I am leaping off of the AMD bandwagon

[b][/b]I have been a die hard AMD fan since the first Athlon 600 was released, those Slot A Athlons blew the doors off of the Intel processors. They handled memory better, played games better, and rendered video better. What has changed my mind? A Pentium D 950 chip for half the price of an Athlon x4800 changed my mind. Now here come the "Purist's" chasing me down with their pitch forks, ropes, tar and feathers, but before you lynch me, here is my rationalization. A x4800 chip costs roughly 700, I am rounding up 5 bucks you silly purists, and a D950 costs roughly 350, keep your tar and feathers to your self, I am rounding down a wopping five bucks. Hmm, 1.2 frames a second less in a game I love for half the price? Everyone has their price. I certainly do, it is $350. I render video also, you will notice that I am going to gain a whopping 2 seconds on 95mb mpeg2/dvd transition and encoded with Pinnacle, but I lose a second if I encode a mpeg2 in DivX 6. I think that is worth saving $350. Now you are going to say, but the NVidia SLI and Intel chips are not as good. SLI? I was doing SLI when most of the kids on here were still eating Gerber baby food and leaving messes in diapers for their parents to so kindly clean up. For you old school folks, I have one word. Voodoo. I had two of those bad boys in SLI and was playing Quake, MDK, ETC and getting wicked frame rates. Now you are going to tell me to get the Intel 975x chipset, it supports Crossfire. Uhm. No. A 955x chipset will do me fine, I was going to get the eVGA 7900GT, now, I can spend that extra $350 I am saving by not purchasing the AMD X4800 and put it torwards getting the 7900GTX. You can have your X4800, even your FX60 or FX62, but you are going to be stuck with your 7900GT and I again will be frame rate king. Here we go, you ATI fans are chomping at the bit for a piece of me. I have owned ATI cards in the past, notice the word past. ATI makes great integrated video for servers. I have fried more ATI cards than Waffle House makes bacon, ATI is Canadian for Pete's sake! They fry lots of stuff beside bacon! I have never, ever fried, or had an Nvidia card crap out on me. I still have my old Viper w/ the Nvidia V770 Ultra chip running on my linux box, it has been running every day now since late 1999, never a hitch or a hiccup. Sorry, this is an AMD rant, not an ATI rant. I seemed to have gotten carried away.
I am stepping off my soap box now, as I turn to go, you may call me a traitor, a scoundrel, or even a cheap skate, but I will always remember you like I remember those Apple users slamming me for purchasing an Intel Pentium Pro 200 to edit my video, and yes, they got smoked too.

Noob? ROTFLMAO I have been a visitor to Tom's Hardware since 1996. It seems you have consistantly posted on the forum here for a while, what else do you do with your free time? Don't answer that, I do not want to know. If you do not have anything intelligent to back up your claims, like calling me a noob, then you should sit back, drink a few more Mt. Dews, have some more Cheetos, and clean that orange sticky mess off of your keyboard.

MPJesse - 1

Noobs - 0

Do the math. My post count amounts to about 2 posts a day on average. Yes, I spend all my free time authoring a whole 2 posts a day.

I'm sure if you had actually bothered to join the forums back in 2000, yours would amount to 10 times that.

Try to wait until it slows down. It's going pretty fast right now. Intel purposely dropped their prices cause they can barely give away NetBurst chips. It is a bold strategy considering that they will lose BILLIONS of dollars doing it. They had better hope AMD doesn't have anything else planned for this year.

They may be the first X86 with UEFI firmware. Looking at the fact that they are selling 35W Opterons to Sun, 4GHz X2's are NOT out of the question for 65nm.

Thanks for the intelligent reply. I am not much for waiting, impulse control is definately not one of my finer traits. I have $1000 burning a hole in my pocket, and I am starting to see my poor old Winchester chip and AGP slot based video card getting pushed to the wayside. I am willing to go a month or so to wait and see how AM2 and Conroe pans out, that should drive prices even further down since there are less than 10 chips you can buy today for AM2, and none seem to be dual core. This is always a risk buying computer hardware, you never know what the other guy has up his sleeve.

Sure I have heard of overclocking. I ran my old 486 dx100 for a year overclocked until it went up in smoke. You run a CPU beyond spec. You take a chance burning it up, blowing out the pots on your motherboard ETC, I have seen the silicon from the 386 all the way up to our lovely Athlon64's send smoke signals to x86 heaven. Your overclocking arguement does stand true. You do get more bang for the buck by overclocking. You do get less thermal dissapation out of an x2. Let me explain it a little differently. I just bought a 2006 Harley Davidson Electra Glide. If I wanted to go faster I could do several things. I could supercharge it, I could purchase a big bore kit, I put a larger intake on it. Those are the add-ons like Corsair XMS or OCZ Memory, the 7900gtx video cards, the WD Raptor drives of the Harley World. If I wanted to go faster, I could of bought a Honda ACE and put Nitros on it. I am not questioning anyone's technical abilities, I am questioning my own sensabilities. AMD and spend more, Honda ACE and spend less and juice it. I will take the Harley any day, and I will run my processor at spec.

Yeah, we all suffer from the "dangit it was $xxx when I first bought it and now it is only $XX!" blues. I see the prices of video cards like the 7900gt wich costs less than the 6800gt I bought and cringe. Such is life for those of us that wish to be bleading edge, but our wallets say differently.

Yeah, we all suffer from the "dangit it was $xxx when I first bought it and now it is only $XX!" blues. I see the prices of video cards like the 7900gt wich costs less than the 6800gt I bought and cringe. Such is life for those of us that wish to be bleading edge, but our wallets say differently.

Hmm...yeah, the Intels are quite cheap and offer great price/performance for their price range. But isn't Intel losing a lot of money by doing this? I mean, I don't care that they are, it's just that once Conroe comes out, and it becomes performance king, won't the prices go up for Conroe?

Yah, I remember the old days....when one could purchase an AMD for less than an Intel and yet outperform it! Those were the good days....for example my Athlon XP 1800+ outperformed the P4 2.0Ghz!!! I couldn't be happier. I miss those days...

I plan on upgrading this clunker to a P-D 930/805 or perhaps Conroe...I'm not in a rush

A guy who respect 9mm....WTF???

I'm amused at the way the author and responders to this thread consider it logical to be loyal to a "for profit" company. Words like "bandwagon" "traitor", connote that this is not about buying a product, its belonging to a team.

Don't you think that's interesting? Why does anyone feel the value of creating a team around who's profit you contribute to? .....its pretty funny if you think about it.

The amazing power of marketing, I suppose.

Why would anyone care what company anyone else buys their parts from?

Bob

AMD vs intel seems to be a very immotive subject on this forum. Is it possibly people like to root for the underdog.

Any ways sureley some healthy price competition is good for us consumers?

Maybe AMD will look at comments like toosobers and cut prices too.

I think the next few months look quiet exciting (Conroe v AMDs response, & Nvidia 7950gx2 v ATI response)

All inspired by competition.

noblekitty=1

mpjesse, raven 87, baronmatrix, sidvicious and prozac26=0

Competition is good for us all. It drives down costs, forces innovation, and creates heated posts on the THG Forumz!

LOL, you're telling respected members to STFU? I'm surprised you're not banned yet. We're not defending AMD, we're saying n00bs shouldn't post their opinion why they like AMD or Intel.

Say what, - excuse me - let's pretend I'm 9-inch SAY WHAT!
And no matter what 9 inch says, all you see is the CAPS.. Grrr

People- follow your own advice. If you don't care what the N00B says.
Ignore the thread!

I don't agree with jumping off the AMD bandwagon, or any bandwagon.
It should always be, Show me the Beef (performance).

I'm a Noob, and that's my opinion.

The guy bought a Harley for gods sake Then talks about making it go fast. Umm...that's what sportbikes are for. Or if your an old timer and wanted some comfort there is always the Honda VFR or a BMW.

I failed to mention that I also have one that goes fast, and is comfortable as well, a Yamaha fj1200.
A bike for each mode, one for speed, one for cruising. Just like gamers, they swear by the AMD, and I will give AMD cudos, they are fast. There is always the Dollar and Sense factor. My agurement stands. $350 saved to do the same tasks at roughly the same speed.

Thanks for the intelligent reply. I am not much for waiting, impulse control is definately not one of my finer traits. I have $1000 burning a hole in my pocket, and I am starting to see my poor old Winchester chip and AGP slot based video card getting pushed to the wayside. I am willing to go a month or so to wait and see how AM2 and Conroe pans out, that should drive prices even further down since there are less than 10 chips you can buy today for AM2, and none seem to be dual core. This is always a risk buying computer hardware, you never know what the other guy has up his sleeve.

Considering that you got some good DDR memory (I <3 Samsung TCCD chips), a decent GPU and a "meh" motherboard (Via chipset, yuck!), you could go for a 939Dual-SATA2 motherboard which supports both AGP & PCI-E and that can be upgrade to Socket AM2 & DDR2 by using a riser card, that will allow you to migrate your memory and GPU while being able to afford a nice Dual Core CPU along with a high end cooling system while benefiting of a long upgrade path.

The alternative would be to get a "BadAxe" mobo and bin all of your core components in favor for a PCI-E GPU and DDR2 memory, it'll cost ya...

@ noblekitty :

Go ahead, feel free to prove me wrong, the TDP values and the overclocking potential of '06 Manchester cores that I stated are facts...

I intend to keep the 3500+ running, it will be deligated to the honorable role of file server. My poor old Athlon 2500+ needs retired. My upgrade path include 2 gigs of Corsair XMS ddr2 675 ram, Intel or Asus 955x board, eVGA 7900GTX, and a Antec TPII-550 550W Power Supply.
Again, I am not going to overclock, I would have posted in the overclocking area if I was. I want a solid, speedy system that I can rely on. I have a budget, I work for the state supporting silly users, and sillier hardware, the last thing I want to do is come home to a dead computer.

Wow. 4000+ posts and you don't even have enough sense to just move along when you should; you just go right in for the flame. I haven't seen 5000 posts on this topic.

Let me think about it and I'll post my thoughts on this subject. Conroe's got everybody worked up.

I try not to talk about people I don't know. You should give it a try. In other words, uummmmm you dumb sh$t I didn't say anything about no tcaring about the post. I told him AMD is doing fine. So you STFU.

who gives a shit...seriously....OOH NO AMD ISNT THE BEST ANYMORE..oh noes!

look no 1 cares you should just be happy faster hardware is comming out. your going to buy intel just because intel is coming out withs omething faster whoodie freaking doo. I have an intel, Northwood never went to AMD my old gateway was an amd, i didnt jump off the band wagon or anything, i just bought the best hardware at the time that i could afford.

Who really cares in a few months amd will have soemthing ut and then you will be like OMG INTEL IS TEH SUCK ect. ect.

So seriously go post on your livejournal and cry to people who give a shit

Is it just me or are the noobs getting stupider by the day?

are you refering to me? i dont pretend to know alot of highly technical things such as the atom by atom engineering of a processor, but i have a certain degree of common sense, and i reconize the apparent lack of it, as in said thread.