Price Guides, August 2005: Labor Day CPUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Howard Johnston on September 4, 2005 4:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
As always, we like to start off our price guides with a little plug for our Real Time Price Engine; quite possibly the fastest growing price engine on the internet. A handy feature of the RTPE is the ability to compare several products using the OR function depicted by the pipe ("|") symbol. For example, if you wanted to compare the prices of an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ and the Intel Pentium 4 670 you would run the following search in the RTPE: "amd athlon 64 3800+ | intel pentium 4 670." We have more details in our forums.
You may also start to notice new graphs for RTPE and AnandTech. Unfortunately, GNUPlot wasn't cutting it anymore, so we switched to a .NET engine that also powers the rest of the graphs on AnandTech.
The processor scene has settled down a bit since our last price guide. Although we've started seeing the new Intel Celeron D lineup with EM64T enabled, we're still eagerly awaiting the Intel Pentium 4 662 and 672 with virtualization support. Check out our updated Intel Roadmap for the latest info on Intel's soon-to-be released processors. On the AMD side of things, we've seen the X2s sharply dropping in price since September making them a much better value since their introduction.
Dual Core Desktops
Prices on Intel's dual core desktop lineup haven't seen much action since our last processor guide in late July. Although the price of the Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) [RTPE: BX80551PG2800FN] has shown a slight incline since our last guide, we still recommend it as this week's dual core choice. The sub-$250 price tag makes it a great value for multitaskers.
Intel Pentium D (775) 820 800FSB 2x1MB
The rest of the dual core Intel processors have also show very little change over the past few weeks. Hopefully with the release of the 9xx series next quarter we'll see these prices drop.
We know AMD's dual core processors outperform Intel's offerings clock for clock, but they have thus far been too expensive to compete with Intel in terms of pricing (a sharp contrast when you think about the AthlonXP days where AMD held the price advantage). Since August we've seen AMD's entire line of X2 dual core products continue to drop in price steadily. The X2 3800+ [RTPE: ADA3800BVBOX] has proven to be a worthy match both price and performance wise to Intel's lineup. This week we also saw the Toledo version of the X2 3800+ [RTPE: ADA3800CDBOX] showing up on a few vendors' sites. The Toledo X2 3800+ is an interesting animal in the fact that it is actually carries 2x1MB L2 cache, but with half of that cache disabled. If you're looking for an AMD dual core option we would definitely recommend one of these offerings. Be sure to check out Anand's article on AMD's unofficial DDR480 memory support on the X2 processors to see how to squeeze a bit more performance out of your X2.
AMD Athlon 64 X2 (939) 3800+ 2x512KB Manchester
We still feel the lowest cost X2 offers the best bang for your buck. From our X2 3800+ review you can see that each speed grade in X2 processors continues to offer only a 3 to 4% difference in performance. A 3% performance doesn't justify a $100 price hike in our book.
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highlandsun - Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - link
I suppose; for noobs it would just mean they can spread viruses/worms twice as fast.The turbo analogy is good, you've hit another topic near and dear to my heart. :P
(Of course with a properly sized turbo, "lag" is mostly a non-issue.)
Chapbass - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
lol, im assuming you mean dual core...your topic said dual but the post said single... : )As of right now the big push for dual core is for those (like myself) that multitask alot. Yeah, its not a good idea to multitask while gaming and such, but it would be nice to be able to do whatever while im say, burning a dvd with dvdshrink. Or i suppose (depending on how powerful they are, as i dont own one) I could actually probably game while burning a dvd... who knows maybe someone with a dual core can chime in.
I'm sure that once the big name companies start pushing it then software companies will start coding for it.
Bona Fide - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
Well, a lot of workstation applications already are SMP/SMT-aware, since most workstations are built off of Xeon or Opteron setups, which are usually dual or quad processor. Apps like Photoshop, CAD, and 3dStudioMAX all are optimized for dual-core. Here's a complete listing.http://www.denniskarlsson.com/smp/">http://www.denniskarlsson.com/smp/
Does anyone think that AMD's dual-core offering will match up with Intel's any time soon, in terms of price?
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ = $350
Pentium D 820 2.8 = $250
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ = $475
Pentium D 830 3.0 = $350
Athlon 64 X2 4600+ = $690
Pentium D 840 3.4 = $540
Furen - Sunday, September 4, 2005 - link
AMD's 3800+ is a match for the D 830 performance-wise, so the chart should be shifted like this:Pentium D 820 2.8 = $250
Pentium D 830 3.0 = $350 Athlon 64 X2 3800+ = $350
Pentium D 840 3.4 = $540 Athlon 64 X2 4200+ = $475
Athlon 64 X2 4600+ = $690
The problem with AMD (right now) is that they dont have a low speedgrade, and I'm sure this is a purely yield-related Issue. Intel can make cheap because they have much more capacity than AMD (something fab36 will hopefully help AMD deal with) and because they can just slice off a core if it turns out to be defective, effectively making their failed Dual-cores into single-core variants (this is because event hough the 2 cores are on the same die, they are simply side-by-side for the most part).
JarredWalton - Monday, September 5, 2005 - link
Actually, you still don't have the price table correct.1.8 GHz 3000+ ~= Pentium 3.0 GHz
2.0 GHz 3200+ ~= Pentium 3.2 GHz
2.2 GHz 3500+ ~= Pentium 3.4 GHz
2.2 GHz 1MB 3700+ ~= Pentium 3.6 GHz
2.4 GHz 3800+ ~= Pentium 3.8 GHz
(Yes, I AM fudging on what each CPU "equals". The fact of the matter is that in most instances, the 3000+ is actually faster than a 3.0 GHz P4, and that applies to the others as well.)
So, 2x2.0GHz 3800+ is really equal to 2x3.2GHz Pentium D 840. There really is not Intel match for the 4200+ and above parts - the 4200+ is faster in almost every case than even the 840D Extreme Edition. (Tests under Windows XP with four CPU-intensive tasks will put the 840 EE ahead, but that's a Windows scheduler problem.)
joex444 - Tuesday, September 6, 2005 - link
No, the 2x2.0GHz 3800+ is closest to an 830 (2x3.0GHz). The 840 is faster in most benchmarks.It's a little difficult to compare the two, really. The P4 was always faster than the Athlon (64) in certain apps, mainly encoding, while the Athlon was always faster in other things (like everything else, especially gaming). When you put two cores on one PCB, however, things can change. The Athlon X2's design is more advanced than Intel's. AMD really thought it out and made it backwards compatible with Socket 939, at the cost of memory bandwidth rather than invent a new socket. Intel instead requires a new motherboard that offers no real new features other than Pentium D support.
Basically, if you already have a Socket 939 board, it would make more sense to grab an X2 as an upgrade rather than jump ship and go Pentium D. You have to add the cost of a motherboard, something that everyone buying a Pentium D needs, so Intel can offer the chip at a lower cost somewhat, because they are also selling a Northbridge/Southbridge (whatever they decided to call it, that's what they really are). They also put next to no tech design into the Pentium D, little research money comparitivley. They literally glued two cores together and changed the northbridge/BIOS to support the chips. The architecture map shows it, the two cores go through the FSB to talk to each other, just like in a dual Xeon system which has two independent sockets. AMD's cores don't hit the FSB to talk, which can help out in many situations. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel's 800MHz FSB is still fast enough to run two 3.0GHz chips fast enough to compete. If Intel only had DDR FSB (effectively a 400MHz bus) I don't think they could have come out with the Pentium D at the speeds they did. Fortunately for Intel, in their quest to produce the 3.8GHz chips, some fall short, way short, like 2.8 or 3.0, and when you pair them together, glue them together (we saw the IDF pic of a chip w/o it's heat speader) and call it a Pentium D, it works really well for them.
If you had a P4 now, though, it probably makes more sense to get a Pentium D, unless you were looking for leading edge, in which case the 4600+/4800+ (if you just have to have 1MB L2 for each core) is your target.
IDK where I'm going here, so...yea.