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"Budget" Chips go Head-to-Head
StewedSquirrel writes "Anandtech has published an article taking a look at the low-end of the CPU market today. It takes Intel's newest Celeron processors against the AthlonXP and Duron with a Pentium 4 1.8GHz thrown in for comparison. All of these processors will cost you under $120, but the article shows that the old Duron (at barely $40) can out-perform Intel chips costing nearly 3x as much. In addition, it shows that the performance of the Athlon XP is head and shoulders above the Celeron processors, while costing roughly the same."
This is something everyone who has built systems and read any reviews in the past few years knows. The duron isn't really that great of a deal but the 1700+ and the 2500+ axp chips are unreal. Both perform exceptionally well, overclock like a dream, and unless compared to c varient (800mhz fsb) p4's absolutely rape everything performance wise.
Shadus
Athlon MP wasn't tremendously successful penetrating the server market, but Opteron appears to be making serious headway!
IBM has the e325, and Sun is about to introduce Opteron servers in a big way. Opteron thorougly rips Intel's x86 server offerings, especially in 2P and 4P configurations, and is extremely competitive with Itanium at a lower price (and with no software recompiles required).
Opteron should also do really well in the workstation and high-end PC markets.
This is all great for AMD, since Opteron is a high-margin part that kills Intel's high-margin x86 parts. The design wins with major OEMs just keep on coming...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I think it was mentioned before but is worth repeating.
Not only are AMD great value for money, but you can upgrade them later quite cheaply too.
I have an 850MHz PIII laptop, and it is quite close to the point where the packaging changed for the +1GHz chips. So I can't upgrade what is essentially a perfectly good laptop.
I find this greatly annoying, and will be buying AMD next time round.
I think that concern has been answered by the nForce series of MB chipsets. I've built several nForce2 based systems, and they are rock solid. There is a single unified driver from NVIDIA for sound, network, I/O and so on. If you use an NVIDIA graphics card (my preferred brand for various reasons) one vendor is supplying all your drivers. That is a very nice level of accountability, and better than almost all Intel systems.
There was an article not too long ago about how happy a major corp. was with HP nForce based business systems. The unified driver architecture was a big win for them.
From what I hear, Opteron is also extremely stable. I hope to find out for myself before too long... =)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I love my VIA C3 Gigapro. I wish they had included the new EPIA stuff in their comparison. I would like to know just where they stand on a price / performance comparison.
Before you flame me for my low power chip (that was a joke, sonnnn! Laugh!), know that I went from that lowly 1.1GHz Duron powering my lab of 5 thin clients and overheating in the unairconditioned noonday heat of Bangkok several times a week to a VIA C3 600 MHz, with very little difference to the end user, and it's cool to the touch. No burnouts here.
The chip costs 300 Baht, or about US$7.00
Smoke them apples!
Put identity in the browser.
Athlon64. It runs slower when it's idle, saving alot of power.
Well, all CPU's are completely silent, it's the fans that make noise
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
This is nonsense. The Prescott will dissipate over 100 Watts. The current crop of P4s are up around 90 W. Those high clockspeeds directly translate into high power consumption.
There is no real-world thermal issue with AMD CPUs. They even have Intel-like thermal protection these days...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
You can get a good nforce2-400 board without onboard video for about $80. You can get a retail AthlonXP Barton 333mhz fsb 2500+ cpu (with fan) for $90. You can get a Radeon 9100 video card for about $60. Throw in some good quality 2x256 ddr 3200 ram for dual-channel goodness for less than $100 and you have the guts of a machine that'll run all but the very latest and most cpu-intensive games with total ease.
I figure the whole thing with 120gb hard drive, burner, dvd, case, monitor, etc. will run about $800. Imho it's the best deal on the market right now, price/performance wise.