Last Sept '06, my Asus P4P800-E (865PE) prematurely conked out. Bec. I didnt have the budget to do an all-out upgrade, I made it a point to reuse parts as much as possible. In other words, I just needed to get a socket 478 motherboard, but at that time the shops in Gilmore no longer carried such boards due to the fast-paced or planned obsolescence. To make it short, I got myself a AMD64 3200+ (venice) and ASrock 939Dual-SATA2 (motherboard). I just sold my now "useless" and "old" P4 3.0E ghz socket 478 cpu.

I noticed the AMD is much cooler and quieter (both by a big margin) than the P4 "PresHOT" cpu that it replaces. And those are the only good I think of, for the AMD. With all things equal (as in the only diffs bet. my AMD and Intel setup are the CPU and MB), I find the AMD so much slower in normal WinXP usage and esp. during multi-tasking (ie. browsing the net (ie and firefox), word, excel, win explorer, and divx running). There would be a few seconds of pause or "freeze", which is really annoying (even a Piii-500mhz/256MB ram will not do that).

So I'm contemplating to move back to Intel by getting either a P4 (65nm "Cedar Mill" core) 631 or 641 cpu and another Asus 865G based mb (P5PE-VM). Although the Core 2 Duo is tempting, it is disregarded bec. its cost is more than the double the budget. So is this a good move or should I just keep the AMD?