Need advice about AMD?

[zendig]

I'm using always intel processors, always I'm reading about compatibilty issues with AMD on windows.

These days I bought a capture card to transfare my VHS and camcorder tapes to DVD but capturing stops me from using my PC for encoding which takes time. So I decided to buy another PC and make it for this purpose.

I'm thinking to try AMD some of my freinds are saying it is faster than intel processor and cheaper.

So I need an advice from the people who used both intel and AMD. Is there a compatibility issues wtih AMD processors? and what about overheat?

[TommyCP]

It is true that AMD's Athlon64 is slightly faster than Intels Pentium 4 in a lot of cases, but when encoding video the Pentium 4 has a small advantage. However, both Intel and AMD processors should work fine for encoding video. Over at tomshardware.com they have set up interactive CPU charts, take a look at them to find out more about how both cpus perform:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/index.html

I have built quite a few AMD systems for both myself as well as others and have never experienced nor heard of any compatibility issues with AMD processors. Be sure to stick with a mainboard, with either a VIA or an nVidia chipset, from a well-known brand like Asus, DFI, MSI, etc.

As for heat, at 100% workload the Pentium 4 is less energy-efficient than the Athlon64 and thus will produce more heat. You need a good cooling solution when letting it perform intensive tasks like video encoding. (But of course the same goes for the Athlon64.)

[zendig]

Thanks for the help, I'll take a look right now.

[furballi]

Mostly BS from fans of Intel. AMD 64s are cheap and on the average, much better than Intel. You can overclock an AMD 64 3000 easily to 3500....