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Originally Posted by calhounian
Which is better and faster, an AMD Athlon 64 x2, or intel Pentium 4 630?
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That's grossly oversimplifying it; the type of work being performed by the processor has a lot to do with actual performance. Some tasks are closely bound to clock speed, others benefit from faster memory access, etc.. (P4s have high clock speed, A64s have fast memory access, because of their respective architectures.)
In your case, you might as well pick up a lesser Athlon 64 (not necessarily a dual-core x2, though), for the same cost as the Intel P4 630 (which is a single-core model). Assuming that you're doing typical things like games, an Athlon 64 will usually be better for the task. In fact, if you're just doing word-processing and internet browsing, speed is essentially irrelevant, because the computer isn't under any significant load, most of the time (right now, my processor usage is less than 2%).
As for dual- vs. single-core, it depends on how you'll use it; games tend to be singlethreaded, while multithreadedness is generally reserved for professional software*. This refers to the ability of the program to dish out parallel tasks for a multiprocessor system; a single multithreaded program can execute tasks on several cores at once, while a single singlethreaded program can only take advantage of one core at a time. Multiple singlethreaded programs, (i.e. multitasking) can, however, make use of several cores (if the OS supports it, which XP Pro does, and XP Home should, for dual-core, but not dual-processor installations); if you intend to do two computationally-intensive tasks at once, dual cores will permit this, provided that they're from a multithreaded program, or from separate programs. For this reason, it may be better to buy the best single-core processor that you can afford, rather than the newer dual-core.
Assuming your usage pattern is pretty typical, an Athlon 64 (single-core) 3800+ would probably be reasonable. The salesman is correct in saying that the A64 x2 would be a better performer, but he's on commission, so it's to his advantage to make that known.
As for Office, don't pay for it now, if you can afford to wait until the next version (creatively code-named "Office 12"), which ought to be out some time next year. There's a complete user-interface re-work underway, and from what I've seen of it, it actually looks rather good.
*There are exceptions; for example the flight simulator Falcon 4.0 (dating from 1998 or so) is multithreaded, but that, and (I think) some builds of Quake III are pretty much the only multithreaded games of any consequence. Conversely, Pro/ENGINEER is not multithreaded (on x86, at least—but it is multithreaded on SPARC), despite being firmly in the "professional software" category.