AMD or Intel?

[wormyblackburny]

The time has come to buy a new desktop, and I think I may have found the smokin deal I have been waiting on. Preliminary research regarding hardware "Linux friendliness" seems good (knock on wood). In this time of indecision I turn to you, my fellow Ubuntu users, to help steer me in the right direction....

First, here are the specs of what I'm looking at. (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ca/en/ho/WF06b/12454-12454-3329740-64546-64546-4269972-4300927.html)

My evil plans for it: Basic work and surfing along with some virtual machines to tinker with. I'll probably dual boot it with 7/Ubuntu or 7/RHEL. It's primary purpose will most likely be as a media server. I'm not a gamer (I have a 360/PS3 for that), so not too concerned with video performance other than the ability to run dual/triple monitors.

So, here is where you come in....

I tend to fall under the "I don't give a crap" philosophy of who is better, AMD or Intel. For me, it is all about speed vs cost. Anyone have any compelling arguments leaning one way or another?

How about brand? Any good arguments for one brand vs another?

If I can pick that up for $450 brand new should I jump all over it, or keep looking a little more?

[el_koraco]

a friend of mine has the exact same phenom processor, he's more than happy with it. i have an ati gpu whose proprietary driver caused two system disasters, up until i went with the open source driver. now it's working just fine. if you're not into gaming, you shouldn't see significant differences between the ati/radeon vs fglrx drivers.

[NightwishFan]

I am thinking of going with AMD/ATI in the future if that is any help. I really have no reasons other than wanting a change.

[KegHead]

Hi!

I have both.

Intel seems to be better for me.

KegHead

[3Miro]

If you care only about speed vs cost, get an AMD. I don't think anyone can argue that Intel gives you a better speed to cost ratio (things like total speed, power consumption or specially optimized commercial software are another story). I have both Phenom II X4 and X6, I recommend the X6, it doesn't cost that much more, but it is a lot faster and cooler.

In terms of Linux friendliness, AMD vs Intel makes no difference. Both are equally well supported.

For Video, things are more complicated. Intel has nice video drivers that run out of the box on most distributions, however, Intel video is also the weakest and to very good for video games and such. AMD/ATI video cards had very bad support, but the FOSS drivers for those have been improving tremendously. I have an ATI workstation and I am very happy with the graphics. Nvidia on the other hand has always had good Linux support and it is still the best choice for Linux gaming (this can change in the next couple of years). If you want to play games with AMD/ATI you will have to dual-boot with windows 7, if you want to play games with wine get an Nvidia. For desktop effects and regular use under Linux, it makes no difference.

[Spr0k3t]

If your main concern is cost vs performance... you should build your own. A recent system I built only cost me $173 for everything (excluding keyboard, monitor, mouse). The system was an Intel C2D P4 clocked at 2.8GHz with 2GB DDR3 memory and 160GB drive. Graphics card is an onboard G41 Intel chipset. That left me with massive amounts of overhead if I really wanted to throw something from Microsoft on it (which I didn't).

An equal system spec to that HP you posted with better hardware:
Case, 25-50
PSU, 35-60
Motherboard, 60-80
CPU, 85-130
Mem, 80-90
HDD, 65

Worst case: $475
Shopping smart: $350
Win/HomePre: +129
HP Branding: +374-499 (you could build two systems for the same price almost).

Now, if you go with openbox or refurbished, you can save an extra $100 easily. From what I can see though, AMD seems to be the better cost/performance ratio though.

[handy]

Ever since their first Athlon was released in 1999, I've given AMD as much support as I could.

When in business I often used to build machines for people (amongst other things) & since their release I used Athlon processors for every job except one, where the customer specifically wanted a P4.

The cost & performance of the CPU's that most of us use would be very different today, if it were not for AMD, as the competition that AMD provide for Intel has been extremely good to the consumer & is actually very helpful for Intel as well, as they need some competition, it helps to keep them out of legal hot water in certain countries.

That said, I run an Intel chip in my iMac, but I had no choice there as I didn't build it myself.

There are two other machines in my office that are running Athlon CPU's & the headless 24/7 IPCop firewall/router box sourced from the local rubbish dump is a PIII.

I've also two identical PIII Compaq's in my shed, one has the purpose of being used to run a race management system on the slot car track I'm building. The other will be its backup. They both cost me nothing. Shame they are Compaq's though, I really don't like the way most Compaq' are built.