I've been thinking about making the jump in the next few months, and wanted to know what some early adopters think. Suggestions for any particular processors welcome.

8/19/2005 10:35:01 PM

I'm not as up on this as I should be. What is the difference in an Athlon 64 say, and an x64 chip? I've had my Athlon64 based lappy for a while, and its been the best c0mpu73r I've ever had. We have an Itanium or whatever that is in our server, and its been a pain in the ass, but I think its the other components and the OS, and not the processor.

8/19/2005 11:17:31 PM

the Itanium and Itanium 2 processors are IA-64 processors.. not x64.. the XP 64-bit edition that came out not to long ago is an x64 OS.. so it won't work on the Itanium chip.. Intel has just released an x64 version of their processor

8/20/2005 12:43:58 AM

i have the new amd 64bit processor, and its pretty good i guess. + the 2 gigs of ram and 256 video ram on the 7800 don't hurt it either.

its much more reliable than a girlfriend i suppose.

[Edited on August 20, 2005 at 1:14 AM. Reason : ok]

8/20/2005 1:12:24 AM

Quote :

"its much more reliable than a girlfriend i suppose."

Sounds like someone needs a hug!

8/20/2005 10:34:53 AM

there doesn't seem to be any (software) reason to switch yet

8/20/2005 4:38:52 PM

Quote :

"some early adopters think"

the early adopters spoke over 1.5 years ago. x64 is a solid choice. if you're upgrading and planning on keeping the system for more than 1 year, don't bother getting anything else.

8/20/2005 4:54:00 PM

The one thing that's been bugging me about actually making a switch to AMD processors is the fact that I really don't have any idea how to compare their actual processing power. With Intel's clock speed comparison, at least you've got some measurement. When AMD threw that out the window, I'm not as comfortable buying something. And I'm not willing to drop $900 on a processor to make sure that I've got the fastest thing.

8/20/2005 5:10:35 PM

^ you do have something to compare their power... they're called "benchmarks." check out anandtech.com or tomshardware.com

8/20/2005 5:59:00 PM

i wanna get me some dual core hyperthreading

8/20/2005 6:01:00 PM

^^^that's what Intel wanted people to think... that you should only go by clock speed. although they're finally going to be switching to a system more like AMD.

8/20/2005 6:19:08 PM