Athlon compared to Intel difference, pros cons?

Question

im looking to buy a new computer and im thinking about buying a Intel Pentium D 3.2 Dual processor, but i see many athlons out there, i would like to know the equivilant of intel to athlon. right now i am running on a 2.54 pentium 4. i also want to know what difference does CPU make. when my computer runs multiple programs it laggs, do i fix this with RAM or CPU?

Answer 1

Well i would give you some list of Suggestions which might help you i hope

1) AMD chips do more work per clock cycle than Intel chips. So a 2.2ghz AMD is comparable to a 3.0-3.8 Intel depending on the version of CPU. The main differences though is AMD are better at gaming and Intel is better an apps and business programs. And for the most part AMD chips and motherboards costs alot less than Intel.

2) also notable is the thermal differences. the pentium 4's and pentium d's create much more heat than thier amd counterparts, thus making them poor candidates for overclocking and forcing the user to take extra steps to ensure proper cooling. amd chips, be comparison, generally generate (much) less heat and have unlocked multipliers, making them great for overclockers.

3)Intel uses more expensive RDR RAM while the AMD chips use DDR RAM. That said, the RDR RAM is faster (533 MHz versus the 333 MHz of the DDR RAM) and helps to soften the blow of the cost of the chips to the consumer.

4) When multiple applications are running, the clear conclusion is that the Intel Pentium 840 Extreme Edition is superior to the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+.

5) Refer to this article for more about the dual core performance
they conducted benchkmarks on those two rivals
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120915,00.asp

Answer 2

Adding more ram is the best way to increase a pc's performance period and is the cheaper option. Athlon or Intel it's really a coin toss some Intel Processors run better than the Athlons but you would have to put a stop watch on both of them in order to be able to tell the difference.

Answer 3

more ram will give you better performance and will be cheaper than a new cpu