Pentium D915 dual core or Athlon 64*2 3800+

[Brandeego]

I am looking for a base unit for my 14 yr old son for Christmas. It will be used mainly for the web and games, although the games he prefers won't need a high end graphics card. I can upgrade the graphics card at a later stage if required.

My budget is about £350. I have narrowed it down to a Gateway GT5042 from Staples which has the Pentium D915 dual core, which runs at 2.8ghz. It has 512 mb memory, which may need to be added to. 200gb hard drive and a price of £370.

The other choice seems to be an Acer T180DC, which runs an Athlon 64*2 3800+ dual core running at 2ghz and has memory of 1024mb and slightly smaller hard drive and costs £349 at Comet. Also appears to include a free printer(although don't really need one)

Anyone have any idea as to which is the best spec machine to go for, or any alternatives.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[aldi]

Not much to choose between the processors, each is better at some tests and worse at others. Persoanly I'd go for the intel by default but if the AMD comes with 1 gig of ram...

[RobDickinson]

Go for the athlon, unless its a core 2 duo the AMD will slaughter the intel especialy with the extra memory.

[Zad]

I would go for the AMD. Just make sure that whatever machine you go for really has a PCI-Express 8x expansion slot in it.

[aldi]

RobDickinson said:

Go for the athlon, unless its a core 2 duo the AMD will slaughter the intel especialy with the extra memory.

Really?
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.htm
Aggreed about the extra RAM though.

[annodomini2]

Building your own:

Casecom LG-7780 Black/Silver Gaming Case - With 350W PSU
Maxtor 6V200E0 200GB SATA300 7200rpm 8MB Cache - OEM
Samsung 18x DVD1RW/RAM DL Int Drive Black - OEM
Athlon 64 3800 Dual Core 2.0GHz L2 cache AM2 940 pin
Abit KN9 nForce4 skt AM2 7.1channel audio SATA ATX
Kingston Value Ram 512MB DDR2 533MHz/PC2-4200 CL4 Dimm 240 pin Unbuffered
Asus Nvidia 7600GT 256MB DDR3 TV out DVI PCI-E

Ok its £444 from ebuyer with delivery and you have to put it together yourself, but at least you know the components are high quality.

If you wanted to reduce the price I would switch to a single core micro if its for gaming as 99% of games don't support multi-threading which is required to take full advantage of a Dual-core micro.

[Brandeego]

Looks like the it will have to be the Athlon.

Can guarantee that in 2 weeks time there will be a better spec machine at a lower price

[greenlandy]

not a bad shop This is where I get my computers from or try novatech