WHAT ONE TO BUY

[CWB]

All things being equal, is it more worth getting the amd athlon thunderbird or the PIII

both are 800mhz using Asus motherboards
256 pc133 ram
20g hard drive 7200 speed 100-udma
herclues ddr-dvi 32mb tv out
16x pioneer dvd
us robitcs 56k data fax voice hardware modem
300 watt power supply
SIIG 1394FIREWIRE PCI ADAPTER
WINDOWS ME
basic keyboard,mouse,floppy
sound blaster live value

price
athlon 1183
PIII 1225

use;
gaming of course
using my sony digital camcorder for editing home videos and hopfully for video emails and confercing.

is there any holes in this system
were can i go better
I was thinking of the 64mb radeon but cost to much

the hercules card is 99 bucks.

[daveleau]

I am a PIII user but I would highly recommend the T-bird. They seem faster and better for gaming. Only "hole" I see is the DDR Geforce. I would rather have a GTS but it is still a great card. It would be nice to have two 20 GB hdds and a RAID 100 card as wel but that would drive the price up of course.

[This message has been edited by daveleau (edited 12-06-2000).]

[rowan]

I would go with the Athlon. No question about it. First of all, Athlon is an entire generation ahead of the PIII: it's faster, across the boards. Go to www.gamersdepot.com (http://www.gamersdepot.com) to read their comparisons of Athlon and P3's. Second, not only does it perform better, but it's cheaper to boot! GO AMD!!!

Also, I've heard that Athlons overclock better than P3's. Can this be confirmed by anyone?

As for vid cards: the ATI Radeon is sweet, and it's cheaper than the GForce equivalents. I think you can get the 32 MB DDR Radeon for $200, if you do some looking. You're going to need something with video editing capability, by the sounds, so you're probably going to be better off with the Hercules. Of course, you could always splurge and get the Radeon 64 MB DDR VIVO, but that's one expensive peice of silicon.

Good luck!!

[This message has been edited by rowan (edited 12-06-2000).]