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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."
I notice that Anandtech describe an 800MHz machine as "chugging along". Hardly. One of my older machines is an 800MHz Athlon Thunderbird machine with 256MB RAM and a 40GB disk. It runs GNOME and WinXP without any problems and continues to be extremely responsive and perfectly adequate for the vast majority of tasks I throw at it (except Games).
The same is true for budget chips - if you want a machine to go online, to do Word Processing, play a few older games or whatever, these chips are perfect. Putting together a full-blown capable system for $400, or buying secondhand, is a great way for people to get in to computing who couldn't otherwise afford it. Getting them on the bandwagon is the important thing, and whilst the hardware is so far ahead of the majority of software (at least until Longhorn comes out...) getting more people using computers in their homes is a really good idea.
The article had 3, yes 3, banner ads for AMD when I viewed it.
Conspiracy mod ~ON~
On a serious note, people, including myself, are starting to worry about power consumption. I'd like to pick up a low power device for a BSD gateway.
Agreed! I'm currently interesting in replacing my 400Mhz desktop. (I've got a 1ghz dell laptop, and 12"TiBook) It's used mostly when I either don't want to unpack my notebook, or want to take advantage of my 21" monitor.
I have three major "wants":
1. Be good on power...I don't want to power it down. (Does linux suspend well yet?)
2. I want it to be quiet...I don't want to be able to hear it.
3. Major brand. I can build and support my own machines, but don't want the hastle with this one.
It is very hard to shop for something like this, as it's not something that is well marketed. I don't need it bad enough to be willing to spend major time comparing hard to find specs on a model at a time basis. I am sure swordbuy and myself are not the only ones with desires like this.
AMD was high on my list, and it just jumped a little bit higher.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I agree. G5s all round then. :-)
Cheers,
Ian
These Sub-$100 CPUs serve as decent upgrades for aging systems (e.g. the P3-800 that is barely chugging along)
I'm using a P3-550MHz, and it's fine for everything I do all day.
Can I have that 'useless' 800MHz chip when you toss it?
OK, I don't see how AMD AthlonXPs and Durons outperforming Intel Pentium4s and Durons is news, but does it really matter much anymore? Those are desktop CPUs and that's a declining market. High-density servers and portable devices need low power-consumption CPUs and that's where Intel is way ahead of the competition. I'd like to see a performance/watt comparison of AMD's notebook CPUs and Intel's Pentium M line.
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.
Its probably to move the bottleneck away from the video card.
I've got a desktop system with an AMD K6-2 500 Mhz processor and 512 MB of RAM. The hard drive is a Western Digital 7200 rpm with 8 MB of cache.
And Dell still ships new machines with 4200 rpm hard drives.
Sure, I could buy a new 3.6 GHz system, but it would be slower than the one I've already got.
I've been building fast machines on a budget for the last 7 years. What most people fail to realize is that the average desktop user never uses more than about 300Mhz of processing speed. The rest of the clock cycles are spent waiting on the hard drive, memory bus, ethernet card, or the modem. My system building strategy is this:
- I buy the fastest hard drive I can afford. I get one with the largest cache offered.
- I use motherboards with the fastest system bus offered.
- I buy as much memory as I can afford.
- I spend the rest on the processor.
Anything above 1 GHz is simply irrelevant; I'll never use the processing speed. However, adding RAM and a faster hard disk does noticeably improve performance.And I always smile when people compliment me on the speed of my Macintosh (I've got a blue case) and I tell them it's a 500MHz PC. They can't believe that a processor "that slow" could be so fast. As if the processor speed made any difference.
It's not the hardware, it's how you configure it...
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