As I see it a CPU is defined, roughly, by the following features:

Clock speed
FSB Speed
Cache memory

and then som extra features:

-MMX
-SSE
-3DNow!
-Extended 3DNow!
-SSE2
-Hyperthreading

Depending on which company you buy from you get different values:

Intel offers a 3.200 MHz, 800 FSB, 3 MB Cache

while AMD only offers a 2.200 MHz, 400 Mhz Bus, 1024 cache

From these numbers it seems that AMD is way behind!

But anyway does games benefit from a large chache, SSE2 or Hyperthreading...etc?

What is it that games in specific use from a CPU??

vaps

I think the Intel EE chips are the highest in cache and they are 2mb not 3mb.

I think cache is what offers the highest advantage point, because other than registers (flip flop or whatnot type), its the fastest thing in the PC (approx 70% the speed of light).

the athlon does more instructions per clock cycle, the best for games at the minute are the pentium4 EE and the athlon64 fx range of processors but both very expensive

there's not really much difference betwen the athlonXP and the P4, the high end P4 is slightly faster with 800fsb but for midrange the athlon gives better performance compared to the price

If money doesn't matter, you really should go for the P4-EE or the Athlon FX. As newer games will most likely be benifiting quite some from the 64 bit instruction set (that will be when the 64bit version of WinXP will be released and games adept to that), I'd stick with the AMD CPU. The Intel P4-EE isn't bad at all, but for now, the extra performance it offers doesn't hold for that mile high price! I think that the FX is more futureproof than the P4-EE...

If you can't spend all that money on a CPU, you have a few options:
- get a fast P4 (like 3Ghz)
- get a fast Athlon XP (like 3200+)
- get a somewhat slower CPU (can be P4 or XP, but I'd prefer the XP) and overclock it (buy a 2600+ Barton CPU and overclock it to 3200+ or beyond, this CPU comes for around $100 or less!), as this can be done easily and quite save nowadays!

I think that if you are aiming at the high price range of the P4 EE or the Athlon 64 you may as well spend the few extar on the EE chip. It outperformed the Athlon 32 times out of 47 different extreme tests done on it. You can read the article below to see.


http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/index.html

Conclusion is here on last page of summary:
http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20...lon_64-53.html

Well.. that's just THG (I sometimes doubt their results)

Some other reviews (etc):
http://www.digital-daily.com/cpu/ath...ee/index04.htm
http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.html?i=20545
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/...-32ghz-ee.html

As you can see, the results of these reviews sometimes differ a lot from THG's results (haven't we seen that before?). As I said, I think that the Athlon FX is more futureproof then the P4EE is, as it doesn't run at full power yet; the P4 does!

i thought the p4ee was going to be obsolete in a few weeks anyway when the new p4 prescott comes out and needs a new motherboard

i've also heard that the fx processors are getting a new motherboard for future processors so u may not be able to upgrade it much either

the P4EE is definitely going to become obsolete very soon.

i don't trust THG myself. they have a fairly negative reputation among the hardware review sites community for bullying other sites, as well as providing "favorable" results for sponsors, etc, and i wouldn't make my decisions based on their reviews.

Yes, this is true. The Prescott needs a chipset that supports it and a mainboard that can deliver enough power to the CPU (as this CPU will consume over 100W, while the current P4 "only" consumes 89W at max).

That is true, but also faulty. This is the 939/940 pin story: the FX has 939 pins and the Opteron has 940 pins. As there where no FX mainboards available at first, they used Opteron boards for this. It's just that Opterons can't run on FX boards (because the socket lacks a pin for a certain memory parity check), while the FX can run on a Opteron board. A nice thing is, that the FX has an integrated memory controller. This makes the mainboards way more futureproof...

The fastest cpus for gaming are unquestionably Athlon 64 cpus. Here are some links for anyone interested:

Slowest Athlon 64 humbles fastest P4 in gaming
Hard Tecs 4U review
Aceshardware Review