Well let me put it this way . I tend to think same that’AMD runs too hot and may be short lived’ but all my hypes about this Lovely piece of Architecture goes when I personally tried to give it a try.
I owned 2 PC or more speceficely my brother have a Intel 1.7 Ghz, 120 GB Western DIgital Hard Disk, 512 MB RDRAM, GeForce 4 Ti 4200 Graphics Card etc.
I owned a AMD Athlon XP 1800+ processor actually running at 1.53 Ghz with same configuration as above except 512 MB DDR-SD RAM .
Now I will try to explain it pointwise why to opt for AMD.
1) AMD 1800+ processor cost me around Rs 3800/= in Delhi, Nehru Place and the 1.7 Ghz Processor cost me around
Rs 7300/=.
2)People tends to think that more Ghz means more performance so why should a 1.53 Ghz piece of machiene should beat 1.7 Ghz . Well PERFORMANCE= CLOCK FREQUENCY* ARCHITECTURE PIPELINE .Intel has droped their architecture pipeline from 9 in pIII to 6 in pIV while AMD still manufacture processors based on 9 Pipelines that means higher performance inspite of lower Frequency.
3)Better choice for Motherboards.
AMD provides one better choice for motherboards . A casual gamer could opt for nVidia based motherboard(I personally have a MSI nVidia 420 Pro).This motherboard has nVidia GeForce2 MX 200 32MB Graphics Processor onboard, whats more it also have onboard 5 channel sound, LAN, four USB ports, two USB2 ports, two COM, one PARALLEL and two PS2 Ports.
4)The processor runs Rock Solid on 50-55 Deg. Celcius . No problems at all . I am using it for 2 years now and outperformed my pentium machine in every benchmark.
Nishant