollars in cost to the
hard drive). If you don't need any extra bits other than what is
listed above you should be able to fit this within your $700 budget,
but only just barely.

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Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->