which one?

[BetaScriptin]

right now im getting an alienware computer...i was wondering which proccesor is better for gaming...AMD or Intel...ive heard good and bad things about both, so i thought id come here and get user input on it ^_^

[David Harrison]

AMD, and specifically the AMD FX-60.

But why waste your money paying for all of that flashy showy stuff that doesn't do anything. The money you spend on their custom case and whatever could be spent on the componants inside.

And if you have an exceptionally large wad of cash in your pocket and don't want to build your own. Check out Falcon North West, the ultimate gaming PC's (http://www.falcon-nw.com/flash/).

[PeOfEo]

Psh... The amd fx60 also sells for over a grand. Pentium D still has the price edge, and the extreme edition w/ the ht still bench marks right up there with the top x2 procs. On the whole Id say they are going to out perform intel's chips... but intel's chips still have a bit of a price edge. Id wait till the new amd socket comes to the market.

[David Harrison]

Yeah, socket 939 will be dead soon and socket AM2 is supposed to be coming out this year, also the newer chips will probably support DDR2 RAM.

Have you seen the Intel dual core design though? The two cores have to communicate via the much slower FSB, but with the AMD chip the cores can communicate via the a crossbar switch that's on the chip itself and runs at the same frequency.

Here's a couple of diagrams to show it.

[PeOfEo]

True, but intel can regain that performance with ht because instead of the proc dividing something up onto both cores it can do a lot of the work load on a single one leaving the other to do something different all together where the cores wouldn't need to share data as extensively. But when that new socket comes out Intel is going to loose any edge it has because amd is going to smoke it in the benchmarks for the same or an even lower price. I know the next system I build will probably use x2... but that will be a while from now.