Intel vs AMD Athlon - speed difference?

[Mad Dave]

Hi Guys,

I've just been given an old computer and upon booting up and checking, the spec turned out to be as follows:

Intel Pentium III 733mhz
128mb RAM
10Gb HDD

Now, my own machine is an AMD Athlon 800mhz with 524mb RAM. Ive heard before that Intel Pentium processors are faster than the equivalent AMD chips - is this true? If so, what is my AMD equivalent to in Intel terms? The reason I ask is that I am tempted to swap the mobo and CPU into my machine and use that instead - is it worth it?

Cheers

Dave

[Muncher]

Your AMD setup will be significantly faster. It would still be faster if they had similar amounts of RAM.

[.Adam.]

I think you will find that AMD are meant to be better for games and multimedia applications, where as Pentiums are meant to be better for number crunching applications, such as image manipulation, video editing etc. Think I would stick with the AMD setup if I was you, especially with the extra ram. You could possibly swap the ram over, if compatible, but you really could do with knowing what speed the ram is if you do that.

>> Edited by .Adam. on Thursday 20th January 20:33

[arcturus]

Concur. If it's for gaming or multimedia stick with the Athlon.

[Mad Dave]

Thanks guys. I intended to put the Intel board into my machine, along with all my drives, RAM etc but if theres no advantage, ill stick with what ive got.

Thanks.

Dave

[fid]

AMD processors usually have higher clock speeds than Intel 'cos of the type of metal used in them, but that metal also gets much hotter than that in Intel processors...hence the bloody great noisy fan!

[pdV6]

Mad Dave said:

Ive heard before that Intel Pentium processors are faster than the equivalent AMD chips - is this true? If so, what is my AMD equivalent to in Intel terms? The reason I ask is that I am tempted to swap the mobo and CPU into my machine and use that instead - is it worth it?

Think you've gotten that back to front.
MHz for MHz, comparable tech AMD chips are usually "faster" than Intel's in the real world.

Everything else aside, your 800MHz Athlon would outperform an equivalent 800MHz Pentium, never mind a 733, so stick with what you have!

It gets even trickier with the Athlon XP range, as their numbering scheme reflects their relative performance as compared to the older Thunderbird chips (like the one you have).

E.g. An Athlon XP 2400+ is actually clocked at 2GHz but is so named because it would out-perform an equivalent Athlon Tbird clocked at 2.4GHz (if they made one!)

By the same token, it should significantly outperform a 2.4GHz Pentium

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[Mad Dave]

Thanks guys, ill stick with what I have