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AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core or Intel Core 2 Duo?
Posted by JLP on July 27th, 2006
This is the question I’ve been pondering for the last couple of hours after my sister’s computer broke down and we decided to buy some upgrades. I’ve concentrated on the comparison of AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4200+ and Intel Core 2 Duo E6300. In almost every test I’ve seen Intel is faster. In some tests the gap between them is quite wide. So, if I would be buying a new computer instead of upgrading and if the budget was not so limited, Intel Core 2 Duo would be a clear choice. But unfortunately, I still have some components, like the AGP graphics card, which wouldn’t fit into motherboards for the Core 2 Duo processor. While the new motherboards for AMD with AM2 socket also don’t seem to support AGP, Athlon 64 X2 is also available for Socket 939 and a lot of the motherboards with S939 do support AGP graphic cards and DDR1 memory. In addition to my compatibility requirements the Core 2 Duo E6300 is quite a bit more expensive then Athlon 64 X2 4200+ here in Slovenia and there are also problems with availability of Core 2 Duo CPUs. Motherboards for Intel are also more expensive. So in my case I had to choose AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. I’ve already ordered it from mimovrste.com and it will cost me 183 €.
August 11th, 2006 at 23:23:53
[...] This morning I finally got all the components I ordered to repair and upgrade my sister’s computer. It didn’t go without problems though. For starters, I had to wait a week longer until all the components got to the store. It looks like the demand for AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processors is very high. Especially because they now have highly reduced prices. And even when the delivery man was finally at the door step, the problems were not over. When I wanted to pay him for the package, he told me that I have two packages. As it turned out they were identical. I had to call the computer store mimovrste.com and ask them what is going on. They simply made a mistake and instead of sending me only one package they sent two of them. When all was cleared up and I had all the needed components in my hand, I could start to assemble the computer. It took me about three hours to set everything up. And this part did go without any problem. My sister took some photos of the process, so I guess they will soon end up on her Flickr account. All I had to do after starting up Linux (she uses Mandriva 2006) is to install the kernel with SMP support enabled (kernel-smp-2.6.12.24mdk in this case) and reinstall nVidia driver afterwards. The speed-up compared to the old AMD Athlon 1200MHz and 512 MiB of memory (now 1 GiB) is quite big. Especially noticeable when working and rendering in Blender. [...]