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

Only amd and intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Everybody knows the answer:

[schwaang]

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.

Re:Everybody knows the answer:

[AuMatar]

Maybe you waste money like that. I buy the one that has the best performance/$ rating at all times. THe extra $50-$100 for the next step up buys you no real performance increase. These days the performance is more driven by memory latency and bandwidth than anything else.

but no analysis of performance / $ with wattage?

[Surt]

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.

Buy Cheap, Buy Often

[saterdaies]

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.

Re:Processor {Power vs Heat vs GHz}

[SlimSpida]

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.

Am I reading it wrong, or is it flawed?

[Enigma_Man]

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

Re:Given away by whom?

[Sylver Dragon]

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".

Re:No clear winner

[demachina]

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.