New system

[Nebular]

I'm hoping to build myself a new sysem but not sure which way to go with the processor, Help? Athalon or pentium, have been looking at P4 2.4

[hiredgoonz]

As has been mentioned before, make your decision based on price unless you want the absolute cutting edge system.

Stay away from P4 systems with regualar SDRAM. You want DDR or RDRAM. With the Athlon XP you want to get the B version of the Thoroughbred CPU which was designed in response to the relatively disappointing "A" T-Bred...

[Budfred]

What you get is based on what you want. If you want raw power, P4 is leading the pack at the moment. If you want effective, but cheap, AMD is the way to go. Boards with SDRAM are slower, but I am not sure if hiredgoonz had any other reason to say to avoid it. SDRAM is certainly a lot cheaper and will do the job.

Budfred

[hiredgoonz]

I would stay away from P4 with regular SDRAM because those systems perform worse than P3 systems that are A LOT slower in clock speed.

You need DDR or RDRAM to get any beneift out of the P4. For me, I don't see any reason to buy a P4 and pair it with RAM that's a going to cripple the system

[BigBlue66]

I agree. SDRAM will just bottleneck the quadpumped P4. RDRAM is about the best there is to reap the full benefits of the P4, but it's expensive and there are more and more boards now that offer DDR.

Your decision primarily depends on your wallet. AMD offers the best bang for the buck.

P4 costs more and should be paired with at least DDR to get the best bang.

Maybe you should throw some numbers in here and then maybe we can be of more help.