Need to get a new computer for my daughter -- a desktop.

I have a choice between an AMD Athlon 64 processor or a Pentium 4 processor.

What are your thoughts on this??

(although this is not musically related, I value opinions of my fellow obnerites more than I do those on some other thech boards)


Thanks-a-ton,

Bill

My general view is don't worry so much about the processor, but spend your dough on as much RAM as you can afford.

this is usually pretty good advice...what is she going to be doing with her desktop?

if she's doing any gaming or video editing, the processor might matter...but if it's just internet & e-mail, go with the cheaper processor

Both of the processors are at the same price point. The AMD comes with 250 Gig harddrive and the Intel comes with 200 Gigs.

She'll mostly be playing Sims (the game), internet downloads, wordpro and some digital photography.

Cheers,

Bill

I'd get the AMD just because Intel has been kind of a bad company in the past. Computers I've used with AMDs have generally been pretty good, and that extra 50 Gigs sounds nice.

A lot of the performance is going to have more to do with the amount of RAM and what kind of graphics card you pick. I've had trouble with high end cards from both major brands (ATI and nVidia) so I can't be much help with that.

It's got 512 RAM.

Is this too little??

You could try it out at 512 and see if she needs more. It sounds like she isn't doing anything too memory-intensive, but having 1GB of memory would let her run more apps at once.

If you can get any deals on extra RAM, go for it, but if it's going to raise the price too much then don't worry about it right now. You can get more later, generally.

And adding RAM is pretty simple, especially if you ever played with Bristle Blocks.

If you get either P4 or AMD Athlon, with 512MB RAM, she will be set. Anything over 100Gig hard drive is PLENTY. Add a DVD writable, and you got yourself a computer

get an athlon. the performance on most of the slower models beats even the fastest pentium 4s. its not even fair anymore.

AMD > Intel
RAM upgrade >> processor/motherboard upgrade

get at least 1gig ram....

make sure you get the fastest speed HD too.....that can be a bottleneck as well

"You down wit AMD...Yeah you know me...."

Like everyone pretty much said..The extra 50gb in the hd is a plus...But no doubt, try to get atleast 1gb of RAM...

You'll want more ram.

Well, if you get more RAM, get it after the fact. These days you can easily find 1GB for < $50

Thanks a lot folks.

This makes my decision very easy.

Going out, right now, to pick it up.


I knew you guys would help me out in spades.


Cheers & thanks,

audiobill

I need to get more RAM for my computer soon. I've had to shut down Soulseek because I keep getting low memory warnings.