AMD xp vs Pentium 4

[zook250]

i have a dinosaur pentium 3, 800 mhz and my cubase sx is beating it to death. how do you guys feel about the AMD processors? is an AMD 1.8 xp as good as a pentium 4 1.8? a sales man at a reputable computor shop told me that he uses protools with an amd and he feels that the amd is faster. by the way he sells both AMD and Intel.. the pentium is much more money. would i notice a difference between a 1.8 AMD to a 2.1 AMD. i have 640 mb 133 ram.windows xp and a delta 1010lt soundcard.i record audio only at present time.

thanks for any advice.

 

[Slackmaster2K]

This question has been covered in depth many times over around here, so use the search function for more specifics.

Basically it's like this: it is fact that the AMD processors are faster than P4 processors when it comes to floating point calculations (like those used by your audio software). Thus an XP 1800+ is typically going to be very equivalent to a P4 1.8Ghz, even though the XP 1800 runs at a much lower clock rate, and is cheaper.

The *problem* with AMD processors in the past and present is that there are a wide range of chipsets to run them on, and a lot of these chipsets have been problematic. The trick then, is to pick a motherboard with a chipset that's known to work well with your hardware. In your case I would contact m-Audio or look on their website.

To truely experience these faster processors, you're going to have to ditch all that PC133 memory and opt for DDR. Obviously DDR is faster memory and there is a clear performance advantage, but I have also noticed that some XP and P4 PC133 chipsets perform like crap for no good reason. For instance, I have a P4 1.5Ghz here at work on an intel i845 PC133 board and it runs WAY slower than my trusty old 850Mhz i440BX PC133 machine at home.

Slackmaster 2000