Yes, but if we're gonna go comparing "top tier," you gotta do the same on the other end. The person originally asked about performance and to comparing a $700 Athlon to a $300 P4 Northwood isn't exactly fair in a performance standpoint. You should be comparing it to something like the (now dead) P4 EE or something. Maybe even a bloted and expensive P4...I mean Xeon.Brolly345 wrote:I'm not even talking about Prescotts >_<, I'm talking the price of an Athlon. And, yes, he did point that out. When I talk about price I mean extremes. The Athlon FX-53 is $740. That's much more that anything else I've seen (except for a P4 3.6 Ghz which is about the same amount). Then if you add the mobo that's about $120. I don't know what they're going to be selling the 64 bit OS for... And I never mentioned memory. If I decided to switch to an Athlon 64 I would just need the processor, the OS, and the new mobo to put it in. Everything else I have would plug right into the thing and run without a problem.Scintilla wrote:Didn't DW already point out that there's a good Athlon64 that can be had for less than most Prescotts? And I find it hard to believe that the motherboard and memory would be that much more expensive...
And again as Scintilla said, you can get a reasonably priced Athlon-64 for the same (or less) than an equivalently performing P4. You're effectively paying nothing to get 64-bit capability and future computing. Seems like a good deal to me.
And yeah, 64-bit software is already out. If you wanna talk mainstream, 64-bit Windows is less than a year away. Probably even less than 6 months.
