26 Desktop Processors Compared

theraindog writes "The number of different CPU models available from AMD and Intel is daunting to say the least. The Tech Report's latest CPU review makes some sense of the landscape, exploring the performance and power consumption characteristics of more than two dozen desktop processors between the $999 Core i7-975 and more affordable sub-$100 chips. The article also highlights the value proposition offered by each CPU on its own and as a part of the total cost of a system. The resulting scatter plots nicely illustrate which CPUs deliver the best performance per dollar."

Comments

Re:Seems pretty clear:

[athakur999]

The Phenom II X4 955 beats the i7 920 in 3 out of the 4 games they tried. The only one it lost was Cryis Warhead and it was a narrow loss (48 vs. 46 FPS).

These price difference of these two chips is about $35 on Newegg. I think for gamers, getting the X4 955 and putting that extra $35 towards the video card will net better results. This isn't counting the additional cost of DDR2 vs. DDR3 memory which has minimal effect on performance right now but still has a big price difference.

Re:Seems pretty clear:

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention that for most folks that "ludicrous speed" is simply overkill. I've been building my customers a mix of Pentium Duals and AMD 7550s and all they can talk about is how blazing fast they are. Because for most of the stuff folks are doing today, even games, the CPU is rarely the bottleneck and passed "good enough" a few years back.

So at least for my customers and myself (I liked how the last AMD 7550 ran so quiet so I built one for myself) it is more about "bang for the buck" and when I can build a nice AMD 7550 with 4Gb of RAM, a 780 board along with a 300Gb Sata 2 and a nice black case for $281 shipped it is just nuts to blow all that extra cash in this economy to get a bigger epeen. For most of us even the bottom of the line dual cores are sitting idle a good 80% of the time, so why blow the extra cash? I just checked process Explorer and with 9 tabs plus Comodo Internet Security on XP X64 I've still got 3.2Gb of RAM free and am only using an average of 1.4% CPU, plus I got another 1Gb of RAM on the $50 HD4650 for watching videos.

Considering my first machine was a VIC20 where I had to peek and poke everything all this extra power is nice, but I doubt I'll be saying "you know what? I need more power!" for quite awhile yet. So for a box that cost a hair over $500 counting the OS and GPU I'm a happy little camper. While having ludicrous speed might be good if I was doing major CAD or graphics work, for the things that myself and my customers do with their PCs there just really isn't a point. Hell I gave my nearly 5 year old 3.6GHz P4 to my oldest and he is blasting zombies in Left4Dead even as we speak, so even that CPU is "good enough" for what he wants to do with it. The "bang for the buck" you get nowadays even on the low end is frankly unreal!