stryder said:
hi
someone told me a while ago that amd based systems are better for gaming than intel ones, could someone tell if this is true and why? i`m thinking of building new pc and thought it might be better to go for amd for a change as i ve always used intel cpus upto now but i do lot of gaming, i had a look at a few amds on ocuk but the running speeds seem quite low compared to intels!why is this?
This is sort of analogous to weight. Bear with me, I'll make sense soon
People tend to talk about their weight, about losing weight.
They're wrong. They don't actually give a damn about their weight. With the exception of astronauts and competitors in some sports, a person's
weight is irrelevant. What they're actually concerned about is their
shape and their
volume. Measuring their weight can give them a very misleading picture. I've known several people who increased their exercise level and then stopped because they weren't losing weight...but they were losing volume (which is part of what they really wanted) and changing their shape (which was the other part). They made a poor decision because they were looking at the wrong thing, a thing that only has a partial correlation with the things they were really interested in.
The clock speed of a CPU (or other processor) is like weight in this analogy. People look at it as if it was important, but what actually matters is how much time a processor takes to complete a processing task. If it takes 29.4 seconds to do a particular task, does it really matter whether the CPU was running at 1MHz, 1GHz or 1THz?
Intel pursued a design that traded efficiency for clock speed. More cycles per second, less effective use of each cycle.
AMD did the opposite.
In theory, either way works. The bottom line is how much processing can be done per second. How it's done doesn't matter. It's like taking many short steps or fewer, longer steps - you cover the same distance per minute of walking.
In practice, AMD's approach worked better. Intel topped out on clock speed. The higher the clock speed, the higher the power consumption and the more heat generated. Intel hit the limit of reasonable levels of power and heat. Some would say they exceeded both. No more clock speed, no performance increases. AMD could coax their clock speeds up some more. Intel were stuck and losing ground.
So they jumped to the other approach, the higher efficiency and lower clock speed approach. The result will go retail in about 3 weeks - Core 2.
For a while, AMD has been a better buy than Intel. Particularly, but not limited to, gaming. For the same amount of money, you'd get more from AMD. That's still the case right now.
There's an abundance of evidence that indicates it won't be the case much longer. Core 2 appears to spank Athlon64 on a like for like comparison, and there are good reasons why it would.
I advise you to wait a few more weeks for that gaming PC you're thinking of building, until Core 2 CPUs are available, and make a decision then.
