I'm an intel fan so you know what I'll recommend.
 
I own an asus P4P800 with a celeron (out of cost reasons)
P4's are really expensive here in Europe.
 
But the board is stable and no problems so far.
 
On the other hand I'm thinking my next comp might be an amd, but just for gaming not for "serious" work.
 
If you do get a P4 stay away from prescotts (P4E) they tend to get quite hot.

thanks for the feedback , I have been doing some research and noticed though that the celeron's weren't up to par. I mean, I'd rather opt for an athlon xp than a celeron since price wise, they are about the same but performance is better with the athlon. I'll be doing some heavy DV editing soon so I'll need a cp that'll be able to cut down some time. If I had the money, I'd go for for top notch with scsi hd's, but times are rough these days. With me married now and a new baby coming in July (the reason for the DV editing part). Well, atleast I have a couple more months and hopefully after Comdex in June, prices will come down.
 
man, what happened to ntcompatible?? after 100+ views, only one reply?

i would sy go for a pentium 4 with HT enabled. over here in hungary the prices are not that bad but i am expecting a spike after may 1 and it will probably last for about 1-2 months. joining the EU has some of its drawbacks.
 
My processor temp: 38 c constant
My system temp: 37 c constant
 
this is with the cooler/heatsink that came with my P4 2.8 HT ready.
 
I have no experience with AMD but my step-fathers is a devotee.

Choose your processor based on your intened use:
 
Athlon chips are best for Office type applications, and are much faster with programs of this type. Athlon XP chips are only average for gaming, Athlon 64 chips are currently best for gaming.
 
Intel P4 chips perform best with gaming and video editing. P4 was best chip for gaming until Athlon 64 was released. Performance wise, Prescott chips are not worth buying until they hit at least 3.6GHz. At the same speed, Northwood chips beat Prescott chips (this reverses at about 3.6Ghz, assuming you can get a Northwood to run that fast).
 
 

I know your pain and too have upgrade two or three times to get the Optimal video editing/DVD burning PC.
 
I started off with an XP 2500+ Barton Core on a dual channel nForce2 ultra board. 1.0GB of DDR400MHz. RAID drives the whole "10" yards. That wasn't enough power for Adobe Premiere Pro to render the speed at which i would be happy with.
 
So now i have an P4 3.0GHz HT 800MHz BUS, Intel based board, SATA drives, same GIG of memory dual channel, yada yada. THe P4 setup screams through Premiere with HT enabled!!! I love it! Oh yeah I overclocked both chips, the 2500+ i got up to 2.3GHz, and the P4 i can get to 3.4GHz easily, no need to though.
 
Go with the Intel setup, it's the closet you'll get to a MAC if you are into video editing and media creation. MACs suck for anything other than media IMO.

The part about the Athlon heat issues aren't an issue if you use a decent heatsink and have good airflow in your case---no different than if you were to build a P4 box.
 
Having said that, for the Intel side, Abit's IS7 series boards are nice and cheap. If you want to splurge go for Abit's IC7 or Asus P4C800 series boards. I've also been hearing great things about DFI's LANParty and Infinity lines, but haven't ever worked extensively with DFI before.
 
AMD: nForce 2 all the way. I picked up Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe recently and it's an excellent board.
 
Either way is good, and the issues AMD has had in the past are sorted out by now. For Intel...keep with an Intel chipset and stay the hell away from Prescott for now.

I don't do video or mp3's. All I want is to play games. And so I chose the ABIT KV8 Max3 mobo and the AMD 64 bit 3200+, and am glad I did! But before I made this choice, I tried the AMD 64 bit 3000+ on the MSI K8T Neo FI2SR, the ABIT IC7 Max3 with a P4 2.8E then with a P4 3.2 regular. I really liked the P4 3.2 a lot, but for games the AMD 64 bit 3200+ just creams it! But during most of my research for the perfect PC (for me of course), everything I read and all the benchmarks show that the P4 3.2 is great for video editing and MP3's. Most in the know on the net also say for that go P4, but for games go AMD. Now there were also some bencharks that DID show the "E" version of the P4's did even better on video and such, and when SSE3 comes into play someday, might be the thought for your future.
 
BUT! In some recent articles I have read, and helped me deicide to go AMD 64, as well as maybe spells the death of the P4:
 
Microsoft will only make ONE 64 bit Windows XP - the AMD one. They feel it would be too much of a waste of effort to build 2 different x86 64 bit versions, so as AMD was first, they win. The article also went on to say that if Intel wants to jump on the 64 bit bandwagon, then they will have to eat crow and beg AMD for the 64 bit code. (but recently there was a blurb about Intel doing some reverse engineering on the AMD 64 bit chips . . . . could be nasty soon)
 
Also, many game companies (Far Cry comes to mind that I am drooling over at the moment!!!!!!!!!) are now going to start compiling in 64 bit code! Using that, they can create larger maps, better graphics, better AI, and many other neat stuff.
 
So with that in mind, it might not be bad either to think AMD

thanks for the feedback guys.
man, from what you guys are all advising, it's gonna cost a bit to upgrade.
 
i hate it that even though i'm in taiwan, prices are still so high as compared to the states.
 
I have done some price checks and basically the P4 and the 64bit Athlons are the same price. about a $60 difference. This is with 512MBDDR 400, SATA 120GB HD. But it's gonna be in the price range of $580~$650 for the upgrade. That's more than my budget is allowing me to spend.
 
I wonder if I could get away with just buying a mpeg card?? I have never bought one but would it get the job done? Do these cards actually improve encoding/decoding times?? It would be a much cheaper alternative and I could spend the money on a larger HD and a stick of ram (pc133 ) though I am against buying a stick of ram that will be usless if I decide to upgrade later on.

oh, btw, there is also a combo deal with the following:
AMD 3000+ 64bit
Gigabyte GA-K8VT800
Transcend 512MB DDR 400
Seagate 80GB 7200 SATA150
US$558.00

APK,
 
Thanks for the info. From what I read about those cards, they only mentioned playback (or de-coding). I don't really have a problem with that. The part I'm wondering is the encoding part. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to encode a *.vob track (or a dvd track of a song) to mpeg1/2 format. It took me over 6hrs to encode The Eagles DVD to VCD format! I want something that'll make it go faster so I was wondering if the new generation mpeg cards would help. Again, it's the encoding that I'm after.
 
Thanks
 
btw, I'm running a Athlon 1G T-Bird with 256mb ram (the other 256stick burnt out ) And I just spent $450 on a 17" LCD monitor so I'm running out of cash to spend (though it's a sweet wide screen 16:9 LCD ) and about $80 for a tv card & keyboard. More of a appearance upgrade than a performance upgrade, vanity, I'm guilty as charged

Originally posted by three:

Quote:APK, 
Thanks for the info. From what I read about those cards, they only mentioned playback (or de-coding). I don't really have a problem with that. The part I'm wondering is the encoding part. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to encode a *.vob track (or a dvd track of a song) to mpeg1/2 format. It took me over 6hrs to encode The Eagles DVD to VCD format! I want something that'll make it go faster so I was wondering if the new generation mpeg cards would help. Again, it's the encoding that I'm after.
 
Thanks
 
btw, I'm running a Athlon 1G T-Bird with 256mb ram (the other 256stick burnt out ) And I just spent $450 on a 17" LCD monitor so I'm running out of cash to spend (though it's a sweet wide screen 16:9 LCD ) and about $80 for a tv card & keyboard. More of a appearance upgrade than a performance upgrade, vanity, I'm guilty as charged
 
*edit* forgot to mention the DVD Burner I just bought as well for $100. So that's a total of $630 already spent. I'm not looking forward to adding another $600 for the upgrade

From what I understood from an Intel rep, Windows 64Bit will work with their "future" 64bit chips just fine.