MrBlack, you obvously aren't comparing against the new Athlon 64 chips. The Athlon 64 series CPUs have a 1600 MHz effective link to the Northbridge, which is the closest thing they have to a FSB. It is a 800 MHz DDR Hypertransport link, or 1600 MHz SDR effective. (So I guess you are right, "no matter what you do with AMD you won't get 1200 MHz" - you get 1600 MHz stock.
) Since the Athlon 64s have an on-die memory controller, they don't even have a traditional external Front Side Bus like any other CPU. Their link to the on-die memory controller runs at full processor speed. This greatly reduces memory latency, and along with the 1 MB L2 cache, is the primary reason for their improved performance over the Athlon XPs. When it comes to overall gaming performance, nothing can touch the new Athlon 64 FX 51.
You should be careful comparing Intel and AMD chips based on FSB speed alone. The Pentium 4 'C's use a 200 MHz QDR (quad data rate) bus, which gives an effective rate of 800 MHz. The Athlon XP 3200+ (the "old" Barton core) uses at 200 MHz DDR (double data rate) bus, 400 MHz effective. Notice that the fundamental clock rate is the same. The theoretical latencies of AMDs "400 MHz" FSB and Intel's "800 MHz" FSB are the same. The maximum available bandwidth is the only difference. There are such tremendous architectural differences between the Barton and Northwood cores that affect performance that comparing raw FSB speeds alone really doesn't mean much.
Since the Athlon 64 3200+ and Athlon 64 FX 51 are still out of the price range for most of us, I'd say the best bang for the buck ratio is still either the Intel 2.4 'C' or the Athlon 2500+. Both of these are also highly overclockable. At stock speeds they perform roughly the same, especially in gaming. The P4 has a definate edge in media encoding (video and to a lesser extent audio) and the Athlon has an edge in office applications and scientific/engineering applications.
When it comes to gaming, the video card is by far the main limiting factor. I'd say the best bang for the buck there is going to be either the $199 ATI Radeon 9600 PRO and/or XT or the hard to find $250 Radeon 9800 standard. I personally feel ATI has the edge over nVidia at the moment, but the GeForce 4 Titanium 4200 is still a pretty fast card that can be found for around $120. I don't care much for the GeForce FX series.
