AMD to Intel????

[Jun aka Pekto]

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?

I doubt the cpu is directly involved unless its bus setting isn't set right in the bios. Assuming the bus speed is set correctly, I'd take a look at the amount of ram, the video card and which drivers it's using, the virtual memory settings, the size and speed of the hard drive.

Granted, XP flies in this AMD dualcore pc. But, it also flies in my wife's old Athlon XP 1700+/768mb ram/100gb hard drive/30gb hard drive/128mb agp nVidia GF4-Ti4200+. XP is on the 100gb hard drive while the virtual memory is on the 30gb.

I also disabled any unused ports like the serial and parallel ports in the bios.

My next pc will probably be a Core 2 Duo as a replacement for my wife's pc unless AMD drops its prices to make it more attractive.