Updating System Board - Dual Athlon or Pentum 4?

[Alliante]

This has probably been beaten to death but I'd like to run it across your expertise.

I'm caught between purchasing a dual AMD Athlon MP system with 1 gig RAM or a 3.0 ghz Intel Pentium 4 800fsb motherboard and memory.

My current system is a 1ghz Pent III it's been a super trooper for me, but it's two years old and I'm long overdue for an upgrade (I normally like to keep yearly updates on my Motherboards and Processors)

I'd like to know your thoughts on the above platforms. I'm also a Vegas Video user (I do play a few games, but rarely), but I have another machine (Dual Pent III on Windows 2000 Server with a boatload of RAM) I send my renders to and serve my test websites with locally, so long animation renders are not an issue for me for the most part.

I do apologize wholeheartedly if this was answered more consisely in a previous thread, however a quick search and found nothing really up-to-date on this site.

Thank you for your time!
JDG

http://www.alliante.com

[mattclary]

If you plan to render on the machine, I would make the decision based on render speed vs. price. My conclusion was that buying a single P4 3ghz was more economical than buying a dual AMD setup. As of 3 seconds ago, my machine is in the top 2 at Blanos.com for single CPU machines (for the benchmarks I performed). If you look at dual CPU benchmarks, there is one dual AMD system that beat mine by a small margin.

[Darttman]

I agree with Matt. The newer Intel boards are a bit faster and cheaper when it's all said and done.

If you need a workstaion I'd build an intell box.


Good luck