This whole thread itself is considered as Epic Fail... as well as the advocates of "smoothness"...

The "Smoothness" thing is really subjective. At the end of the day performance is all it counts... Yes, I know what you meant by "smoothness".. actually I would prefer to call it RESPONSIVENESS.

Back then during the K6-III 450MHz days, that rig was able to boot up faster than my PII @450MHz.. surprise surprise.. why? Its because of the VIA chipset, even on Intel systems VIA chipsets boots faster than Intel's own chipsets. At the end of the day, performance counts... The K6 had problems running DVD videos smoothly (it was jerky all over the place) while my PII was fine and dandy even when I revert back to stock 300MHz.

The came the P4 and Athlon days. Again I noticed those AMD systems boots up faster.. and that's about it! I had an Athlon 3000+ and Pentium4 HT 2.8GHz... guess which one is more RESPONSIVE, should I say SMOOTHER? The Pentium4 HT! Yes its true, the slower Pentium4 HT was "smoother"! However it was the Athlon 3000+ which is always faster when it came to gaming. Even AMD-owning friends thought the same thing when they used my P4 machine during those LAN gaming parties.

At the end of the day, its performance that counts... not "smoothness"