Macro - 9:23 pm on Nov 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

PC or Mac, Frontpage or Dreamweaver? Everybody will have their opinion - you won't get a definitive answer here. Do your research, base your decision on what you are comfortable with. Choosing the right supplier for your PC is more important than deciding AMD vs Intel.

You are incorrect in your assumptions in para two. There is no evidence of this and, in fact, overheating can happen to an Intel. CPUs like the Prescott run particularly hot. A good PC builder will incorporate adequate cooling whether it's AMD or Intel. That's not your problem. OTOH, the myth that AMD is cheaper needs to be dispelled. There is little to choose between the two in terms of pure price.

The hard disk isn't your problem either. WD has had their faulty batches (even with their Fluid Dynamic Bearing drives) just like IBM/Hitachi and Maxtor and Joe Bloggs. Only BIG PC manufacturers will know the % of drives that go faulty with each manufacturer and they won't disclose those figures. So you'll never really know what chance you have of your disk going faulty. Your warranty with your PC supplier and the efficiency with which they'll resolve faults is what matters. (Like for like all makes run at pretty much the same speed. Yeah, really. The fastest non-SCSI drives though are the WD Raptors though the new Maxtor and Seagate with NCQ - slightly different from Raptor's TCQ - and the right Intel motherboard can run faster than the Raptors but you need to have the right motherboard. I am digressing...)

Advantages with the Intel at present are some cool new technologies like PCI Express, DDR2 etc some of which won't reach AMD for a while yet. AMD's major advantage at the moment - apart from 64 bit CPUs - are technologies like on chip (CPU) memory controllers.

If you're talking to people who are biased one way or the other - you're talking to the wrong people. Anyone who fancies himself enough to declare one or the other better .... is best avoided.