Gaming PC.

[Quark]

1) I don't like AMD. It's not that I hate them - I've just always loved Intel. Always have, always will. Besides, the latest P4's totally BLOW AWAY the AMD competition (competition? WHAT competition? ;)). Not to mention buy Intel a good deal of time to roll out the "P5", and the fact that AMD has delayed the release of their Athlon 64. Nope, for me, I'll stick with Intel - and never have to worry about blowing the chip due to overheating, nor the need for a 10-pound heatsink with industrial-strength fan. :P

It's just not true ... as the above link to TheTechReport and other websites have shown, the AMD 64 3200+ (which isn't even the high end model) can beat Intel's that's rated 1GHz higher. Many websits point out that P4 Extreme Edition (which is just a remarked Xeon) and Athlon 64-FX are evenly matched. Not nearly as many point out that the AMD chip is cheaper, and more importantly, already available.

That said, the price point you have there is still too low for any Athlon 64 chips - Intel's chips just had a price cut and though AMD followed suite, they didn't lower the new 64's prices. The Opteron chips, on the other hand, look very attractive right now. They have recieved a price cut, give you basically the same performance as Athlon 64 (depending on the situtation and it's memory needs), and support multiple processors. Remember that 2000/XP already support SMP, even if the programs don't. I know I'd love that for my constant playing of Winamp. If I were getting a system right now I'd go for a single Opteron with a dual-motherboard. Then I could get that second CPU later on for an instant bonus - and no motherboard/memory upgrade necessary at all.

The downfall to Opteron is that it requires Registered ECC memory - more expensive and a small latency increase. The reason for this? Check out This page of a FiringSquad article. It shows that given Intel's current architecture, adding in memory chips can kill your performance. I would hate to upgrade my memory and lose performance. But Intel chose that path - they killed the latency with certain configurations.

Personally, I'm waiting for either the next price drop or the next line of Athlon 64s.

Oh yeah, I agree about ATI mostly, though until the latest set of drivers came out (Nvidia's good, Ati's bad) I was starting to ponder switching.