2600+ doesnt run at 2.6. or 3100+ doesnt run at 3.1. Im sure there is a reason why they label it the way they do. can anyone clarify this for me?

the 2600 or 3100 lable is usually descibed as the pr rating or pentium rating. Ie a 3200 amd processor running at 2.0ghz is comparable in terms of performance to a pentuim running at 3.2 ghz. its all about marketing. A average person thinks the more mhz a processor has the better it is. If this was the case intel with there higher mhz chips would get the laymans cash everytime. So they have the pr rating to show that they do more work per clock and can compete with pentiums etc... AMD 64 Venice E6 LBBWE 3200 Running at 2.6ghz 1024 Crucial Balitixs tracers 1:1 1T 2.5,3,3,8 @ 260 DFI LANPARTY UT ULTRA D 6800gt 425,1200 CD+DVD 2x80 gig sata raid 0 1x80 gig pata

But it's true to. AMD's do preform as well as if not better in some cases as a Pentium or Celeron clocked at that speed. Yeah, don't let the lower mhz fool you. If you look on the box's of some software like games etc.. It will say best preformance for this type of software, Pentium 4 2.4ghz, Athlon XP 2400+ etc. The more advanced processors get with larger cache size, transistors the less ghz power is needed for a processor to run at optimn preformance. Dual cores are a prime example of how you don't need a lot of ghz speed to gain a lot of preformance. Athlon 64 X2 dual core processors are a prime example of that. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 6800GT SATA II 250gig 7200rpm 8mb cache Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

AMD uses different technology. Their CPUs are more efficient than Intels & can do more work per MHz. That's why a 3200+ A64 running at 2.0GHz is comparable to a 3.2GHz P4 Hellz Yea!

CPUs - Fastest to Slowest StopBadware

It may have changed now but the PR rating AMD give the Athlons is how fast an original athlon t-bird would have to run at to perform at the same speed. IE a t-bird would need to run at 2000MHz to be similar speed to an XP2000 (obviously going back a bit) but it should be the same idea now. Abit NF7-S 2.0 XP2500-M @ 11.5 x 204=2353MHz Tt Volcano 7+ 512MB DDR 1x2700, 1x3200 120GB Maxtor D9 8mb cache GeForce4 Ti4200 @ 300/600

www.amd.com