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Intel AMD Hardware

"Budget" Chips go Head-to-Head 372

Posted by CowboyNeal from the duking-it-out dept.
StewedSquirrel writes "Anandtech has published an article taking a look at the low-end of the CPU market today. It takes Intel's newest Celeron processors against the AthlonXP and Duron with a Pentium 4 1.8GHz thrown in for comparison. All of these processors will cost you under $120, but the article shows that the old Duron (at barely $40) can out-perform Intel chips costing nearly 3x as much. In addition, it shows that the performance of the Athlon XP is head and shoulders above the Celeron processors, while costing roughly the same."
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"Budget" Chips go Head-to-Head More

"Budget" Chips go Head-to-Head

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  • axp2500+ (Score:3, Informative)

    by Down8 ( 223459 ) <Down8@Nospam.yahoo.com> on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:03AM (#7637742) Homepage
    I love my shiny new AthlonXP 2500+. $90 for retail packaging, scoring well above my old P3-500, with plenty of room to overclock.

    -bZj

    • Re:axp2500+ (Score:5, Informative)

      by Daengbo ( 523424 ) <daengbo@nOSpAm.gmail.com> on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:54AM (#7637988) Homepage Journal
      I love my VIA C3 Gigapro. I wish they had included the new EPIA stuff in their comparison. I would like to know just where they stand on a price / performance comparison.
      Before you flame me for my low power chip (that was a joke, sonnnn! Laugh!), know that I went from that lowly 1.1GHz Duron powering my lab of 5 thin clients and overheating in the unairconditioned noonday heat of Bangkok several times a week to a VIA C3 600 MHz, with very little difference to the end user, and it's cool to the touch. No burnouts here.
      The chip costs 300 Baht, or about US$7.00
      Smoke them apples!

      • Re:axp2500+ (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jridley ( 9305 )
        I'm seriously considering the 800 MHz fanless VIA as a replacement for my workhorse 200 MHz pentium pro. The low power consumption is a big plus, and it would still be plenty of speed for me, especially with a half GB of RAM in it.

  • A war on many fronts is a war of attrition (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:05AM (#7637746) Journal
    It seems to me that the number of market sectors may be the ultimate decider here, rather than the actual technology :-(

    Intel simply have larger resources - they can push money at blue-skies research, and non-profitable lines, whereas AMD (although successful) have to "bet the company" on every major decision...

    In a way, I think it's because AMD is such an underdog, that I like the company - although the fact that their chips are damn good helps a lot :-)

    Simon
    • whereas AMD (although successful) have to "bet the company" on every major decision...

      Well there's no way to refute this, because "major decision" could be anything from wether or not to blow up all their plants, to what type of coffee to drink...

    • Re:A war on many fronts is a war of attrition (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:35AM (#7637889)
      OK, I don't see how AMD AthlonXPs and Durons outperforming Intel Pentium4s and Durons is news, but does it really matter much anymore? Those are desktop CPUs and that's a declining market. High-density servers and portable devices need low power-consumption CPUs and that's where Intel is way ahead of the competition. I'd like to see a performance/watt comparison of AMD's notebook CPUs and Intel's Pentium M line.
      • The rate of growth of the desktop market is slowing down, yes. However, the desktop market is still growing in terms of number of units and is certainly not declining.

        For the next few years/decades, there is a definately a market for desktop CPUs. So, yes, this article definately matters.

      • Much as I like Intel's Pentium M processor, AMD actually doesn't do that bad here. The Pentium M running at 1.6GHz consumes somewhere around 25W of power. AMD's AthlonXP-M chips for the "thin and light" market consume a maximum of about 25W at ~1.4 or 1.5GHz as well (unfortunately AMD does a piss-poor job of documeting their mobile processors, so a bit of guesswork is required). The Pentium M is a slightly faster processor, but the difference shouldn't be huge.

        The AthlonXP-M "Desktop replacement" chips

  • It's clear... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Glock27 ( 446276 )
    that the emperor has no clothes, where Intel CPU performance is concerned. Performance/price is even worse.

    It's time for people to stop rewarding the Intel marketing machine, and start buying the best tech - AMD!

    At the high end, 64-bit addressing is just icing on the cake! :-)

    • Re:It's clear... (Score:5, Funny)

      by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:28AM (#7637855) Homepage
      It's time for people to stop rewarding the Intel marketing machine, and start buying the best tech...

      I agree. G5s all round then. :-)

      Cheers,
      Ian

      • Re:It's clear... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Glock27 ( 446276 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:38AM (#7637905)
        I agree. G5s all round then. :-)

        Cheers, Ian

        Touche. I'm actually a G5 fan myself, and will own one as soon as I can afford it.

        Let's face it though, a lot of people (especially Linux people!) are committed to x86. Opteron/Athlon64 looks like the most future-proof route there, by far.

        I've also seen some performance comparisons [pcworld.com] where AMD64 trounces the G5. Not that there aren't examples in the other direction, but clock-for-clock Opteron seems a bit faster. It'll be worth keeping an eye on things as compilers improve and applications are updated. We'll also see if new G5 speed grades up to 2.6 GHz. really appear this spring...if G5 can get ahead on the clockspeed front it could prevail in real-world performance.

        According to some of those benchmarks, though, it has a lot of ground to make up...

        • Re:It's clear... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Billly Gates ( 198444 )
          That has top do with compilers.

          The tests that showed the 2.6's having an advantage were optimized with VC++ for the p4. Especially the fortran tests.

          The macs software was optimized for the G4. Newer optimized compilers should come out soon. It explains also why Jaguar was 32 bit and not 64.
          • Uhhh, dude? Optimizing for P4 does not optimize for Athlon64 any more than optimizing for G4 optimizes for G5. They are different architectures.


            For A64 there would be an additional performance boost with an optimizes compiler even on 32-bit applications due to the doubled number of GPRs. I don't know enough about G5 to know if there is an equivalent benefit as compared to G4, but this is huge in multimedia heavy applications on x86 architectures.

        • Re:It's clear... (Score:4, Informative)

          by billsf ( 34378 ) <billsfNO@SPAMcuba.calyx.nl> on Saturday December 06, 2003 @01:41AM (#7646024) Homepage Journal
          It's clear to me the amd64 is by far the best VALUE, bar none. Clearly it is unfair to benchmark a 64bit chip with 32bit applications, but still it comes out on top. Unix is normally 64bit and in true 64bit mode it really runs circles arround the the dual G5 despite all the marketing machine (and lies) of Apple. No chip has more attention from developers today than the amd64.

          The amd64 is only for Unix users that can bootstrap a compiler and know how to use it. This is changing rapidly and there is atleast one distribution that will work -- FreeBSD-5.2. (Should be a distro by Christmas.) Still if all you want to do is run binaries, get an ecconomy processor! I don't see Microsoft coming out with a 64bit system anytime soon. So for those lusers it may not be all that 'futureproof'.

          Love my amd64 -- and Unix. You get out what you put in, to be polite about it. Three months ago, when it was purchased it seemed like a computer hobbiest's curriousity item, but things move fast and it is the best buy.

      • Re:It's clear... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Walterk ( 124748 )

        G5s all round then

        *cough cough* [hp.com]

        If that damn capitalism didn't wipe out DEC, and the next gen alpha was developed, it would have blasted all those other CPUs. Alphas always were the best. I shed a tear every day for the murder [techweb.com] and slaughter [com.com] of Alpha.

    • Re:It's clear... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      IMO, stability outweighs all other concerns. I've been putting together my own systems since the days of the 386, and in that time I've used x86 chips from AMD, NextGen, Cyrix, IBM and Intel. The one thing I've leared is that nothing beats the combination of an Intel CPU on an Intel Motherboard. Sure I might pay an extra $200 above a similiarly performing AMD system, but I know the thing will work and NEVER crash.

      • Re:It's clear... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Glock27 ( 446276 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:45AM (#7637946)
        IMO, stability outweighs all other concerns. I've been putting together my own systems since the days of the 386, and in that time I've used x86 chips from AMD, NextGen, Cyrix, IBM and Intel. The one thing I've leared is that nothing beats the combination of an Intel CPU on an Intel Motherboard. Sure I might pay an extra $200 above a similiarly performing AMD system, but I know the thing will work and NEVER crash.

        I think that concern has been answered by the nForce series of MB chipsets. I've built several nForce2 based systems, and they are rock solid. There is a single unified driver from NVIDIA for sound, network, I/O and so on. If you use an NVIDIA graphics card (my preferred brand for various reasons) one vendor is supplying all your drivers. That is a very nice level of accountability, and better than almost all Intel systems.

        There was an article not too long ago about how happy a major corp. was with HP nForce based business systems. The unified driver architecture was a big win for them.

        From what I hear, Opteron is also extremely stable. I hope to find out for myself before too long... =)

      • The one thing I've leared [sic] is that nothing beats the combination of an Intel CPU on an Intel Motherboard [for stability].

        I agree entirely. I generally put this down to Intel's higher standard of documentation and errata notes, which means that good drivers can be developed more easily, and can work around any hardware bugs early on.

        In response to the poster who suggests nVidia's nForce; I'm happy that their hardware quality and drivers are pretty good, but I'm not happy to be "held ransom" by a sin

      • Re:It's clear... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ncc74656 ( 45571 )

        IMO, stability outweighs all other concerns. I've been putting together my own systems since the days of the 386, and in that time I've used x86 chips from AMD, NextGen, Cyrix, IBM and Intel. The one thing I've leared is that nothing beats the combination of an Intel CPU on an Intel Motherboard.

        HTF did this tripe get modded insightful? The stability "argument" was debunked long ago. As long as you're not buying truly cheap [ecs.com.tw] -ass [pcchips.com.tw] parts, stability is not generally going to be an issue. While I do have a

      • Re:It's clear... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Hoser McMoose ( 202552 )
        Hmm, you're experience with Intel chipsets (or, more to the point, the drivers for said chipsets) must have been better then mine. Sure, Intel's drivers have almost always been better than those for VIA, ALi or SiS, but I'd hardly call them top-notch. Especially early revisions of certain chips were particulaly bad. For example, the first drivers for the PIIX4 southbridge (used with the 430TX and 440LX northbridges) were a disaster. Intel ended up getting them right, and by the time the 440BX came aroun
    • Actually from what I seen Intels are the faster ones but not by much. This has to do with the faster rambus memory. The newest versions blow DDR away.

      Your right on performance/price.

      If your on a budge then an athlon is the way to go.

      However if money is no object, Intel chipsets are fairly more stable and do not require mamoth heatsinks that create noise and break. Itanium are another story. :-)

      But I think the G5 is the fastest out there if your optimized software for it. New gcc compilers should be out
      • You'd better check out these benchmarks [pcworld.com].

        Note the 3.2 GHz. P4 at the bottom. I doubt seriously that RDRAM will make up for the 53%, 41% and 46% performance deficits the P4 demonstrated on the three benchmarks that took long enough to be a valid test (Quicktime, 50 MB Image, and 150 MB Image). You'll also note that the P4 won exactly zero of the benchmarks.

        Now you know the reason for the P4 Emergency Edition. ;-)

  • Upgrades not always necesary... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:10AM (#7637763) Journal
    I notice that Anandtech describe an 800MHz machine as "chugging along". Hardly. One of my older machines is an 800MHz Athlon Thunderbird machine with 256MB RAM and a 40GB disk. It runs GNOME and WinXP without any problems and continues to be extremely responsive and perfectly adequate for the vast majority of tasks I throw at it (except Games).

    The same is true for budget chips - if you want a machine to go online, to do Word Processing, play a few older games or whatever, these chips are perfect. Putting together a full-blown capable system for $400, or buying secondhand, is a great way for people to get in to computing who couldn't otherwise afford it. Getting them on the bandwagon is the important thing, and whilst the hardware is so far ahead of the majority of software (at least until Longhorn comes out...) getting more people using computers in their homes is a really good idea.

    • What I like (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The Tyro ( 247333 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:32AM (#7637873)
      is the term "low end of the cpu market," as if to imply these chips are somehow less than adequate...

      Bah.

      Both of my current linux desktop machines run these "low end" chips, and they run just fine, thanks very much. They all have a bunch of RAM... but other than that they are very vanilla... 1.3ghz Durons all. It makes you wonder what's really driving the CPU market (other than wow-look-at-this-shiny-new-CPU marketing).

    • Re:Upgrades not always necesary... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by xeno_gearz ( 533872 ) * on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:34AM (#7637882) Journal
      Precisely! I recently purchased a computer for a family member who will only use it for some basic uses such as word processing, email, etc. Anyways, when I was out shopping at one store, the sales guy stated "This machine will be on sale the day after Thanksgiving, although it's only 2.6 GHZ..." ONLY?!?! What in the hell? Anyways, I ended up getting the person a Thanksgiving special at a different store (but it also was only 2.6 GHZ ;)

      Took the damn thing back to their house and a whole bunch of the extended family was there, it being the holidays and all. They check out the computer and they are all, "Nice computer, only 2.6 GHZ though..." What in the hell! These people are only going to use it for email and stuff. I couldn't believe the reaction I was getting from these people!

      At least the person who received the computer appreciated it though. Sorry for the rant but I was amazed at this prevalent outlook on processor speed. Has anyone else run into this?

      • I used to work at bestbuy. The salesmen are only taught how to sell the service plans. anything else they're told to read the box. so all they have to go buy is the bigger the number the better.... i dont know if other retail outlets are like this, but i assume its close.

      • Re:Upgrades not always necesary... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @09:14AM (#7638112)
        Took the damn thing back to their house and a whole bunch of the extended family was there, it being the holidays and all. They check out the computer and they are all, "Nice computer, only 2.6 GHZ though..."

        Heh :) This is the angle that Dell takes. They have those silly charts that shows 2.6GHz is only good for email and web browsing, while 3.0GHz is what you need for serious applications and gaming. In reality, it's only a 15% difference in raw clockspeed! And the actual performance increase is less than that, of course, because the bus and memory speeds are still the same. Okay, and the 3GHz machine uses significantly more power (more than a 15% increase), but Dell doesn't advertise that.

        There really isn't a high-end PC market any more. ALL PCs are high-end.
        • And it wasn't too long ago that their charts showed that a 2.6 GHz CPU is what you need for serious applications and gaming, and a CPU like the 1.8 GHz one I'm still using now is only good for email (and reading Slashdot which, sadly, is mostly what I use it for).

      • Re:Upgrades not always necesary... (Score:4, Funny)

        by kavau ( 554682 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @09:15AM (#7638116) Homepage
        Well, I put together a nice machine for myself with a 2.4GHz Pentium this summer. Now, every time I browse through the ads that clog my mailbox, I feel so.. well, out of date! I used to be a sociable geek, but now I don't dare to talk about computer hardware anymore, because I fear the topic of CPUs might come up. If people ask me about my processor speed, I usually just mumble something under my breath. If I had only gone with the 2.8GHz model...

        I think it's time to get that 3.2GHz processor and regain my confidence!

      • Welcome to the world of mass marketing.. of course most people have no real idea of the internal functions of a processor (nor do they need to), but Dell says that they need a PIV 3.2 GHz so that's what they look for, so they can read their email.

        I think a lot of people are realizing now that they don't need such processor speed. My Dad is still chugging along with his old 400 MHz P2, running Windohs 98. Asked him about upgrading, and he replied, "Why? It does everything I need it to.." :)

    • It's marketing drivel.

      I have a "chugging along" Dual P-III 866 machine here that I use strictly for video editing and 3d graphics rendering. It works fine, it's still snappy, and does it's job well.

      Hell the $50,000.00 AVID editing station at work has a SINGLE P-III 500 processor in it!

      I am not going to upgrade until the 64bit AMD processros and motherboards mature more giving myself a major increase in speed and power instead of the tiny incease that was available before. (yes tiny. a 3ghz processor
    • Yup, I recently got a laptop and ended up with one which had a processor running at a "mere" 1400MHz. However, the lower power consumption means that I get a decent battery life, more important than CPU power and in fact, I usually run it at 600MHz and linux runs quite happily on that, letting me write up web pages using Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL.

      People are getting caught up by the hype; 75% of home users don't need 3GHz of computing power to browse the web, write some emails and balance their chequeboo

  • They missed the green one! (Score:5, Funny)

    by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:10AM (#7637764) Journal
    They didn't even tackle the the Green Celeron [pcworld.com]. After all, Celeron is derived from the latin word 'celer', meaning speed. Of course, celery is the fastest of all vegetables.

    On a serious note, people, including myself, are starting to worry about power consumption. I'd like to pick up a low power device for a BSD gateway.

    • Re:They missed the green one! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <petedaly&ix,netcom,com> on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:21AM (#7637814)
      On a serious note, people, including myself, are starting to worry about power consumption. I'd like to pick up a low power device for a BSD gateway.

      Agreed! I'm currently interesting in replacing my 400Mhz desktop. (I've got a 1ghz dell laptop, and 12"TiBook) It's used mostly when I either don't want to unpack my notebook, or want to take advantage of my 21" monitor.

      I have three major "wants":
      1. Be good on power...I don't want to power it down. (Does linux suspend well yet?)
      2. I want it to be quiet...I don't want to be able to hear it.
      3. Major brand. I can build and support my own machines, but don't want the hastle with this one.

      It is very hard to shop for something like this, as it's not something that is well marketed. I don't need it bad enough to be willing to spend major time comparing hard to find specs on a model at a time basis. I am sure swordbuy and myself are not the only ones with desires like this.

      AMD was high on my list, and it just jumped a little bit higher.

      -Pete

      • Re:They missed the green one! (Score:5, Informative)

        by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @09:05AM (#7638048)
        1. Be good on power...I don't want to power it down. (Does linux suspend well yet?)


        Athlon64. It runs slower when it's idle, saving alot of power.

        2. I want it to be quiet...I don't want to be able to hear it.


        Well, all CPU's are completely silent, it's the fans that make noise :). But from what I know, the heatsink/fan that comes with boxed A64 is very quiet. And I have heard that it can work with just passive cooling as well.

      • If you want a low power system, definately check out the EPIA systems from VIA.

        A less expensive option is the VIA C3. These cpu's are socket 370 compatible. You can find these for under $50. See pricewatch [pricewatch.com]. Max power on these is about 18 watts.

        Josh

      • Brand name & AMD is going to be tough. Good luck. I would recommend something like this [fatwallet.com] if you can wait for it to be available again, or something like this [apple.com] if you have the money and want the quality.

        Note: Macs are quality. I have a Dell and I have a Mac. Dells are fast, and they are cheap, but its basically just a motherboard and some components shoved into a cheap plastic case. This isn't a bad thing, it's just a choice.
      • 3. Major brand. I can build and support my own machines, but don't want the hastle with this one.

        Great Googly Moogly! When did not wanting to hassle with building your own box start equating to "major brand"?

        Look, I'm well past the stage in my life where I can afford to piss away a weekend putting a box of parts together (though fun it may be). However, I haven't bought brand-name in years. My last 3 PC purchases (and those of a couple of clients) were spec'ed out by myself and built/certified by a l

    • "Celeron" is a combination of "celery" and "onion". That is why we should refer to them as celery-onions.
    • These green chips are mainly for the laptop, and then you have to buy the whole laptop. Where can I get me a green Celeron and an ATX board for it?

  • Why so little take up? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <petedaly&ix,netcom,com> on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:11AM (#7637765)
    I see AMD advertisements on the web all the time, but they don't seem to have much of the "big name maker" market. Why not? Is Intel so intreched that their value doesn't even matter any more?

    AMD seems to have been kicking Intel's butt for a little while now technically.

    I'd love to see some brand name servers start using AMD chips, look at what AMD's doing on the low end!

    -Pete

    • Opteron should help (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mackstann ( 586043 )
      A decent number of companies took up dual Athlons because of their great price to performance ratio, and Opteron looks like it'll become even more popular with the same type of people. It also has 64bit going for it, which will be useful for getting beyond memory limitations. I haven't really been paying attention to prices lately but Xeons are expen$$$ive in comparison AFAIK.
      • Athlon 64 - basically an Opteron (minus a little performance) but aimed at the desktop market. currently around $380. i really think this might be AMD's money train if OEM's will start putting them in desktops at the major retail chain level. (i'm not sure that'll happen until XP-64 bit is released :( but the great thing with Athlon 64, no need to buy all new software as it'll run your 32-bit apps too!! don't believe that can be said for the itanium.

    • Re:Why so little take up? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Glock27 ( 446276 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:25AM (#7637838)
      I'd love to see some brand name servers start using AMD chips, look at what AMD's doing on the low end!

      Athlon MP wasn't tremendously successful penetrating the server market, but Opteron appears to be making serious headway!

      IBM has the e325 [ibm.com], and Sun is about to introduce Opteron servers in a big way [sun.com]. Opteron thorougly rips Intel's x86 server offerings, especially in 2P and 4P configurations, and is extremely competitive with Itanium at a lower price (and with no software recompiles required).

      Opteron should also do really well in the workstation and high-end PC markets.

      This is all great for AMD, since Opteron is a high-margin part that kills Intel's high-margin x86 parts. The design wins with major OEMs just keep on coming...

    • From what I've seen, the lack of market by AMD stems mainly from the lack of OEM partners. When you can't get Dell to put your chip in their computers and have little penetration in the other major PC makers, it makes it difficult to build a bigger name.

      AMD seems to have been kicking Intel's butt for a little while now technically.

      Agreed. I started building my computers solely with AMD about 6 years ago and, despite a few compatibility problems at first, have been extremely happy with the bang for t
    • I see AMD advertisements on the web all the time, but they don't seem to have much of the "big name maker" market. Why not? Is Intel so intreched that their value doesn't even matter any more?

      Some companies, like HP, Alienware and MicronPC, use AMD processors in about half of their line.

      Dell, however, gets a HUGE discount from Intel as long as they only use Intel processors. So much so that it's cheaper than using AMD processors, plus they get all the benefits of Intel's very recognizable slogan and tel

  • Well, Duh... (Score:3, Funny)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:11AM (#7637770) Journal
    If anyone here didn't already know this, please raise your hand...

    Anyone???

    Anyone at all???

    Hello???

  • No wonder AMD won (Score:5, Funny)

    by gyp ( 312559 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:12AM (#7637774)
    The article had 3, yes 3, banner ads for AMD when I viewed it.

    Conspiracy mod ~ON~

  • Well duh! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shads ( 4567 ) <shadus.shadus@org> on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:25AM (#7637837) Homepage Journal
    This is something everyone who has built systems and read any reviews in the past few years knows. The duron isn't really that great of a deal but the 1700+ and the 2500+ axp chips are unreal. Both perform exceptionally well, overclock like a dream, and unless compared to c varient (800mhz fsb) p4's absolutely rape everything performance wise.

    • Re:Well duh! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Pelops ( 454213 )
      Well true enough. But again the purpose of the article was to look at low end processors. I don't think the c variant of the P4 is a low end processor. As you can see, they only included processors in the same price range, keeping only one of the P4 for comparisons.

      Pelops

  • My hatred against Intel is (Score:4, Interesting)

    by -noefordeg- ( 697342 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:27AM (#7637847)
    ... that whenever I bought a new motherboard + CPU, and then after 6 months decided to upgrade I would ALWAYS have to by a new motherboard + CPU.

    They changed their CPU specs faster than I change between my two pair of socks. (almost..)

    It was like whenever they released a faster Celeron or P3 you would have to buy a new motherboard because the number of pins were (your current pins) + 1, and then we had the Slot-1 to socket 370,371,372,373.... Dunno where we are now.
    • that whenever I bought a new motherboard + CPU, and then after 6 months decided to upgrade I would ALWAYS have to by a new motherboard + CPU.

      Why wouldn't you? It doesn't make much sense to cripple the next-generation processor by putting it on a motherboard with an old/slow memory bus, does it? In fact, you'd probably get more gain out of increasing the memory speed and staying with a slower processor than by simply upgrading the processor.

  • Upgrades (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <{ten.epacsten} {ta} {rzqsav}> on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:33AM (#7637878)

    These Sub-$100 CPUs serve as decent upgrades for aging systems (e.g. the P3-800 that is barely chugging along)

    I'm using a P3-550MHz, and it's fine for everything I do all day.

    Can I have that 'useless' 800MHz chip when you toss it?

    • One under... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gillbates ( 106458 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @11:55AM (#7639536) Homepage Journal

      I've got a desktop system with an AMD K6-2 500 Mhz processor and 512 MB of RAM. The hard drive is a Western Digital 7200 rpm with 8 MB of cache.

      And Dell still ships new machines with 4200 rpm hard drives.

      Sure, I could buy a new 3.6 GHz system, but it would be slower than the one I've already got.

      I've been building fast machines on a budget for the last 7 years. What most people fail to realize is that the average desktop user never uses more than about 300Mhz of processing speed. The rest of the clock cycles are spent waiting on the hard drive, memory bus, ethernet card, or the modem. My system building strategy is this:

      • I buy the fastest hard drive I can afford. I get one with the largest cache offered.
      • I use motherboards with the fastest system bus offered.
      • I buy as much memory as I can afford.
      • I spend the rest on the processor.
      Anything above 1 GHz is simply irrelevant; I'll never use the processing speed. However, adding RAM and a faster hard disk does noticeably improve performance.

      And I always smile when people compliment me on the speed of my Macintosh (I've got a blue case) and I tell them it's a 500MHz PC. They can't believe that a processor "that slow" could be so fast. As if the processor speed made any difference.

      It's not the hardware, it's how you configure it...

      • Re:One under... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by crayz ( 1056 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @12:05PM (#7639628) Homepage
        Please don't tell me you actually believe all that crap. Dell will ship you a very nice and balanced machine if you want it.

        There's no way in hell your 500MHz wonderbox is going to beat a new Dell w/ an 800MHz bus. Which can be had extremely cheaply. And I paid $20 for my last HD, a 200GB, 7200RPM Western Digital w/ 8MB cache. So I hope you didn't blow your whole wad of computing $$$ on some stupid hard drive that you think is going to let the special ed PC beat a modern machine.

        Also, when you buy outdated crap like that, the RAM is going to much more expensive than DDR, which everyone and their dog is now using.

        P.S. I am fairly sure Dell does not ship 4200rpm drives on anything but laptops
  • (Page 8) is this correct? 18.4 Seconds to compile QuakeIII Arena Source Code on a 2600+ ? Maybe it's right, but I was expecting it to be longer.

    Damn that's fast - all those months/years of id's hard work, only to compile in 18 seconds on a budget processor....

  • Upgradeability (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 05, 2003 @08:42AM (#7637931)
    I think it was mentioned before but is worth repeating.

    Not only are AMD great value for money, but you can upgrade them later quite cheaply too.

    I have an 850MHz PIII laptop, and it is quite close to the point where the packaging changed for the +1GHz chips. So I can't upgrade what is essentially a perfectly good laptop.

    I find this greatly annoying, and will be buying AMD next time round.

  • Small OEMs (Score:2, Informative)

    by iamthemoog ( 410374 )
    Many thanks Anand - this article will be a great help to many small system builders being beaten to death by Dell; many (such as myself) cannot compete with Dell on budget Intel kit of the same spec.

    Having an article like this to show potential customers will mean I can provide better performing systems at competitive prices using AMD.

  • Who needs faster? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 )
    I'm running an AMD K6 1.1 GhZ chip on the machine I'm using at home, and I feel no need to upgrade right now. Nothing I'm running demands the extra performance... even though I know the cheapest eMachines on the market today is running at double the clock speed.

    It seems to me that most consumer users don't need 2+ GhZ chips, but marketing over the years have told consumers that higher clock speeds always equate to better chips, even though that's a myth that Apple has worked hard to counteract.

    Maybe it's

    • Re:Who needs faster? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > I'm running an AMD K6 1.1 GhZ chip

      Ladies and gentlemen, our new overclocking champion!

  • *sigh* (Score:3, Funny)

    by mntgomery ( 620581 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @09:26AM (#7638181)
    Its depressing when the "low end of the CPU market" beats all four of your machines.

  • Video Card (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hibiki_r ( 649814 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @09:26AM (#7638185)

    Has anybody noticed that Anandtech is testing this budget, $60 to $90 processors using a radeon 9800Pro w/256mb of video ram? That's a $400+ video card!

    Is people really buying this kind of video card on a budget PC? I'd rather test the processors using a budget video card instead. It might become the bottleneck in some games, but I think that's what the consumer wants after all... an idea on how much faster their game will run on a realistic machine, not in this monstrosity.

  • Barton 2500+ & nforce2-400 (Score:5, Informative)

    by doodleboy ( 263186 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @09:53AM (#7638416)
    You can get a good nforce2-400 board without onboard video for about $80. You can get a retail AthlonXP Barton 333mhz fsb 2500+ cpu (with fan) for $90. You can get a Radeon 9100 video card for about $60. Throw in some good quality 2x256 ddr 3200 ram for dual-channel goodness for less than $100 and you have the guts of a machine that'll run all but the very latest and most cpu-intensive games with total ease.

    I figure the whole thing with 120gb hard drive, burner, dvd, case, monitor, etc. will run about $800. Imho it's the best deal on the market right now, price/performance wise.

  • My first AMD was a 5x86-133. I never looked back. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LazloToth ( 623604 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @10:36AM (#7638851)

    Heh heh - - I pushed it to around 160 on a generic VLB mainboard and thought I was in heaven. I've built more systems for myself, friends, family, and work than I can remember, and every one has been built on AMD. CPU related stability issues have never - - and I do mean NEVER - - been a problem. My years of system building have convinced me that, when stability is a problem, you should eliminate drivers, physical connections, adapter cards, and mainboard components in that order. I know bad CPUs do surface occasionally, but I think that most people get themselves in trouble through pushing voltages/clock cycles and not compensating with good cooling.

    I hate seeing money wasted, and the Intel name to me has the same connotations as "BMW" - - it's more about hype than bang-for-buck.

  • Processor speed considered harmful. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @11:20AM (#7639206)
    Does processor speed really matter that much?

    I have many old(er) computers around here. My fastest is a Pentium III laptop, and my slowest is an old Pentium 133 box. Basically, whenever I got to the point where I needed an upgrade, I just got more RAM. Cutting down on swapping has brought me significantly greater performance improvements than having a "faster" processor.

    Further, I am sick and tired of the market hype that surrounds clock speeds. It's not the processor, but the software that needs to be made more efficient. And because many programs spend a lot of time processing graphics and GUI stuff, I think that making video boards "smarter" by adding GUI-specific processing features would bring a significantly greater performance improvement, by offloading crap from the main processor, than speeding up the main processor.

    All of that said, it doesn't surprise me that an old processor is "faster" than a newer one. There are hundreds of variables affecting their respective performances, the biggest one being the software used to test them. In most cases, I think it's like comparing apples to oranges.

    Personal computers have gotten so fast and powerful in the past couple of years that I think what's under the hood is totally irrelevant to 90% of the users. The other 10% have specific needs because of high-end applications or something.

  • Build a speedy computer for $800 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by angle_slam ( 623817 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @06:22PM (#7643667)
    On a related note, ExtremeTech has an article [extremetech.com] detailing how to build a fast PC for $800. The final recommendation uses an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU with 512 MB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, and a GeForce 5600XT video card.

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