I've been using AMD since Intel became overly expensive for the difference in performance, probably 7 or 8 years now. I use an AMD Athlon XP Barton core 2800 CPU for all my computing, including graphics! I must say that I have not noticed anything lacking in both speed of rendering and graphics performance. For all my other computational needs it is far more than I will ever be able to put a strain on. Of course, to get the best out of a CPU you have to match it up with a good quality graphics card, I use a Nvidia Geforce4Ti 4600 128Mb, it's more than capable of rendering all the graphics I'm likely to need. I also have 1 Gb of PC3200 DDR 400 Ram to assist with the rendering procedure.
I see no necessity to change any of this at present, the extra cost doesn't warrant the slight extra performance gain I might achieve, in any case I would stick to AMD, they still have the price/performance edge.
If I were to update anything it would be to a higher quality 19" CRT monitor.
nirofo.
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