AMD or Intel?? For Portal.... Buying new PC
I know its interesting Ive been an AMD fan for awhile but man a great deal at my electronics dept..
HP
7GB RAM
1.80 GHz Quad Core X4 AMD Athlon 64 <---- 7.2 GHz
640 GB Hard Drive
22" Screen
All for $898
Will be changing Video card to a Geforce 9800 possibly
Or
Dell XPS
3 GBS Shared Ram
2.4 GHz Quad Core X4 = Total Power 9.5 GHz of power <--- Intel
320 GB Hard Drive
19" Screen
All for $798
Will be changing Video card to a Geforce 9800 possibly
What would you guys pick??
I've been a dell fan for long time, not much of a hp lover but will adapt, however ive never liked Intel, but for the price and quad core i really cant make up my mind??
Any suggestions?
Current PC is taking its last living steps, unless I put new Video Card in, but its a waste since its all old technology.
Fan on video card died, so I have a house hold fan blowing the smitherines out of it.. keeping it some what cool, but still glitches in mass detailed rooms.
Keep in mind, I don't play intense games like I used to any more..
WoW
CS:S
CS v1.6
Runescape <-- LAWL 
but anyways.
Starcraft
WCIII: The Frozen Throne
All I play now is Portal. I gave up all my old games.. This puzzle game just continues to puzzle me hahah! Anyways Any ideas which PC you'd pick for portal?
Those two builds are completely overkill for any of those games, hell, even all of those games running at the same time.
So.... um... which would you get lol?
Get the HP, not the Dell.
With my PC I bought all the parts separately and built it. The price was less then those 2 prices. If you know computers that well, I would look into separate parts and seeing if you can build better for less money if you were to buy one already built and modify it.
The more you give, the less appreciated it will be received.
Heck, my current processor has a speed of 2.1 GHz, and it's an AMD. Together with my (slightly too powerful) GPU, it can run Portal in highest settings... easily.
Really, since the Source engine is several years old already, modern CPU's really should have no issues with it, no matter what CPU you use. Of course it depends on the map, but since Portal's enviroment are sparse anyway, I don't think it's actually possible to buy any CPU's that can't handle it.
Other than that, I've heard Intel CPU's are generally better, though you shouldn't buy one of their GPU's.
"Duct Tape is the answer."
Yeah HP over a dell any day, although I remember back to when HP sucked ass.
However you could always build your own system. I'm currently using this:
17 920 @ 2.7GHZ <-Hyperthreaded meaning it's actually a Octo-core CPU.
6GB of DDR3
1.3TB of drive space, the 300GB is my gaming drive.
Nvidia GTX 295
EVGA X58 mobo
Of course that's overkill, but its really great working on Hammer and compiling maps at the same time. I really do a lot of mapping, and other rendering work, so the price was justified.