BUH Blog

AMD or Intel - Still debating

I was really looking forward to the release of the Core 2 Duo chips from Intel a couple of months back. I am in a desperate need of a new computer - at least I would lead you to believe that! Honestly, the little computer that I use - 4 years old and running and Intel Pentium 4 at 2.2Ghz - works. It works. Yes, it is slow at times - especially when dealing with Microsoft Outlook. Yes, yes - I know - I should be trying other email clients, but have never gotten around to it. Probably the bottleneck is the hard drive. My machine is running a standard IDE drive - all 80 Gigs of it. A SATA drive would probably help a lot.

Now, back to the processor choice. My system runs slowly when I am trying to do certain things - at those times I dream about the newest processors and their ability (the dual core processors) to handle multi-tasking a bit better. Over the summer I was certain about getting an AMD X2 3800 - it had a wonderful price to performance ratio - it was the cheapest of the AMD X2 (dual core) processors and at $300 it was well priced. Here it is three months later and I STILL don’t have a new computer.

The biggest reason for this - my computer still works! It is slow - but works. And the dang Core 2 Duo got me all excited, so that froze me for a while. Then AMD dropped the prices of all their X2 line 50%! Now we are getting closer to the Xmas season and things will really get interesting in the processor world, but I would say the odds are 50:50 that I am still using the my old computer come Jan first of 2007…