by the way, all the help and advice is greatly appreciated.

What you are experiencing, my friend, is the bloat of marketing bull**** that comes out the computer industry. The stuff can be a little overwhelming when black isn't black and white isn't white.

When Intel hit the 1ghz mark, they found their process was basically broken and could be pushed no further. They responded to this by lengthing their pipelines which allowed them to ramp up the processor speed, but at the cost of performance. 1 intel mhz was no longer one intel mhz. It did get the job done, but from my perspective the decision was probably based more on a marketing mindset than a technical one. The average joe consumer knows nothing about pipelines...all then know is "more megahertz is faster!" The CPU is faster, but not as much as you would think.

Also of note, the latest intel offerings using the new prescott core, nick named pres-hot by many, has lengthed the pipelines even further and effectively reduced performance again. This allows them to ramp up cpu speed further, but a prescott is slower clock for clock than a northwood (the predecessor to prescott). Nevermind that they eat more power and produce a lot more heat.

AMD sort of went the alternate route, and continued to slowly ramp up speed while adding more efficient instruction sets. The end result is a chip thats just as fast, sometimes faster then Intel's stuff...but has a much lower actual operating speed. The confusing xxxx+ naming convention came to make it more appealing to the 'more megahurtz is more faster' crowd.

I'd reccommend a Radeon 9600. Go for the SE version if you can't get more (it's only about $105 Canadian), or the XT version for "OGM t3h 133t Gr4ph1cs!!!111" at a good price ($210 Canadian). My brother's computer currently uses one, and he's enjoying using all his AA and AF at full, and still getting 60fps with games like UT2k3... and the rest of his comp is a low-end system.

As for manufacturers of Radeons, you should try for either ATI or Saphire. Saphire is often fairly cheap, and you can over-clokc them fairly well (you overclock your card by simply installing and using a program; no messing with the hardware needed)

Very well spoken. I think Intel took their route of lengthening their pipelines when they realized AMD had beaten them to the 1Ghz mark... That's also why I said an AMD64 3000+ would beat a prescott 3.2Ghz; the prescotts are more expensive thant the old Pentium 4's, yet get less performance per gighertz. The plus side? They'll now be able to reach 4.0Ghz by the end of the year, though ti won't even be competitive with the latest Athlon64, by which time the 4000+ might be out...

Ah, thanks, that made it a lot clearer than before.

I think I'll end up going for the 9600 SE, since it's the only one I can afford to get. As long as I can play games fairly decently, I could care less, I cant wait till Half Life 2 comes out.

I'll go for the Athlon 64's with HT tech. They seem from what you guys make them out to be, the very best for gaming.

the prescott has a bigger l1 and l2 cache though which does offer significant performace gains. The prescott does run hot in cramped positions (like that of a retail comptuer; dell; compaq, etc...) but in a home made system with proper airflow they run fine... yes intel is only upgrading and reupgrading what it has without a brand new arcitecture... the p4 64bit should be interesting when it comes out...

NOOOO!!

The 9600SE is pretty much crap. If you can't afford it now, save up a bit, and get a 9600 Pro at least, or even better, an XT. The 9600SE uses just 64bit memory, which hinders it's performance. I have a friend that bought one, and returned it because it was such a crummy card. Trust me, that card will NOT run HL2 (at least not good).

?

Every comparison I've seen has the prescott performing slower than a northwood at the same clock speed, regardless of the extra cache. All processors run hot in cramped positions, but prescotts just plain run hotter. The only good thing I can see about the prescott is that it allows the ghz to be ramped up and when all is said a faster chip will offer more performance. Whether or not its going to beat the bang for buck of AMD remains to be seen...but that has historically not been Intel's strong point.

The P4 64bit is just a prescott with AMD's instruction set tacked onto it. (Which, they have rights to use because of a cross licensing agreement forged back in the 486 days I believe) Intel was basically forced to use AMD's instruction set because microsoft stated they would not support another 64 bit instruction set/architecture/whatever. I'm sure it pained the Intel execs immensely to have to play me-toos with AMD for a change of pace.

If I were going to get a P4...which I personally wouldn't because I think AMD's the better deal for gaming...I'd get a northwood.

No, they have a bigger L2 cache on SOME processors, which isn't that big of a performance gain. And the P4 64 isn't coming out for at LEAST a year, probably more, around the time dual-core hits.

Temperamental--seriously, consider building your own system. You know most of those systems? Won't play a damned thing. The video card on all of them slows down the performance. Not to mention they cost about 4/3's more than building one yourself would. That's 300 dollars you'd be saving right there, buddy. For that money you could get yourself an awesome videocard--9800 pro, for one.

If you're NOT going to get a new computer, I suggest this one

Get a new video card (you could even afford a 6800GT), maybe new RAM, but the processor is okay. I'd suggest, for the lowest budget possible, 9800np or 9800 pro.

Why do I suggest the slower clock?
1) You're going for a prebuilt, but you should be able to overclock (a setting in the BIOS). Getting 200-400 MHz more outta this thing would be a breeze, if so.

2) I myself only run a 2400+, yet that hinders my gaming in very, very small ways. I run Doom 3 at 1024x768 8xaa 16xaf, on high, with 512MB of PC2100, and a 6800GT. No big performance hit--30-60 fps constant.

Oh... that expalins alot. An Intel guy was saying in a magisine that they couldn't get past 3.2. That was why they didn't put out new CPUs for the longest time. So instead of becoming more effecient, they did the prescott. Typical. I hope the big PC retailors (Dell ect.) start going AMD soon.