P4 Killer or just a wanna be??

I've tasted both flavors in the CPU wars, Pentiums and Athlons. I owned an Pentium 133mhz cpu, then got an Athlon Thunderbird 950MHZ, then a AMD Athlon XP 1600+ and was due for another upgrade and was torn between:

a 2.0GHZ P4 or a Athlon XP 2000+

we all know the claims by AMD about quantispeed architeture and how Athlons run neck and neck with a P4 of similar speed (1.6ghz P4 = Athlon XP 1600+, etc).

Well, i was low on cash and already had an Socket A motherboard (AMD based), so i splurged and went on ebay and got one for $100 (back in Dec 2002).

Installation:
like any cpu. i added some thermal grease between the heatsink fan and the cpu (Athlons tend to get a bit warm, so make sure your heatsink fan supports this cpu or you can burn up your cpu and fry your system).
took about 5 minutes.

My bios recognized it right away and i was off and running.
My review does not have any fancy benchmark test results but more real-life speed (what you notice).

Performance:
I am an avid dvd ripper and do lots of work with video. I did notice that my dvd encoding times shortened quite a bit.

on a side note, i get lots of email about dvd backing up and i usual have to know what kind of system people are running to help them. i've noticed that most people who email have Pentium 4 based systems. My dvd transcoding time takes about 5 hours for a 120 min movie. I have an Athlon XP 2000+, 640MB PC2100 DDR, 160GB of total disk space, people i've helped had similar systems but a P4 cpu instead and they said some times it took up to 10 hours to transcode videos. So i don't know if this is just coincedence or a fact, but it seems that athlons work nicely for video editing and transcoding. same seems true with photo editing.

So, was the trade off of not getting a true 2.0 ghz cpu worth it? i'd say yes. my system runs very fast... i feel a bit spoiled and get impatient on other computers.. hehe.. oh well.