Okay...in the battle between AMD and WIntel...who's comes out on top? Intell more often than not. Why? Because not only are hardware manufacturers slow to produce AMD compatable products, but Microsoft has sabotaged AMD from the get go...because they and Intel are corporate bed-fellows.
Bull, you say? In Windows 98, there is a line in the code which makes the OS lock-up if one uses a USB type-mouse and an AMD chip. A 14-year-old kid found this flaw and notified the local tech-journals, and posted it on the internet. When the issue became public, Microsoft published a fix in 24 hours (if I remeber it correctly).
The question I have is, when has Microsoft ever been so swift? Something rotten in Denmark? Micrososft even canceled the deal with AMD to supply the X-Box with AMD chips not even an hour before the anouncement was made public. AMD's people at the showing didn't even know about it. But, whatever...
The thing is, the processor is not the only limiting factor in performance, the motherboard's capabilities have a great deal to do with what a proc can achieve...that's partially the reason why over-clockers are more fixated on motherboard variations than on different chips. If there are few, stable and fast MB's out there for AMD chips, what do you expect?
I've built enough systems to have seen what both AMD and Intel can do, I've seen and old AMD 233 outperform a Pentium 300, and I've seen a Pentium 450 crush and AMD 500...
But I have yet to see any Pentium beat an Athlon. Quite an amazing feat considering the lack of stable support for AMD chips.
The problem associated with Athlon chips are with the VIA MB's...not enough plys on the original referrence boards for VIA chipsets...it limits how stable the AThlon can be.
It's a funny thing...I've seen an Athlon work in Linux, and it blew every performance number I've seen for comparable chipsets on Windows straight out of the water...
I think maybe testing the K6-s might be in order...
The problem is not always the actual harware, the software and peripherals often have a detrimental effect on processors and performance...
But, wither way, you can have my Athlon or my K6-2 when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands...
BTW...no problems what-so-ever running any games or apps...and performance is stellar on both accounts.