[jakehbk]

I guess that the AMD Athlon X2 CPU's crush all the competition, but how much would you have to overclock the Pentium D 820 to give any of the AMD's a run for their money?

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Depends entirely on the CPU and the original speed, if you overclock both the p4 is never going to get as high because the AMD chips are just fantastic overclockers especially if you have good cooling as the AMDs are cooler meaning you can get more from what you have, my venice goes up another 700Mhz on just the stock air it would be safe to assume if i got a reasonable water kit or a good HSF it would go up a full Ghz. And the x2s are supposedly prodigous overclockers, the 3800+ X2 shows great promise in becoming on of those legendary overclockers.

[warriorscot]

Depends entirely on the CPU and the original speed, if you overclock both the p4 is never going to get as high because the AMD chips are just fantastic overclockers especially if you have good cooling as the AMDs are cooler meaning you can get more from what you have, my venice goes up another 700Mhz on just the stock air it would be safe to assume if i got a reasonable water kit or a good HSF it would go up a full Ghz. And the x2s are supposedly prodigous overclockers, the 3800+ X2 shows great promise in becoming on of those legendary overclockers.

[jakehbk]

Say it's just a stock speed X2, I don't know which one just one of the low to middling, What if you overclocked the 820 from 2.8 to like, 3.5 or even higher. Would that at least match the performance of one of the X2's. I'm quite new when it comes to overclocking but the Pentium is just so much cheaper and if I could squeeze enough juice out of it to compete, that seems like the way to go.

[warriorscot]

Well it might against an un overclocked X2 in the 3800+ speed but against an overclocked 3800+ it would be minced. Do you really need a dual core cpu, what are you going to be using the system for, if its gaming no competition get the AMD 3800+ as the p4s single core performance is abismal and since games are 32bit single core apps you can see why the p4 would be bad. If its video and audio editing the P4 will do fine as those can make use of the extra core and the hyperthreading.

Also overclocking isnt easy or safe and in order to get the pentium up to the speed you want you would have to spend more money on cooling than it would have cost just to buy the x2 in the first place. The intel CPUs give out huge amounts of heat and the x2s while hotter than the single core athlons they are still cooler than the P4s and the stock HSF you get with AMD cpus is quite good.

[jakehbk]

I'd like the best mix between them, possibly leaning towards the multimedia side. I like to play a couple pretty games but I do a lot of video and sound editing as a hobby. Which would be the best cross-over CPU?

[warriorscot]

Definately the X2 the cheaper dual core P4s are just that cheap, they arent very good at all, you see the reviews and down at the bottom of the benchmarks sitting below the single core chips is the "entry level" dual core P4.

If you are into overclocking the X2 is the way to go, i havent heard of anyone being able to overclock the P4s on any affordable air cooling. They are really really hot chips.

If you are using the best of video editing software some of the more powerful P4s will have a slight advantage(software like that they have given "grants" to develop its features to suit there CPUs, they do the same with alot of commercial software).

But these CPUs are all so fast you cant really notice it when both the cores are fully utilised.

The AMDs have a big single core advantage as well, they run very well simultaneously as independant cores as well so games like the x2s.

So i would say the x2s as the p4s are only really good at a few things the x2s are good at everything.

[HamburgrHelpr08]

Amd for games thats finall