Value Propositions of Current CPUs Put to the Test

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Processors are typically compared by their performance alone. However, the folks at The Tech Report have put together an article that attempts to quantify the value propositions of AMD's and Intel's latest processors. The article takes 16 processors through an extensive battery of tests that range from gaming and video encoding to Folding@Home and energy efficiency, and examines the value they offer in each. The results may surprise you."

Comments

It's the same for everything

[Colin Smith]

Buy last year's hardware at a fraction of the cost and let someone else take the depreciation hit/development cost. You benefit from lower depreciation and usually, better reliability. There's always a dogleg increase in cost for the latest and greatest.

Works for cars too.

Re:Wait for the next price drop

[RMingin]

DDR3 is worthless so far. It's hotter, burns more juice, same speed, and expensive. In time it'll become desirable, but that time is still quite a ways off. If you're really horny for 1333FSB (which isn't the second coming of performance Christ, BTW), you can do what I did two months ago: Core 2 Duo e6600. I got it for about 220$. eVGA nForce 680i. All the checkboxes, official 1333FSB, and as low as 150$ with a good mail-in rebate. 2GB or more of DDR2-667. I got DDR2-800 because I hadn't done all the math first, and I like headroom. Once set to 1333FSB, your e6600@2.4 magically becomes an e6850@3GHz. Say hello to 1333. While you're here, you'll want to make sure your ram is set to sync with the FSB, which puts it at 666MHz. What's that you say? You simply must have DDR3-1333? Hell no. The FSB is QDR, the ram is DDR. FSB=RAM*2 for a proper sync. Your FSB won't be able to meaningfully use more than that, you'll just be nudging the FSB saturation up from 99% to 99.5%, for a performance gain of near 0. The price cuts next month will rework this a bit, mainly I'll swap out the e6600 for a q6600 and attempt to get the same settings. 4 cores at 3GHz each ought to be possible, and I'm looking forward to it.