I love the prices of those AMD processors and motherboard combos on www.pricewatch.com. The problem is, I need to know how friendly they are to cubase and wavelab. Steinberg recommends nothing but P3 & I noticed it has updated patches for optimizing P4- but no athlon AMD! I am assuming there is a reason, but does anyone have any firsthand experience? How are those AMD processors overall? And does the DDR technology beat he crap out of my pc133 RAM? I want to upgrade, I can taste it but I do not want to make a $350 mistake. (And before anyone tells me to post this to Cubase user forum, I already did. No one responded...)
I dont use Cubase but in general AMD has a higher chance for driver conflicts with any hardware and software. They are great bang for the buck processors but if you want the highest chance of success than stick with Intel. The main problem with AMD is picking the right MOBO for your sound card.
The real life performance gains of DDR and RAMBUS Ram dont match up to the hype. They are faster but in all benchmarks I've seen there is only about a 15% increase in speed.
The new line of Steinberg products coming are completely optimized for AMD Athlons starting with Cubase VST 5.0 R5. Steinberg entered into an "alliance" a wile back with AMD to fully optimize their entire product line for AMD Athlons.