I'd go for the Athlon XP. It's cheaper, it holds its own in most of the tests against the 3.0 Prescott, and the Prescott itself has a somewhat interesting reputation now...
Quote:
Tom's Hardware Guide said:
Despite 1 MB L2 cache and some optimizations, Prescott is slower than Northwood in roughly a third of our benchmarks. Software, like many 3D shooters and more serious applications like Lame, MS Movie Maker 2, Mathematica, Cinema 4D or even 3DStudio perform worse than before...So what is the meaning of this "average Prescott" we were given today? At existing clock speeds, Prescott is not faster than Northwood and is thus a pretty useless product, as the socket is meant to be phased out shortly anyway.
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If you're gonna go Intel, at least get the regular 3.0 C core and save money. I still recommend the 3200+, however...in pure gaming, it'll outperform any 3.0 P4 in most circumstances. The raw clock speed will help the P4 in media programs (DVD ripping, encoding, etc), but I don't think it's worth it if you're gonna play games.
-Lasereth