Megahertz are not the be-all and end-all of PC performance ratings. In basic terms, AMD processors do more with each clock cycle. That's why AMDs model number for the processor is more than the actual clock speed, it's a reference to the equivalent Intel chip. My opinions: Intel makes excellent, top notch chips. I work in IT and I have seen a grand total of ONE defective Intel processor in the thousands of PCs I've worked on. AMD also makes excellent chips, and are a very, very good value. My current machine is an AMD Athlon XP1800 and it has never given my any trouble, and have not had any problems playing any games. My next machine will almost certainly be AMD again, because the value is absolutely excellent.

When you break down all CPUs to the most basic elements, every CPU processes instructions. These instructions are things such as a load, and add, a store, a jump, etc. When software is compiled into machine language, it is in some form of these basic instruction sets (to some standard such as x86). Without getting into too much detail of computer architecture, the instructions can be broken up and classified by general types. Each type of instruction will take x number of clock cycles. Now, when you get down to a chip's architecture, you have to take other architectural elements into account such as multi-cycle, pipelining, and superscaling. At this point, design of processors diverge. A manufacterer (Intel) can choose to create their processor in order to process fewer instructions per clock cycle (on average) in exchange for having more clock cycles (and higher megahertz) a second whereas a second manufacturer (AMD) can choose to create their processor so it will process more instructions per cycle (on average) in exchange for fewer cycles (and lower megahertz) a second. What this means in relation to gaming (as well as any other application) is that Intel may be faster (and produce more frames) in any one given application while AMD will be faster (and produce more frames) in another given application. The cause of this is the number of a certain type of instruction once the game is compiled. By choosing a certain architecture to follow, Intel may excel in an application where there are a lot of load and store instructions whereas AMD may excel in an application where there is a lot of arithmetic calculation (I'm simply theorizing here about what type of instructions each processor will excel in, so don't use that as an answer). While this answer may not be very satisfying since it is essentially saying "it depends," I do believe that the current Intel flagship processors are faster than similarly rated AMD processors for gaming purposes.

The MHz of a chip are getting less and less relevant as the years progress. Things to look for nowadays are FSB speed and cache size. My AMD 1.4 GHz can whip my friend's P4 2.0 GHz in almost any benchmark. These benchmarks inculde games, algorithms, and various other standards.

In comparing the speed of a set of processors, e.g. Intel's P4 or AMD's Athlon (the most commonly compared CPU's, PC-based), the MHz rating is not a determination of speed. A Hert, as completely concerned with a definition apart from the already associated technological point of view, is a unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second, not necessarily speed-based. In CPU speed, the term "flop" is used as an abbreviation for "floating point calculation". While not commonly used, gigaflops are used to determine the calculations per second that a processor can make. Of course, this isn't necessarily the best determinant of speed in AMD's case. AMD's new platform of 64-bit processors can compute larger amounts of data in the same time. While the calculations might be the same speed, the beefiness of the equations can be increased without lag. To determine the best possible performance in gaming, however, the largest, most significant portion of determining speed is not the processor, but the video card (assuming 3D gaming). While the data needs to be moved from the hard disk into RAM, and sent to the video card for processing, the CPU's performance comes secondary to the video card. Obviously though, an extremely slow CPU will not offer up the best framerates, either. In summation, AMD's platform when compared in MHz is not slower than Intel's, just because of the differences in MHz.

Personally I wouldnt worry about such details, as long as the game runs fluently you should be fine. The FPS is really down to your graphics card at the end of the day. As long as you have a reasonabely good CPU you should be fine and not notice the difference.

AMD may have be slower than the Intel 4 but AMD's processors are more able than Intel though Intel offers a higher GigaHertz power. This I was confused with also. For gaming my choice will always be an AMD Athlon XP or a Intel 3.4