I just scooped up another PC off craigslist for cheap and I am trying to decide what one is faster.

my current PC
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
2.16Ghz
Gigabyte 7N400 Pro2 Motherboard
2 GB of RAM
500 GB HD

my new PC
Intel Pentium 4
2.8 Ghz
MSI 848P Neo Motherboard
1 GB of RAM
120 GB HD

is there software to download to test calculations and speeds?

I have used Performance Test in the past and really liked it. It tests every aspect of the PC. It is free to try and you will be able to run both PC'* and compare the scores in the various catagories. Here is the link:

http://www.passmark.com/

current PC: 368.2

new PC: 387.9

impressive but sad, my new $200 machine out performs my $1000 machine (built 2 years ago)

Question, is the new PC "fresh," and what graphics cards are there (or at least the onboard chip). Chances are the benchmark program did graphics, so a big difference in those will produce different scores. Also, depending on your socket for the AMD, you can upgrade processors to something way faster than the P4 for around $100.

current pc: ATI Radeon 9550 256mb card

new pc: ATI Radeon 8500 128mb card

Both computers have had fresh XP installs in the last 2 weeks. Both computer had no other software running when I did the test.

I think whats more important is the systems Front Side Bus.

Are either of those CPU'* 64 bit or dual core? If not take the AMD with more ram and larger hard drive, but according to your reply I'd keep your current video card.

http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html...me&langx=en&a=

SANDRA can test individual aspects and overall.

I would have for sure said the Intel would be faster but not by much. If you wanted to go faster you should have just got some good OC memory and OC'd the AMD. I will state that the fastest computer I build so far was an AMD 3500+ with 1gb of Mushkin memory and Blitz chips on it. Somehow it is faster in every way, and as far as I can tell it'* the memory.

Put PEMs and rockers on, that'll help out the older one.