INTEL vs AMD processers! Is there a huge difference?

Then it doesnt really matter, my old intel P3 laptop could handle all of that!!!

A good deal? Hell yeah!!! was this online or instore? AMD and INTEL both have their respective fanboys, for me its AMD as a preferrence for selfbuilds and Intel for bought not through any particular choice but by what was priced right at the time, not a lot between them either way though IMO.

comet clearance centre in Glasgow, all the PC's are factory refurbs and half the instore price

Jeeees you did well for that price! As for the cpu's I'm an AMD fan too though i do have to admit that the Intel Core 2 Duo's wipe the floor with anything AMD has out.. (Generalising i know before i get jumped on!)

To be fair though that spec you bought will be more than fine for what you are using it for..

I got AMD then spend the savings on getting an even better Graphics card than I would of, then overclock the lot

Short answer - no, both are good. Intel's core 2 series is typical 20%-30% faster per core per GHz than the AMD64, but a 20% improvement in CPU speed is not all that noticable most of the time!

20% not noticable?! Are you mad???!!!!!!

Intel all the way!

What he is saying is that a 20% performance for JUST the CPU does not make the whole PC performance 20% better.

A 20% better CPU may only equate to a 5% overall PC performance improvement, which most people would not notice anyway.

And in fact most people who are using the internet would not notice any improvement at all, as it is usually the broadband download speed that is the bottleneck, not the CPU speed.

Exactly what I meant, thanks for clearing it up

Most day to day tasks are not bottlenecked by the CPU - hard drive speed is another major bottleneck. Only tasks which perform lots of calculations on data which fits in memory - such as video encoding, photo processing etc - are significantly faster of fast cpu's, and for most purposes its better to get a balanced set of all components that spend loads on the latest-and-greatest CPUs (which give far less performance per £). For games the GPU is still the key factor - a setup with a Radeon 4850 and 2.2GHz AMD CPU will run better in games than a Radeon 4650 and 3.2GHz Intel CPU.... The same game would run a bit faster given a 4850/Intel CPU pairing, but the bigger difference comes from the GPU, not CPU.

That's one of the old 'broken' phenoms that need the TLB fix enabled in the bios (which knocks 10% off the performance). A quad-core for that sort of money isn't bad though

Your current usage doesn't require much processing power though, and a bottom of the range intel or AMD dual-core would have been a much better choice as they put out less heat and use less power. Still, your current processor does have some extra processing power which you may find yourself needing in the future.