you can't go wrong either way. I've built about 7 athlon XP machines. None
of them have overheated, or had ANY problems for that matter. If I had a
choice between a p4 2.8 or a Athlon 64, I would go for the Athlon...its
cheaper, its cooler, and got cool and quiet, so the system will run quieter,
and it supports 64bit, not just 32 like Intel. Chances are though, the
average user really won't notice much of a difference between the 2 if your
working in a 32 bit envirnment anyways. There are 64 bit versions of linux
that you could run on the AMD, but not the Intel.
Enjoy your new system, whatever it ends up being.

"Codemutant" wrote in message
om...
I am intel celeron 333mhz user.., I recently decided to buy a new
computer.
The system is most propably going to be used to run a linux version
and do
some serious programming. May be a little bit of games, movies.. and
multimedia
can also be thoght of in the Things-to-do list. I was thinking of
buying
an AMD64 3ghz based computer. But my friends are advicing me to go for
an Intel
pentium 2.8 HT system. They argue that AMD is unreliable and
overheating of the cpu is
very common. They said that for saving money i must not compramise on
reliablity and performance in the long run.
What should i buy: an intel based system or an AMD?