What's a better processor for daily non-uber1337 gaming needs: AMD Athlon or Intel Pentium Also, quadcore mobile processors: worth the money once they come out q1 2007?

Quote: Original post by acidwillburnyou
What's a better processor for daily non-uber1337 gaming needs: AMD Athlon or Intel Pentium

Assuming you bargain shop, you can generally find a Core2Duo E6300 for about $20 more than the AMD Athlon X2 4200 (I wouldn't even consider the 3800 really). For the AMD case, I would stick with AM2 socket (which will require DDR2 ram, but so will the Intel one).

Currently the Core2Duo has an advantage over the current AMD lineup, especially in the media processing court (videos, encoding/decoding, etc). Of course, this may all change depending on the new AMD chips that are due in '07.

Quote: Also, quadcore mobile processors: worth the money once they come out q1 2007?

Nothing much really uses dual-core capabilities let alone quad-core capabilities. Assuming you wait around, AMD will be coming out with their quad-core AM2 chips, which may be better than the Intel ones (wait and see). Either way, you can expect the price of intel chips to drop shortly afterwards.

Quote: Original post by Washu
Assuming you wait around, AMD will be coming out with their quad-core AM2 chips, which may be better than the Intel ones (wait and see).

If you mean the AMD QuadFX stuff, then the benchmarks I have seen so far were rather disheartening. I gather AMD is basically playing the "HyperTransport gives us MASSIVE BANDWIDTH OF PWNAGE" card, which doesn't seem to be working out that well so far.

Quote: Original post by Promit

Quote: Original post by Washu
Assuming you wait around, AMD will be coming out with their quad-core AM2 chips, which may be better than the Intel ones (wait and see).

If you mean the AMD QuadFX stuff, then the benchmarks I have seen so far were rather disheartening. I gather AMD is basically playing the "HyperTransport gives us MASSIVE BANDWIDTH OF PWNAGE" card, which doesn't seem to be working out that well so far.

Pre-release benchmarks of the intel quad-core stuff were abysmal as well. But they managed to improve those numbers quite a bit (still not great, but...). In reality I suspect AMD is too distracted by their anti-trust suit against Intel. Hopefully they will get their act together and shape up.

Even though I'm a bit of AMD loyalist, in the mobile arena Intel has a pretty good stranglehold on things. In fact, that was a big part of what prompted AMD to acquire ATI. With that acquisition they can now start offering the same kinds of bundles that Intel has in the past.

As such, I don't see much changing of the guard in the 1st quarter.
Mobile, go Intel, desktop, I'm still and AMD fan.

Honestly, if you don't care about the best of the best and just want a solid processor for normal gaming loads, you can't go wrong with either. The Core 2 Duos and the AM2s are both awesome chips, and will more than handle most work loads. As for quad cores... I honestly haven't looked into them that much to say either way.

The only thing that turns me off about Quad for right now is that fact that Intel is using the same hack they used with the Core Duo - pairing two separate chips together on the same die and calling it one chip. Now, you're still getting 4 CPUs in the space of one, but they way they communicate and perform is not true quad processing. Just look at the improvements Intel made over Core Due with Core 2 Duo. Granted, you will see improvements in performance using the current quad configs from both AMD (soon to come) and Intel, but IMO it's negligible for the price. Better off waiting until more common-day apps (not just video and image editing suites) and games can take advantage of multiple cores before going that route - and by then the chips'll be cheaper too. Dual-core is about as crazy as you need to get right now.