AMD Athlon vs Intel PIII

I install mostly AMD or VIA (cyrix). [cyrix is the hidden leader in cool running low power mid speed CPU's and very dependable now ]. I only install Intel high end if customer insists. Had good luck and very few complaints, as well as giving higher speeds for the buck.

I may run eight machines at a time. some Intel, others AMD. Though I feel they are both good CPU?s, the AMD chips in hundreds that I have built, have not had one I would say failed due to the CPU.
If it is a machine built as I would recommend, thenAMD, more bang for the buck.

toad

I did a lot of research on this issue before I decided on a XP1700. I have not had any problems with AMD products, and I have not heard or read of any incompatability problems with the Athlon. I Seriously believe that if there are "incompatability" reports, they were probably fabricated by Intel (or people w/ a pentium!)
The Athlon has a more sophisticated/advanced architecture than any version of the Pentium. That is why a 1.533GHz AthlonXP(1800) runs apps faster than a 1.8GHz P4. (uncontested benchmarks from TomsHardware & AMD). It's architecture is superior in at least 4 major areas (cache,decoders,execution pipelines and FPU). Significantly, for sci/tech apps, the Athlons FPU is much better than the P4's. Intel's flagship 2.2GHz P4 has a (Very) small performance edge on the XP2000 and it runs some 530MHz faster!! If/when AMD goes to a .13micron process they will be able to get speeds like Intel...but the CPU's will be much more powerful than any P4.
P4's are for people who don't know a lot about CPU design and architecture and are more interested in having a "big name brand" than the best design.