Desktops forum: Intel vs. AMD CPU in desktop: Does it matter?

Interesting that no one mentioned chipsets rather than just processors. Years ago, I would have recommended Intel for both processors and chipsets. There were compatibility issues with other manufacturers, like AMD, VIA, etc. I believe this sort of thing is much less of an issue today, perhaps not at all. Still, I tend to go with Intel, maybe out of habit, or maybe just as an excuse to somewhat limit the seemingly endless choices. Who's on top seems to shift from time to time, but In any case, it seems that AMD is usually the budget option.

I used to be a solid AMD user, always on systems I assembled myself. During the early Athlon era AMD was not only slightly less expensive than Intel but clearly ahead of the curve. Also, having such close competition was good for consumers. Then they started to mess up and I bought not one but two motherboards that turned out to be duds and suffered early death. During that time AMD nearly fell into bankruptcy. I built an Intel system then, and never really looked back.

I suspect, now that AMD seems to be back on track, that the differences would be minor. It's not a matter of whether you are a "gamer" or just a "normal user". Specific benchmarks may favor one over the other, but you'd have to be a hardware engineer just to understand what they are. If you need absolute state of the art performance for a specific task (like floating point arithmetic) you could do the research and get the best chip for the task. But you say you don't. There is also the reliability issue, especially cooling design (both my crapped out boards were using manufacturer recommended coolers, no "overclocking"). I haven't heard of any, and if you're buying from Dell they should be covered under warranty anyway. (The notorious exploding capacitor boards from Dell were Intel-based, so reliability at any given moment is a crap shot).

Bottom line: I'd be perfectly comfortable going with AMD, especially in a manufactured machine from a reputable builder with a reasonable warranty. .

You already make your point.You don't need a lot of power for your daily needs and you need a desktop.Go for a Amd because is cheaper that intel in aprox. processors equivalents.I'm a user of AMD since I can remember.The reason why I use it is because is the one I can afford.Right now I'm using an AMD CAPABLEfor heavy gaming and it's doing pretty decent for the price but that another history.More reason for you, if you have light schedules on your pc.But if your needs where more demanding then would be the opposite.Go on, you can trust my words.

This is a task that works just fine on low-end computers.

I have an eMachines EL1200 desktop that originally had a single core 2650e processor. It actually ran quite well like that until I got into playing flash games on Facebook or trying to have 30-40 tabs open at once in a browser. That's when I swapped the CPU out for a 4450B (like a 4450e) and having the second core made a huge difference in how the computer "felt". Passmark score jumped from 389 with the single core to 1062 (which I understand is low, the average score is like 1250 for that 4450B CPU, and that can be attributed to the 6150SE chipset holding it back). It now has no issues with videos or flash games and you can have 50 tabs open and it's not a problem. I've had this computer for almost 4 years now and it's done very well. Initial purchase price was $250, open box, but included the monitor, speakers, keyboard, and mouse. You can still buy the EL1852-52w version for about $300-$350 at Wal-Mart, and now it comes with a Pentium E5800 Intel CPU (passmark is 2141). Still includes the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. A terrific entry-level deal and no shipping hassles, just go to your nearest store and get one.

At any rate, just be sure to avoid single core CPU's like Celeron G440's and AMD chips like the E300/E350/E450 AMD processors which may be dual core but are painfully slow in day-to-day activities. Look up the passmark CPU scores for the processors you're looking at. Figure anything over 2500 is perfectly fast, and anything from 1500-2499 is just fine. Anything below 1500 and you'll notice it's slower than most computers and anything under 1000 will be painfully slow. Also avoid anything with that 6150SE chipset if it's an AMD. It's a bottleneck and will limit you to 4GB of memory, rarely has a PCI Express x16 slot for graphics, and isn't smooth running even with a quad-core Athlon II X4 (passmark in the 3300-3600 range).

As Mel i also need a PC which has no gaming as my goal. and not even photo editing. My biggest and heaviest uses would be TV watching and recording via a Dual TV tuner on board. Heavy and fast Web browsing with over 100 pages opened at once. Online chat, e-mail, messaging via Yahoo messenger, Skype. And some word processing and spreadsheets. No discrete video cards, online graphics in motherboard and maybe 2 monitors

So I assume that with 8 GB of Ram and a processor with hyperthreading i would be just fine. So looking at the AMD 6 ot 8 cores and the Intel 2600 without any overclocking i would be just fine. But i do not find much price difference between those processors so the reason to go with AMD loses consistence cause there will be no major savings.
I like Intel SAndy and Ivy Bridge cause of the SRT technology which would allow me to boost with my Intel SSD 160 GB the speed of my other mechanical HDDs speed via using the SSD as cache for the HDDs.

Does AMD offer similar technology to boost the speed of my 7200 RPM extra 8TB storage on board my computer?
If so which MAD model does that and what is the feature know as?

I would appreciate your replies.

Thank you kindly