The Intergalactic Highway

I've got a choice to make between two barebones kits I found on Tiger Direct and I'm not sure which one to get. They are both similar in price so that is not an issue, but one is a Pentium 4 and the other is an AMD Athlon 64. Personally I'm a fan of the Intel's, but I've never owned an AMD so I don't know anything about them. Here are the specs for the 2 systems

Pentium 4 2.93 GHz 533 MHz FSB 1 MB L2 cache (I'm not trying to build a killer system)
1 GB PC4200 RAM (533MHz)
Intel Motherboard
- 1 PCI Express 16x slot
- 4 PCI slots
- 2 PCI Express 1x slots
- USB 2.0 & 6 pin Firewire
- Supports 2 IDE devices
- Supports 4 SATA hard drives
450 Watt Power Supply

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0 GHz 2000MHz FSB 512 KB cache
1 GB PC3200 RAM (400 MHz)
ABIT UL8 ULi Socket 939 ATX Motherboard
- 1 AGP 8x slot
- 5 PCI slots
- USB 2.0
- Supports 4 IDE devices
- Supports 2 SATA hard drives
450 Watt Power Supply

I know people who swear by both AMD and Intel and all of them can do a multitude with their PCs. I've heard that an Athlon 64 3200+ is the equivalent of an Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz even though the AMD is clocked at only 2.0 GHz, but I'm a bit skeptical since they have different cache sizes. I do know that you can overclock AMDs very easily so I could increase my performance without buying new parts (except for more fans or something else to cool down my case). I also have no idea if Abit makes good quality motherboards or not, either.

If anybody has any input I'd greatly appreciate it, I know almost nothing about AMDs and I'd like to get the most PC for my money.

First of all get away from Tiger Direct, go NCIX, its a much better company and you don't get jerked around when buying stuff and they have better deals and there sales are pretty slaggin good. I bought all my stuff from NCIX and there great with RMA's extremely quick and all there products i've bought come in 100% shape. Just bought a 19 inch LCD Samsung 940BF monitor from them and I love it I got it for $60 off, its about $70 off now.

Second it depends on what you want to do with your system. If you wanna game go AMD, if you plan on just farting around and doing multimedia go Intel.

Get rid of the ABIT board, get a DFI Lan Party board, much better board with no hassels. I don't know why people buy such cheap boards. Move up to PCI Express from AGP x8, AGP is no longer fast and reliable and for the socket move to Socket 940. Socket 939 is no longer being made soon.

Any other questions you can drop me a line on msn messenger, matrix_gta@hotmail.com

AIM: cheetor1983

Yahoo: gimic010

Always willin to lend a hand with putting together a PC, don't be afraid us computer tech's don't bite.

Meh, differences of opinion. I've never heard of NCIX, but I'll check it out, I've never had a bad experience with Tiger though.

I'm probably a moron but I decided to go with the AMD. I looked at the specs of the Intel board again and realized it only supported 2 IDE devices and I've got 3 (CD burner and 2 HDD) so I would have to get another card or something and that just seemed stupid to me. Plus a decent PCI Express graphics card is well over $150 and I figured I could get what I wanted out of a less expensive AGP card. So I put the AMD together (first one I've ever done from the case up so I was a bit worried it was going to blow up in my face, luckily that didn't happen *happy dance*) and it seems to run fine, captures video very well and seems to run the one game that I have (at the moment) without any major hassels. And it no longer takes 5 minutes to boot-up.

After seeing your post, I'm starting to kick myself mentally. I should have gone with the Intel bundle, but it's too late now. Oh well, it's still a step up from my last desktop, I had that poor thing maxed out and was running it REALLY hard (it was an 800MHz Celeron with 512 MB of RAM on the board and I had it doing video capturing and editing and I had a habit of multi-tasking with it, I almost completely stopped using it after I bought my laptop last year). I'm an idiot, but at least I'm a faster idiot and I like the fan and temp monitoring and control program that came with the board. Besides, I can always buy a new board or something later, and then have fun tearing apart my PC and swapping the parts.

Thanks for the offer, I'll add you to my AIM buddy list and my email, I don't have MSN or Yahoo at the moment.