>I beg to differ....First of all the XP2000 is rated at>1.67GHz and indeed can effectively keep up with a P4 2.0 GHz>and in some cases surpass it in performance while the P4 does>better in some benches. What it really boils down to is the>components on your machine and how they interact with one>another. I have had Intel based machines as well as AMD based>machines and dollar for dollar, I feel that price vs.>performance you cannot beat AMD processors.>Just my 2 cents :-) >>Cheers!>Richard>>I couldent agree more! Last time I checked Amd processors were a little bit better for gaming. :-)

Needless to say, there is a lot of loyalty to one company or the other. Extensive reading at Tom's Hardware Guide tends to confirm this somewhat general statement:Between say 1.5 and 2.4 mghz, the AMD chips tend to perform similarly to their Intel benchmarks at lower costs. As you move into the more recent chips:a) AMD processors are not significantly less expensive than their P4 bretheren :( They have slipped in the performance category such that they are no longer as fast as their P4 bench mark mates. Thus, they are less of a value than they were before.Tom's did a good comparision of something like 64 CPUs a few months back. Very interesting. Who knows what the future holds, though, with the next generation of chips. Colin

Lets put a stop to all this nonsense!I have been building computers for years, and I can assure you that AMD's rating systemn is perfectly legit.It is industry-wide accpeted that an AMD's rating system is quite accurate, and most knowlegeable users will not even think about whether the cpu id really as fast as it says it is. (BTW, it is.)Of course there will be differeing perfomance levels depending on the application, and this can't be avoided. Due to the different architectures of the cpu's, different apps, which are written to use different parts of the cpu, will run at different speeds.In your case, you will be running games, which generally run the same on both types of processor, do don't worry.Regards,Bob.