Hello my friend, and welcome to the world of reality

Firstly, let me say that you went to a good site in my opinion, as I do rate Tom's Hardware. However, what you are looking at are benchmarks, as opposed to reality.

This is why almost my first question was "what do you want to use it for?" You see, I ran the same comparison and the Intel processor won on "value for money" and on "Multitasking 1" (50% apps, 50% games). You used a gaming benchmark.

I am afraid that you really need to know what you want to do with it, as you are somewhat "budget" in your specifications?.

One thing I would like to draw to your attention is that the AMD processor had PC800 RAM whilst the Pentium had PC667 (superstitious lot aren't we.......I bet it is actually 666 )

I have an old P4/1.7 that will hammer my AMD Athlon 1900s (real speed about 1.6?) even though the Athlons have 1GB of DDR and it only has 768MB...............you see it has RAMBUS RDRAM PC800. That is the RAM, rather than the processor that is having the effect.

I would suggest that you think a bit more about your intended usage and look at benchmarks that reflect that.