first off why the huge price difference?
is one company's chips faster than the others?

thridly is it hard to build your own computer? i was thinking of doing it anyone got any sites that teach you how or is it just common sense? eg: i can install hardrives and cd-rom, floppy drives but the wiring is making me nervous

building your own system is pretty basic.. there is really nothing to it. the only thing that usually gets me is actually the wires that you connect for the power button, reset, hdd light.. other than that you shouldn't have any problems building your own system.
as for the fact of amd vs intel.. i use to only use intel... but since i got my amd, no problems ever, saves money and usually runs better than any intel i owned. in clock tests.. it seems the amd's do a better job actually.. but i am sure this will cause some sort of debate.

Built my first system without ANY problems. It is almost fool proof.
AMD chips are faster and the reason they are cheaper is that AMD doesn't spend over 3 billion dollars a year on advertising.

the hardest thing i find with bulding a computer is getting windows installed. starting with a blank hard drive you always had to add a partition, and make it bootable and all that crap, juggling boot disks and drives around... of course, if you don't install windows...

i've only made erm... 4 pooters, and they've ALL worked first time no problem. if it's all plugged in you're fine.

but the whole thing about the advertising.. yeah you pay for the brand name. So many people will presume that AMD are an inferior make from some taiwanese back street... so they can't inflate their prices as much... which suits me. only down side is that their core runs a damn sight hotter than Intels genrealy do, needing a bigger noisier fan. turn a AthlonXP on without a fan+sink for more than a few seconds and it'll die a death.

To answer your question about which one is faster I'd suggest to look for banchmarks AMD vs Intel (AthlonXP vs Pentium4, etc), I know that AMDs are faster in 2D and 3D apps, Pentiums are faster when it comes to video editing tasks.
Price? I think when you buy Intel Pentium you are paying extra for Intel Inside - Idiot Outside sticker.
Building your own system? It is not hard when you know exactly what you are building.

What rubs me the wrong way is that most of the name brands, (gateway, dell, compaq) all use amd in there "lower" models if you want a better model you have to get the almighty pentium. Now let me start a flame war here, I work for a service provider and we sell and service most major name brand computers and from what I see the amd chips blow away the p4's, I have used the new p4's quite a bit lately and they do not run as stable from what I have seen, now I cannot give you linux benchmarks as I only get to use that at home on my 450 mhz but the new amd xp proccessors blow the doors off the intel chips when you are running win xp, however if you do alot of "encoding dvd's" the p4 is what you need



However I was reading an article on some people that were doing some serious overclocking upwards to 2 gigahertz, and the p4 with rambus 800mhz bus was blowing the doors off the amd's with 266mhz ddr as there was a serious bottleneck at that speed. So there you have it, my opinion, now the next person can take it up from here and contradict everything I just said, but hey thats what makes it fun right?

I agree, everything Cli_man said is accurate and can be looked up on Tom's hardware or CNET or a bunch of other consumer sites.



So what, if you've got mad cash, I'de argue for a dualie AMD MP system, which will run you just a little more than a top end Intel set-up. If you're thinking of saving, take the saved cash from NOT buying into Intel's marketing and spend the difference on something nifty, like the one higher Nvidia card, or start thinking flat panel, or possibly even DVD-ROM.



But really, if you've got enough to go nuts there is one set-top out of the box machine that is well worth the cash, but they will never run windows.

Cheers,

Finegan

I built my first PC a little over a year ago. I performed the process at a snails pace. When I was done and realized how easy it actually was it started me in a whole new direction. Since that PC, I have built 5 machines for various family members and pop in and out of cases swapping new hardware like it is nothing. The hardest thing about building a new PC is installing windows (blah!). The only other difficult process is figuring out what hardware works together and what actual components you want. This can be overcome by spending some time at Tom's Hardware. But, if you are willing to spend some time shopping around for deals on the components you are looking for you can really save some major mula.

BTW, all the machines I have built have used nothing but AMD and their have been no complaints about how these machines perform.

i was able to build my own computer a few months ago. the only real hard part for me was plugging in the wires for powers witch, reset button, etc, into that small area.

As far as AMD vs. intel..... I dont buy Intel because I feel that they are too big, and they dont make as quality of a product as AMD does. granted AMD chips run alittle hotter, but once you are over the 1.2 Ghz speed range, every processor is going to run hot and need a loud fan. So who cares?

Get a chip that is durable and outperforms, in most cases, and Intel. Go AMD.

In case anyone cares, my next chip I wish I could get, if it was as powerul and fast, would be a Transmeta... to help keep Linus employed

well id be putting slackware on it and i found this nice site for any other candians looking for cheap hardware prices...

here it is
http://www.computers-canada.com/

I usually go by http://www.pricewatch.com to get the cheapest price for hardware, and then I am going to a computer fair to get the hardware I need, usually sellers are not that anal about lowering price. Of course I am unaware if you have this sort of fairs in Canada, but pricewatch is a good start, I am building an AMD system right now for my friend it has already AMD AthlonXP 2100+ and ABIT KG7 mobo for $360.00, so I am thinking of putting here NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 for $200.00, 2 Maxtor EIDE HDD 80G each for around $180 overall ($90 ea), a descent NIC ($30 at most), 1G of memory for $240, CDRW $150 at most (maybe he'd opt for SCSI then $200), DVD-ROM < $50, and case w/ power supply for $40 at most. So now we'll have a power rig for around $1300.00 is not bad. Load RH on it and it'll fly.

I've actually only built 3 machines, but I've upgraded a hell of a lot of 'em. I, personally, would go for AMD. I am currently running an Athlon system @ 1.4GHz and an Intel PII @ 350MHz, so it's not a loyalty thing, just I prefer 'em.

Building computers is really easy if you've got the motherboard manual handy. The only things you'll ever really have, is what pins go where. I recently posted here asking if anyone had the motherboard manual for my PII, because the processor speed and fsb were set with jumpers.

It's pretty hard to get things wrong, but first and foremost: Make sure you don't mount the motherboard directly onto the mounting plate. It'll fry. You need to use mounting screw - plastic ones if possible. Almost everything is PCI these days, which pretty much configure themselves, so no jumpers again! New harddisks all have little stops so you can't plug 'em in the wrong way, RAM only goes in one way round (like everything else).

<edit>Oh, finegan, love that link...drools</edit>