Good time to upgrade? AMD or INTEL?
 

I'm looking to upgrade my 1.4ghz AMD to something that doesnt take eons to render. I'm wondering if now is a good time to jump on the bandwagon. All these new chipsets are being introduced and prices are steadily dropping. I've been looking at the prescott 560's, but people are telling me AMD64 is at least on par and cheaper. What do you guys think?

Pentium4s are the better choice as they generally tend to be faster at rendering and MPEG2 encoding. They are also more recommended by the software vendors. You might want to look for program-specific benches.

Prescott core processors are a bit faster than Northwoods of the same clock speed it seems (at video, not games). But they make more heat (more noise and your computer is slightly less reliable) and consume more electricity (which adds a lot to their cost over the long run).

lol everyone makes it so difficult.

"It's great and fast but you'll pay an assload for electricity and it's not reliable"

Not that I dont appreciate your response, because believe me I do... i'm just being a smartass b/c most of the answers i've received on other forums give big strengths about a certain processor, followed by big weaknesses... That is why i still dont know what to do ;/

prescotts are rougly 6% faster.

they also have the sse3 instruction set, which can give it big boosts when and if programs take advantage of them.

figure out when you'll retire the preocessor. you can figure out electricity costs and plan on replacing the processor with a better one (i.e. with sse3).