i am building a computer. and for price i am going for a 2.6 pentimum (athalon sux) and a friend told me that hyper threading is a load of sh*t and i would be better off getting the 400mhz. he said that only certain programs support the 800mhz and that when hyperthreading often put the data on the slowest thread i am confused. any input would be help full

<font color=pink>*gasp* Athalon does not suck! *runs off and cries*</font>

hey welcome to IW!!

actually hyperthreading is really faster than the usual computers.. (but it is expensive..) i do know that your right about certain things that hyperthreading makes it slower (but andrewas can make it more specific ;) )

also athlon does not suck.. the previous problems of overheating has already been solved and they are developing good qualities nowadays with good motherboards to go with it. when it comes to speed.. well they are slower a little.. and they have already started competing with hyperthreading as well.

so.. may i ask what are your specifications really? like price range.. video card quality, sound.. hard drive space.. things like that..

also check out http://www.tomshardware.com/
they have good reviews about hardware parts if ever your going to need one. good luck!

HT is simple - the CPU pretends to be two processors so that it can handle multiple threads more efficiently. THeres a couple of percentage points performance to be gained. However, if you run a large single-thread task (Most importantly for most here, games) you lose bit of power as the CPU is now emulating a second CPU that isnt doing anything.

P4s are not my area of expertise - I've been an AMD man since I saw the price comparison years ago - but toms is definately the place to go for information.

Remember not to skimp on the motherboard. I know people that consider it just something to plug the good stuff into, but if you put a Jetway in your box you will have troubles. And remember, no matter how hot your CPU, its mostly the GPU that determines games performace these days, so make sure to get a deent graphics card.

thanks for the help. the comments about athalon were based on you get what you pay for. my friend told me that an athalon that says it is 2.6ghz will run slower than that where as p4 are very good. i have a gigabyte motherboard, not the best i could buy put above average.
my computer will not be great but it will play current games for a while
specs
gigabyte mother board $125
p4 2.6ghz, 8oomhz fsb $400
512 ddr333 $180 (kingston)
120gb seagate $130
gforce TI 4x 128 ddr $118
all the prices are aust so anything in america would cost about half as much
no more than $1500 but that is maximum

go to
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/2003...mparison_table
look at the top. p4. athalon does suck

Guys, guys, guys... it's all marketing.

What Athlon claims (and has tested) is that with their chip, even though it's slower, you can get as much work done as the faster speed Intel chip. So even though it's a 2.4Ghz chip, it performs like a 3.0 Ghz chip (or whatever the numbers are). Is that lying? Or is that measuring what you're really interested in, the amount of work it can do (or how effectively it can play a game)?

Would you rather pay $400 for a 3Ghz chip, or $250 for a 2.4Ghz chip that does as much as the 3Ghz chip does? That's the difference -- price versus performance. And performance is not how fast the chip is, but how fast it can do work.

Once you know the rest of the story, it's not quite so crystal clear.

As described by an immensly computer saavy friend of mine. Athlon is for gaming and Pentium is for everything else.

Can anyone tell me if SOYO is a decent motherboard ?

for games the atholn is always up there:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...charts-24.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...charts-23.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...charts-22.html

and remember, this is non OC'd. AMD can be overclocked to insane speeds, without faffing with the chip. so thats athlon xp 2800 OC'd to an xp 3200 with few ill effects and much less price.

AMD >> Intel @ Games :D

All I can say is that yes it's true that clock rate isn't everything. In fact the other features of a processor are much more important - like pipelining technique, branch prediction efficiency, instruction set complexity etc. but I haven't studied any AMD chips except the Opteron so can't really go into that..wouldn't want to anyway [img]tongue.gif[/img]