squiffy said:Prescott v Athlon.how's 26-30 idle, 40 HEAVY load sound on my rig? Compared to 41 idle, 52 load on a P4 Northwood 2.4ghz.
It's difficult to directly compare numbers like that, as it's well known that certain motherboard manufacturers and specific models in particular over and under-read temperatures. The only way to see how much heat is being produced, is to have a look at Intel and AMD's data sheets. Notwithstanding the fact that you have different heatsinks.
A quick check on the various websites, shows that a 800fsb P4 2.4Ghz, using 66W, whereas a AMD Sempron 2800 uses 62W. Thermal output is proportional to clock speed increase, so a 3200 is likely to be around 66W, so the difference in temperatures shouldn't be as great as you suggest all things being equal (identical heatsinks, case fan configurations and thermal interfaces between processor and heatsink base)
That's beside the point though. What type of system to go for really depends what kind of media PC we're talking about here - if you just need it to serve up normal films and a bit of music, you could probably get away with a P3. If you require HD content to be played and you want to use ffdshow for post processing to improve the picture quality on DVDs and the like, you're going to need something beefy.
