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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."
By narrowing the field to intel and amd, dont we cut the pie awefully thin?
What about IBM, Sun, Motorola, Transmeta, and hell even VIA?
What I'd really like to see is how the "normal" chips stack up in price/performance effeciency vs the "non standard" lineup....
-GenTimJS
There's no clear-cut price/performance leader.
there, and without cutting it up into pointless pages and appendixes (?!) to generate more ad dollars.
Once you've decided on which company to go with (and most of us already have and stick with our choices), you look for the most powerful CPU just before the price break. Come on - this is nothing new. This is how people have been picking CPUs for at least a couple decades. And if powe consumption matters to you - and you're only buying a couple of these things and not hundreds - then maybe you should rethink the whole computer thing focus on affording your top ramen or whatever.
You buy the fastest CPU you can afford at the time. Stay away from the one or two top-of-the line chips unless you have mad money. And know that in another year you could buy twice the performance for the same price.
A used computer is far cheaper than a new computer. As with cars, people seem to want to pay through the nose for something new and shiny. The price then drops the minute they get the box home. For most computing activities these days, a top-of-line machine that is a year or so old does a good job relative to a brand new low-end or mid-range system. And for basic work (web/email/word), a 5 year old machine can be both very affordable and provide acceptable performance.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
No surprise there. Now if they could add celerons and semprons to the benchmark, we might see which is really the better value, otherwise they've wasted a lot of their own time and money.
You really need to look at your long term costs ... the power to run your computer in the long run is likely to account for a significant fraction of the overall price, so you should factor that in.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It seems it would be more cost effective simply to buy a cheaper processor and upgrade your system more often than it would be to spend on the more expensive processors.
To answer this, AMD64 processors typically draw less power, and perform better than their Intel counterparts. Welcome to the mixed up tech world of today, with Intel inside Macintoshes, IBM inside Microsoft hardware, and overheating Intel chips.
They say price/performance higher-is-better... Higher would mean more price for less performance... I don't understand how they're coming up with that metric, maybe they're actually saying performance/price, but they don't know how ratios work, or am I just missing something important?
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
You might be suprised there. I have seem similar tests on graphics cards, and the result is not the same. Basically, the lowest end cards (sub $100) are renamed 3 generation old crap (GeForce MX4000 is a geForce2). There is a sweet spot somewhere around $150 or so. Above that, the cards performance increase decreases quite fast, and you are usually within 15% of the performance of a $500 at around $250, which you could say is the sweet spot for gamers.
Sure you can solve little man's syndrome by buying an "efficient" powerhouse Processor, but what good is it when you wont see any difference 99% of the time and you can save $400.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
That's not uncommon. When a company doesn't want to carry/sell a product, instead of saying no, they just price themselves out of the market. That way: a) The customer never hears a, "no", which is something to avoid. b) If someone actually does buy from you at that price, what the hell, you made a buttload.
I ran into this on my home printer. I bought an HP 2550 printer (for doing all of the printing for my wedding). It comes standard with 64MB of RAM. This is plenty until you start sending graphics to the printer. So to stop the "Out of Memory" errors, I decided to upgrade the memory. The printer would handle an extra 128MB SODIMM.
Price from HP: US$800
My response: Bullshit!
Price from Kingston: US$50
And, it only took me moments to find the right part with Kingston's website (they have a really nice memory finder). Also, Kingston offers a lifetime warranty and puts out a solid product, so no worries about a fly by night company.
So, in the end, I got what I wanted and HP got to stay out of the memory business, without ever explicitly telling me "no".
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
> I had thought it a strange summary actually
It's customary for review sites not to take sides. How else will they continue to get free product to test?
Here's an Arstechnica article that's fairly accessible, which discusses this lightly, and goes on to predict the maximum possible computational power if all the mass of a laptop were converted to energy (e=mc^2)... and how long it'll take to get there if Moore's law keeps up.
Kinda makes me wonder if Gates's law will also keep up?
But even those no mechanical work is being done, on a macroscopic mechanical engineering perspective, according to quantum theory, logical states are transitioning and there is a minimum theoretical energy associated with their rate of transition, and thus a minimum theoretical power consumption. Of course, to compute this and relate it to a computational task (even just one instuction or even one stage of a pipeline) requires knowing the number of 0 to 1 and 1 to 0 transitions, and possibly considering if those transitions are indeed the minimal approach to implement that particular higher level operation if you don't consider the processor's specific circuit design to be the same as the minimum possible to accompilish the task.
So the efficiency, specifically the ratio of this minimum possible power consumption to the actual power dissipated by today's CPUs, is likely a very, very small number. But according to quantum theory, it is not zero, even though no "mechanical" work appears to be done.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
You also need a house to put each of them in. Do you add that overhead to?
I'm not saying your analysis is wrong, but both approaches are valid. Ideally, you should only factor in the equipment that varies between your two configs (probably processor, motherboard, and memory). There's no reason the case, keyboard, and mouse should be factored in.
I think a key conclusion is that ExtremeTech is trying to drive page hits and ad revenue. Strategy, run a bunch of benchmarks, draw no particularly insightful conclusion, get it posted on Slashdot. A horde of page clicks ensue. Oh and a key point put an incredibly small amount of actual information on each page so that your army of unpaid clickers have to page through a dozen Next links to get to the conclusion, all the while probably generating tons of hits on their ads on each new page.
I pass.
@de_machina
But, people don't buy/build The Ultimate Gaming Machine(TM) to improve their game stats, they buy it so they can have The Ultimate Gaming Machine(TM).
So, if an extra $362.00 will get you a faster processor, and $574.00 will get you the better video card, it doesn't matter whether your skills require you to be inside the barn to shoot it.
You may notice that case mods don't improve performance at all, but people still spend money on them.
Disclaimer: If I had more money I'd buy spiffy hardware too.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I think for most folks casual home use, an older CPU is fine, just throw lots more RAM at it and upgrade the video card. Unil a few months ago that's all I was using was a PP200, it worked fine with modern linux, at least, for my purposes it did. I'd still be using it if it wasn't for extremely crappy local grid power, fried two machines so I just snagged a cheap barebones system and swapped my drives out.
It's odd that they've not included any Semprons or Celerons in there...
As energy prices climb the effect will only become more pronounced. Selecting a processor which is cheaper and faster but also happens to consume as much power as a small city is NOT a cost effective solution. Why blind ourselves to this?
In a way he is right. The programing for a 486dx2 was leaner and faster then the stuff availible today. It seems that you upgrade a slow and slugish computer for a faster new one and after years of program upgrades, the bloated newer stuff apears to run as slow as the computers you upgraded. Windoes runs slower (even though they say it is faster) with every upgrade, office applications tend to do the same. Even antivirus (especialy symantecs offerings) end up using more resources and cycle and give the apearance or running like an older computer.
In fact, i just pulled out my 486SX/33 computer running windows 3.11. loaded a couple programs i used then and still use today. Even thought the newer programs have become more powerfull and such, the 3.11 486 loaded a program at about the same speed and apeared more respncive to menu commands then the new program on my P4/2.8gig machine.
Maybe the magic smoke is bloated software that seems to find its way into updates and such.