Saturday, July 31, 2004
AMD v. Intel
Really, it's unfair to compare an AMD Athlon64 3800+ to an Intel 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Extreme. Then again, AMD has been surprisingly reluctant to send me one of its FX-53 CPUs so I guess you gots to go with what you got. In that case, the 3800+ is about 11 percent slower than the 3.2GHz Extreme for the applications I run --video editing. In real life, that means rendering a 43 minute video with the parameters I use takes about 4 minutes longer on the system with the 3800+. Bad deal? Maybe, maybe not. If you do video rendering for a living, you're losing time, which means you're losing money. If you're doing it just for the heck of it (like I am, to record TV shows and NASCAR races), it means saving about $400 on the initial cost of the CPU.
I'd still like to try the FX-53 but I don't think (the problem with gut feelings) that's it will dissolve the gap --and that may be why one has never showed up here. It may cut the gap in half, though, and the FX-53 is still less expensive than either of the current two "Extreme" processors.
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