Which CPU Is Tops in Price/Performance?

mikemuch writes "You can spend 150 bucks or over a thousand on a processor, but how do you know which gives you the most power for your money? It's a little like MPG for CPUs. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case does extensive benchmarking on twenty-three current desktop processor flavors from AMD and Intel. While of course most folks won't make dollar-efficiency the sole basis for their chip decisions, it's interesting to see which CPUs get you, for example, the most frames per second in Far Cry for a dollar." From the article: "Take PC games, for example. The cheapest CPU available may have the best frame rate per dollar ratio. But you still need an adequate frame rate for an optimum gaming experience, and the cheapest CPU may not deliver that. On the other hand, office applications are generally not as sensitive to raw performance, and the lower cost processor may be better. It's all in what you do."

Comments

Re:Given away by whom?

[bhiestand]

A PII 450? I think you mean a PIII. Anyhow, I've got a few laying around for a much more reasonable price.

Sorry, but you're mistaken. Intel did make a Pentium II 450. What you're confusing is that Intel overlapped clockspeeds when they released the Pentium III "Katmai" chip in 450 and 500MHz. The only real differences were SSE and an improved L1 cache controller. The 550+ MHz Pentium IIIs didn't come until later, although it seems like it's been such a long time now that I've had a > 1GHz machine for years!

Intel actually has a nifty little historical reference of all of their processors.