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Yes, or more specifically:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/c...
https://www.videocardbenchmark...

True. But that means people will buy type 1) machines with a Thunderbolt port (and possibly a non U CPU). I.e. they'll still want something with low power consumption when it's not linked to an external GPU. Which means AMD will still get hit by the "It's not low power enough for group 1)" issue with their solution.

In fact Type 1 machines with a Thunderbolt port are going to be really, really common. And eGPU prices will continue to drop.

I reckon Apple might push eGPUs. They're apparently supported well by High Sierra and Apple don't have any affordable Macbooks with a discrete GPU. Even the high end 15 inch model is very underpowered in GPU terms compared to Windows machines.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy...

$2,799.00 and you only get a Radeon 560.

That's not a very high end GPU

https://www.videocardbenchmark...

I think you misunderstood the poster, they buy the mid-tier price point 2 years after release, and its no longer release price after 2 years.

That is what I thought he meant, but I don't think the logic holds up. After 2 years the new $200 cards tend to beat the previous generation which drop in price to the same price point.

Take this example, where the 1060 will be priced at about $200. Lets say that the GTX 970 soon drops to the $200 price point (its around $280 now). Based on the 1080 & 1070, the 1060 will likely have a PCMark score of around 10850 (scores). Since the 970 has a score of 8658, there doesn't seem to be any logic in going with the last generation. Based on my possibly incorrect memory, this is usually if not always the case.

I'm still 'rocking' a Radeon HD 5870. Looking them up on passmark, I have about 400 points on you.

Personally, my standard for upgrading my video card is that the benchmarks would have to double - which just wasn't happening last year, at least affordably. This year it looks like a GTX 960 might be a good choice.

5 years out of a video card isn't bad at all.

5yrs of playing games. Imagine what you could have really *accomplished* in the real world with all that time.

heh, well a 270 wont do much. he is lying.

Huh? An R9 270 achieves a G3DMark of 4000. Hey, it's not the latest flagship Deluxe Gamerz ReaperJaws Anniversary Edition Moon Commander card, but still an extremely fast one. Should play even new games on quite high settings.

Yeah, well, you have to pay a premium to get on top of the list:
http://videocardbenchmark.net/...
(BTW, very useful resource for making rough sense of the alphanumeric soup)

For my part, I'd be happy with the $200 GPU that gets me in the top 20... (GTX 960). I'm guessing that will get the Ti treatment next.

Though I'm still pretty happy with my 560 Ti, which is still pretty decently placed at roughly 1/3rd the speed of the top card. I think the last couple of generations have been skippable, though I'm now starting to get interested in the triple-monitor capability of the GTX 900 series... once I go out and buy 2 more monitors. My only fear, of course, is that VR headsets will make peripheral monitors pointless soon, though it doesn't seem like any of them really tickle your peripheral vision the same way.

I'm still 'rocking' a Radeon HD 5870. Looking them up on passmark, I have about 400 points on you.

Personally, my standard for upgrading my video card is that the benchmarks would have to double - which just wasn't happening last year, at least affordably. This year it looks like a GTX 960 might be a good choice.

5 years out of a video card isn't bad at all.

So, I personally don't follow performance numbers too much these days, but I just went and did a comparison of this "new" system against my current desktop (most components are 4-5 years old inside)

Theirs:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cp...
http://www.videocardbenchmark....

Mine:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cp...
http://www.videocardbenchmark....

So, the thing barely tops my "ancient" (by today's standards) desktop computer for CPU performance. It has half the RAM (even my old 10" netbook has 8GB DDR3)

Really, I think I'll just label this article as another #Slashvertisement.

So, I personally don't follow performance numbers too much these days, but I just went and did a comparison of this "new" system against my current desktop (most components are 4-5 years old inside)

Theirs:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cp...
http://www.videocardbenchmark....

Mine:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cp...
http://www.videocardbenchmark....

So, the thing barely tops my "ancient" (by today's standards) desktop computer for CPU performance. It has half the RAM (even my old 10" netbook has 8GB DDR3)

Really, I think I'll just label this article as another #Slashvertisement.

Personally I love the GTX 750. It gives the biggest bang-for-the-buck and running at about 55 watts max or so it usually doesn't require a larger power supply. It can run completely off motherboard power going to a 16-lane 75 watt PCIe slot.

It's the perfect card for rescuing old systems from obsolescence, IMO.

The only trouble you might have is finding a single-slot-wide card if your system doesn't have room for a double slot card, though in my case I found a double-slot card that I could modify to fit in a single-slot of an old Core 2 Duo E8500 system.

And heat doesn't seem to be a problem at all, even with the mod I did. The low power of the card means less heat. Even if heat becomes a problem, the card is capable of slowly clocking itself down, though I've never seen that yet, even running Furmark.

Or this...
Chart to sort by Passmark rank
and check the CPU one as well.

I agree that the model number apparently does convey ALOT of information. The guy still did spend 8 paragraphs explaining it, and lost me somewhat along the way (how can something be said to be universally 60fps on "max settings" when there are so many games out there??). The model numbers can be well constructed and yet completely arcane to a once-every-few-years purchaser. And that's to someone who has been gaming since the voodoo2 (many video card generations of knowledge). I can only imagine what the layman would do.

Personally, as someone who buys a new video card every 3 years or so (have 6850 now, performs great), I find the following website invaluable: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

So you want to know what card fits your wallet the best without any research? That does not work with anything tech-related, no matter how the manufacturer chose to name their devices.
Half an hour of online research per $100 to spend seems reasonable, unless you really want to trust your local salesmen (which you shouldn't).

Regarding 'max settings', it usually refers to the time the card was released. Which can be looked up pretty easily if you are able to use a search engine.
videocardbenchmark.net ranks cards by its own synthetic test suite, which does not translate 1:1 to gaming performance. Again, using a search engine uncovers many professional reviews with balanced-load benchmarks, which represent normal useage far better.

You can pray to get lucky with a randomly chosen product, or you invest a sliver of time researching what fits your needs. There is no way to further condense essential information without sacrifice.

I agree that the model number apparently does convey ALOT of information. The guy still did spend 8 paragraphs explaining it, and lost me somewhat along the way (how can something be said to be universally 60fps on "max settings" when there are so many games out there??). The model numbers can be well constructed and yet completely arcane to a once-every-few-years purchaser. And that's to someone who has been gaming since the voodoo2 (many video card generations of knowledge). I can only imagine what the layman would do.

Personally, as someone who buys a new video card every 3 years or so (have 6850 now, performs great), I find the following website invaluable: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html . You can see an entire history of all cards. It may not have the subtle nuances of a professional industry explanation, but it will tell me what card to buy when I am comparing whatever random letters and numbers the company has chosen to assemble in this years fashionable order.

There is no other way. Unless you have the time to trawl forums and do literally days worth of research. Which of course will be completely obsolete when you make your next purchase 3 years down the line.

The Intel Iris Pro 5200 is 28% faster than the Geforce GT 630 on the PassMark G3D benchmark. (I don't know how much the variants you linked differ in performance?)

Ha ha, your setup sounds remarkably similar to mine :)

After evaluating the FitPC and a bunch of mini-ITX stuff for work, I ended up getting a (secondhand) nVidia ION / Atom shoebox PC to migrate my 24x7 home server to. With the nVidia drivers, it still makes a decent and responsive desktop with compiz-fusion. The only time I notice that it's actually running on a poky nettop is on the busier flash-crappy web pages.

Ended up getting an AMD-based Toshiba laptop for my wife to replace the crappy iBook I bought her to break her of her Mac habit. It was a big, cheap 17" desktop-replacement deal with ATi HD3500 something graphics. Unfortunately, she got hooked on Windows, but Toshiba abandoned driver support for it, so when we migrated off Vista, the built-in MS drivers do decent 3D acceleration but no 2D acceleration. So it stutters horribly doing any kind of fullscreen video like youtube or Netflix, which is mostly what it does now that she's finished her dissertation.

Haven't really tried to pay attention much at PCs these days, but I find http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ and http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ indispensible nowadays when I come across a new system at work and I want to know how much it sucks based on the alphabet soup in its name, so I can wield it with the appropriate amount of swagger compared to what my peers are packing.

I initially wrote this reply to another post, but only noticed that he was trolling right before submitting. I think my experiences through the years could be useful for a budget-conscious gamer building his own rig, so instead of deleting it I leave it here. Here are a few points to consider:

• * Buy quality wear parts, mid-range performance parts, upgrade only what you need for a new iteration. I have done this for 15 years, and have always been able to play the latest games at decent settings. My upgrade costs have been pretty stable at around $800 on average every two to three years (running on three years with my current rig, upgrading these days), giving me solid performance for less than $300/year. The quality brand 600W PSU I got five years ago, for instance, will still be present in my new rig, and maybe even the next one after that as long as it's cable compatible with new components.
• * Don't pay the huge premium on the latest GPU/CPU, you can get mid-range alternatives with 80% of the performance at 1/2 the price. Check out CPU and GPU charts (sort by rank), or actual game performance reviews to find good alternatives. No current game *needs* an i7 or a GTX 7XX video card to get great fps at high settings on a single 1920x1200 monitor. The ROI drops off in a ridiculous rate if you go for the newest hardware. It won't even pay off significantly in performance, see the next point.
• * Realise that all games are made to run very well on computers far below high-end. At the end of my 2.5-ish year upgrade cycle I might lose out on some minor eye-candy in the latest games. I also get to laugh at the tools who post in forums with comparison screenshots discussing whether the shiny they were able to turn on and run at 90 FPS with their two new $1019 video cards is even *visible in comparison screenshots*. Seriously.
• * Don't be stupid about what you really need. A 512GB SSD, for instance, is completely ridiculous in a budget gaming rig. A 120GB or even a 90GB one (as I have in my current rig and will keep for the next iteration) will hold a couple of OS'es and the 3-4 games you currently play. Just use mklink (or Steam Mover, which automates this for any game or application, not just Steam ones) to swap them in from your humongous bulk storage spinning drive. It will not degrade your gaming experience at all. If you pay a huge premium to avoid a three-minute coffee break every two weeks to shift in a new game that's your choice, but don't complain about it :)

• * Spend a few dollars more to get a mainboard with an automatic overclocking analyzer along with a a $30 aftermarket silent CPU cooler. I've never bothered to overclock manually, but if the computer does the work for me, I'll take the 10-30% stable CPU performance increase you can get "for free". A $40 premium for this feature and a cooler is *a lot* cheaper than actually buying a chip specced from the factory for those increased speeds. Even my current el-cheapo ASRock board did this three years ago.

• * Open up your case and clean your computer thoroughly once in a while. Remove all dust from air channels in cooling ribs and the video card. This one might be obvious, but very few people actually do it. The computer will run cooler, be more quiet and last longer.

I completely agree with you about brand name components. After two bad experiences with a relatively cheap video card and a mainboard from unknown manufacturers I only buy brands myself (including EVGA for video cards and ASRock for mainboards).

Yes, it does take a bit of research. No, you don't really have to spend more than a couple of hours on it if you don't want to.

> Actually, and you are gonna laugh your ass off as it'll probably sound like a sales pitch but

Yes. You've replied to almost every single person saying the exact same thing. Sales pitch. Obviously. Amd is paying you to push the E350. Got it.

> and finally the electric bill will just drop like a stone

I live in a place where 8 months of the year you have to heat your home, and the building I'm in uses electricity, not natural gas or fuel oil. So I'm going to save NOTHING. But it would result in a whole shit ton of electronic waste going to the "recyclers" (India and China where they melt stuff down in open air vats and poison themselves and their towns) and a whole second batch being created in factories (nasty nasty processes and chemicals are involved).

So. Um. NO. Not going to replace equipment just because an AMD salesperson keeps going on and on about how much I'll "save" in power bills.

When you spec the power needed by your E350, what is the power comparison look like when you add the hard drive, LCD, and other common peripherals? Sure cpu to cpu you're going from 80W to 18W, but full system it's going from what, 250W to 200W? 150W to 100W? Who cares. And none of this applies to people running modern 100W GPUs, unless they're NOT playing modern games:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+6310

All of that being said -- it is entirely valid to point out to people that they do not need to buy bleeding edge CPUs, and that for most business staff an E-350 cpu would be an excellent affordable option.

Disclaimer - I own a C-50 Acer AspireONE netbook and a Phenom 8750 triple core with a GTX 260, and I have NO PLANS to upgrade anything unless my motherboard goes "pop".

And I don't work for AMD. :)

OK, but
2560x1700 = 4 MP
1920x1080 = 2 MP
1366x768 = 1 MP

And you're probably only doing something full-motion video or 3D intensive on one of those screens at a time.

I'm pleasantly surprised it made it to the "High End GPU" list, albeit pretty far down.
http://videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

And yes, I'm pretty happy with the Intel GPU in my wife's $400 Toshiba Satellite. And I'm looking forward to when Intel is a more serious contender in the GPU arena with solid OSS drivers. But the only reason I'd pay more than $1k for a laptop would be to get a half-decent nVidia or Radeon onboard. For most of what I would do on high-end hardware, I'd rather have higher FSAA & FPS than more pixels, but I'm strange like that.

I wouldn't rely on passmark. I have a GTX 285 and a 460. Passmark says the the 460 is way faster than the 285.

My actual gaming experience with those cards says the 285 hoses the 460.

Look at this page: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

It shows a GTX 260 with a higher rating than a GTX 295.

Surface Pro has an Ivy Bridge Core i5 with an integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU. It's not very powerful, but it's much more powerful than the ATI HD 3200 in the TX2500.

Intel HD 4000 benchmark
ATI Radeon HD 3200 benchmark

According to Notebookcheck.net, the Intel HD 4000 pull 30+ fps in Mass Effect 3 at 1366x768, maximum detail with AA and 4X anisotropic filtering. They also show that it can get around 40 fps in Skyrim in low detail.

Surface Pro has an Ivy Bridge Core i5 with an integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU. It's not very powerful, but it's much more powerful than the ATI HD 3200 in the TX2500.

Intel HD 4000 benchmark
ATI Radeon HD 3200 benchmark

According to Notebookcheck.net, the Intel HD 4000 pull 30+ fps in Mass Effect 3 at 1366x768, maximum detail with AA and 4X anisotropic filtering. They also show that it can get around 40 fps in Skyrim in low detail.

Thanks, I've checked the links and they both seems to refer to 847E (even the second one, scrolling down, in the order description says "Celeron 847E,4G RAM w/4xLAN,4xCOM,2xMini-PCIe")

In the comparison on the Intel website, it looks one of the main differences is indeed the presence of the "Processor Graphics" on the 847E:

http://ark.intel.com/compare/55764,56056

From this link:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/typo3temp/pics/beaa4362c7.gif

The "Processor Graphics" looks like a big chunk of sylicon.

I've also found a link to a GPU benchmark that gives the 847 a 85 score, putting it in GMA territory:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=Intel+HD+Celeron+847&id=785

Yes, I'll wait for some field reports. Not an impulse buy for sure.

Sorry to say, he's right. Even the 9800GTX+, released 4 years ago, wipes the floor with the Intel HD 4000. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+HD+4000 http://community.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/Intel+HD+Graphics+4000/benchmarks The HD 4000 from Intel is great, if you don't plan on gaming in any serious manner.

Run aground by the HD 3000? I'm sorry good, sir, I genuinely wonder if you're trolling here or just.....for lack of a better word, ignorant?

If you're talking about watching videos or something then yeah, the HD 3000 is more than enough but for any kind of graphical processing then things are much, much different.

Take a gander - http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=Intel+HD+3000

The intel HD 3000 gets a passmark score of 422. The HD 4000 gets a bit better at 583, a nice 20% increase. Of course, if you compare that to say, a Geforce 560 (a mainstream card from the previous generation), it pales as that GPU gets 2,716. The Ti verison gets 2,992. That's nearly 5x faster for a card that can be had in single-slot, passively-cooled variants.

Really, Intel doesn't cut it for current, modern games.

you accept no graphics for more CPU vs Bobcat, and pay significantly more for it

Please find me an ultraportable AMD-based laptop that costs less than $500. If you can't, then your point is moot, because including tax & delivery, I paid about $450 for my laptop from Dell. They're selling its successor for $459, which is a little more but has higher specs (Vostro V131 if you want to look it up, my laptop is a V130). It's available with Ubuntu at that price, too, for the Linux folks.

While you're looking for that, you may also want to check some benchmarks... http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=Intel+HD+Celeron+U3600 You might, upon reading, notice that it gets almost exactly the same score in PassMark that the AMD does.

Too lazy... I just generally grep http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and/or http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/index.php to see where things fall... roughly.

Plus, the old stuff I'm comparing to is often too old to be listed on any of the more modern benchmarks listed review sites. But I'm a cheapskate like that ;-D

No need to guess -- you could've just asked.

It's an ATI X300 on a PCI Express bus, with 128mb of proper dedicated RAM. It also did overclock very well back when I still cared about mobile gaming. It's an R300 core, configured most similarly to a (much more common) Radeon 9550.

I could've ordered the same computer with GMA instead, but meh. That stuff was pretty horrible even for daily tasks and video at the time.

Anyway, the X300 runs games from that era quite well enough, usually even at the display's native 1920x1200 resolution, and also does well with Windows 7's bells and whistles (though it is, IIRC, literally the oldest chip to be officially supported by ATI's drivers on 7).

That said, the Xbox is considered (according to Wikipedia) to have something very similar to, specifically, a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. The comparisons I find from back then are at best vague -- but they generally put the 4200 ahead of either a 9550 or an X300.

This chart seems to indicate that the 4200 is likely to be about twice as good, whatever that means.

So, yeah. It's not quite as slick.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

I usually base it on the above, as far as I can tell the Nvidia GPUs are both faster than ATI and pound for pound they are cheaper too!

Been Canadian, I used to be a big fan of ATI video cards having owned several all-in-wonder cards (from PCI to AGP types) I have had plenty of experience with the product. Unfortunately, I have found the quality of their drivers to be very inconsistent from release to release.

I stopped using ATI in favour of Matrox and Nvidia. Matrox has provided the most stable drivers and Nvidia has been "more" consistently pushing out reliable hardware with a quality driver.

Actually, it's an even bigger margin than I suggested before: the HD5870 can be had for $220 now, *and* it benchmarks higher than the 5970 (see link), *and* the 5970 is actually $910 ... *if* you can find it.

Yikes, who would actually get the 59 in this case?

Actually, it's an even bigger margin than I suggested before: the HD5870 can be had for $220 now, *and* it benchmarks higher than the 5970 (see link), *and* the 5970 is actually $910 ... *if* you can find it.

Yikes, who would actually get the 59 in this case?

Judging by these numbers it is probably closer to 50% (assuming thats a linear scale, which it might not be). Anyway that number is only the raw performance, which might matter a lot for videophile people, but for Average Joe it becomes far less important. What matters there is that the games can be play without suffering stuttering graphics or plain old incompatibilities and when that is taken into account, even a $70 graphics card will give you access to like 90% of the games, maybe only at medium setting and maybe without AA, but still perfectly tolerable and probably above what a console can do.

According to benchmarks, a $150 GeForce GTX 460 gets about 60% of the performance of a $500 GeForce GTX 580. You need to spend $235 on a GeForce GTX 470 to get 80%.

Unless you have some sort of performance chart you can't tell shit.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ gives a pretty comprehensive overview of just about every video card out there... this new AMD/ti video card will probably be added within the next few days. It's a great starting point before heading over to http://tomshardware.com/ or http://anandtech.com/ to read about all the details, caveats, and more comprehensive benchmark results.

Also, it tends to be the only good resource out there when trying to make comparisons between different market segments (what notebook GPU could keep up with my desktop GPU?) or completely different generations (would this cheap embedded GPU actually be a decent upgrade from my ancient media player box?)

Heh, I've almost given up on following the model numbers, and just head directly to http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ to get a *general* idea of where a card falls in the grand scheme of things.

Flawed benchmarks. How can Radeon HD5970 be ranked lower than Radeon HD5870?

Heh, I've almost given up on following the model numbers, and just head directly to http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ to get a *general* idea of where a card falls in the grand scheme of things.

I've sort of been toying with the idea of another gaming notebook, but I was kinda disappointed in my last one (Inspiron 7200 with a Geforce 4200 Go)... it seemed great for a couple of years, but still went out of date before its time... Dell never released drivers for anything newer than WinXP, and even under Linux it couldn't do proper compositing. So I was running circles around it with a 2 year older desktop machine. The Inspiron still has a lovely widescreen display, though, wish I could run something modern on it.

Anyway, let me know if you find something cheap / interesting that could maybe keep up with the 8800GT in my aging desktop.

It looks to me like the GT 445M scores significantly better on benchmarks than does the GT 435M, and that one really *IS* just using higher clock rates.

nVidia's naming scheme uses the first number as an identifier for the generation of GPU, so it is not to be taken as simply a performance indicator.

The 540M will probably perform similar to a 445M, although I cant find any benchmarks yet so I am just guessing.

435M Benchmark = 693
445M Benchmark = 1015

The later one performs slightly better than a 8800GT which is extremely respectable on the low resolution devices the M's are placed on (the 8800GT still runs pretty much all games very very well at low resolutions)

It looks to me like the GT 445M scores significantly better on benchmarks than does the GT 435M, and that one really *IS* just using higher clock rates.

nVidia's naming scheme uses the first number as an identifier for the generation of GPU, so it is not to be taken as simply a performance indicator.

The 540M will probably perform similar to a 445M, although I cant find any benchmarks yet so I am just guessing.

435M Benchmark = 693
445M Benchmark = 1015

The later one performs slightly better than a 8800GT which is extremely respectable on the low resolution devices the M's are placed on (the 8800GT still runs pretty much all games very very well at low resolutions)

It looks to me like the GT 445M scores significantly better on benchmarks than does the GT 435M, and that one really *IS* just using higher clock rates.

nVidia's naming scheme uses the first number as an identifier for the generation of GPU, so it is not to be taken as simply a performance indicator.

The 540M will probably perform similar to a 445M, although I cant find any benchmarks yet so I am just guessing.

435M Benchmark = 693
445M Benchmark = 1015

The later one performs slightly better than a 8800GT which is extremely respectable on the low resolution devices the M's are placed on (the 8800GT still runs pretty much all games very very well at low resolutions)

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

MINIMUM
GeForce® 6600 GT G3D Rating 251

RECOMMENDED
GeForce 8800 GTX G3D Rating 1050

MAC RECOMMENDED
GeForce 9600M GT G3D Rating 334

I've used Passmark Performance Test before to bench Windows machines:
  http://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm

Very straightforward for Windows dorks to install and use, and provides lots of simple graphs and an easy engine to make comparisons. I mostly used the demo version, but the commercial version didn't seem expensive.

Also, props to them for providing this handy reference:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

Again, be sure to test in as close to the final deployed configuration as possible. I've seen pretty big differences in e.g. x86_64 vs. 32-bit Windows performance, and even with different drivers installed or different BIOS settings.

Any CPU with more than 2 cores, should be able to handle most of what you want... I've been testing a dual core Atom 330 at work, and it's actually easy to forget it's not a "real" CPU (unless some FPU-intensive screensaver comes on).

For mid-to-low-end systems, GPUs are really the discriminator ... what makes a difference with running games at decent resolutions and playing back video. The model numbers are nuts, but I tend to cross-reference a few places:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ - a good comprehensive list that boils down and ranks just about every card out there into a single (artificial) benchmark number.

Wikipedia also has surprisingly good coverage of every family of chip, and what products are based off of them and tables of supported features - crucial for system building. So I use it primarily to figure out things like: which nVidia Geforce is equivalent to which Quadro FX branded model, what is the fastest memory my "Barton" core Athlon would support, what the hell is the difference between a 2.2Ghz "Williamette" vs. a 2.2Ghz "Prescott", etc.

I've also taken a liking to checking with http://www.phoronix.com/ for Linux benchmarks and support for new hardware features and drivers... such as nVidia vs. ATi vs. Intel, which distribution has better VPDAU or audio support, etc.

And definitely once in a while read up on http://anandtech.com/ and http://tomshardware.com/ if it's been a while and you need a comprehensive explanation of new tech, such as SSDs or long-term price vs. performance investment strategies... those can really help you plan ahead (Intel & nVidia's tick-tock release cycle, finding the best value, and just generally knowing which buzzwords are important and which are just marketing rubbish.

Check out http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ With a pinch of salt you can make a relevant decision based on those two, even if Googling around would make your decision even better. .