P4 with HT or A64 for Visual Studio web projects.

[gsgrunt]

I inherited a mess of a .NET web project I need too upgrade and maintain.

The long edit/build/debug cycles are killing me on my work PC - P4 2.0 GHz + 1GB ram

Has anybody seen any benchmarks that would help me decide? My first instinct is to go with the A64 but the development process requires many processes (IIS+SQL Server and Visual Studio), I suspect Hyper-threading may push the P4 passed the A64 in price to performance ratio.

[LiquidX]

I had P4 and now A64. For games it is great but I find for multiple applications the P4 performed better. Mybe its in my head but I have a feeling I am right. Infact this is the reason I want to go back. I would say get a top end P4 because of what your do but I will check around for those benches because I know some site did do them.

[Dazz]

Hyper-threading is what the P4 has going for it but for gaming A64, i belive you are right for the type of application you are doing you will need a HT P4.

[LycosV]

I have to agree with everyone else so far. I have a P4 with HT and my brother was an AMD64. For games his processor works just as good as mine, but when chugging through applications (including Visual Studio) mine just seems to be a better.

[JRepin]

I have both systems (AMD Athlon 64 3000+ and Intel Pentium 4 3200) and I can only say about Linux development. There my AMD64 system seams quite a bit faster with almost all work. Another important thing is that having a AMD64 system is a very good thing becase some day you will have to also port your apps to AMD64 and this way you will have your hardware ready for development and debuging. It is much faster if you can develop/fix and try at home then as it is to blindly do something and then send the code/binary to someone that tests it for you and then sends back his comments. Belive me this can make it very hard for development.

[saturnotaku]

Since he's developing on .NET, Linux support is irrelevant. Also, porting to the 64-bit platform isn't likely going to happen any time in the near future, at least at the rate it's going right now.

[JRepin]

Well NET, C++, or anything else on Linux or Mac OS X or Windows I think it doesn't depend that much on the OS with what speed the CPU compiles and things like that. I just wanted to say that with the same software/code things on Athlon 64 mostly ruuns faster here.

And you are true. If Microsoft will be so damn slow with their development/release of x64 Edition then there sure will be no hurry to develop 64-bit apps for it.
In Linux there is support for AMD64 for quite a long time now and you can hardly find any app that can't be compiled in 64-bits.