Price Guides July 2004: CPU and Motherboards

AMD CPU's

AMD has been pretty busy lately and their current socket lineup stands as evidence to this. Right now there are three sockets from which to choose and it can get a little overwhelming, since we're all so used to having nothing but socket A to deal with.

Firstly, socket A is still here for a little bit longer, so you can still stick to the tried and true Athlon XP chips. Since AMD is trying to push their A64 products, there isn't anything new to report here. The Athlon XP 2500+ still holds the crown for giving the most bang for the buck. For an extremely overclockable chip at a very reasonable price point, the 2500+ Barton is a lot of power for its cost. Right next to this chip is the Athlon XP Mobile series, which gives even more room for overclocking and only costs a few dollars more than the standard chips. Both the Athlon XP 2400 and 2500 Mobile processors are priced within the reach of most users and should prove to be a reliable and well-performing upgrade or inclusion for your system.

If 64-bit computing has caught your attention as it has ours, the Athlon 64 3000+ is a solid choice. This chip performs very well against Intel's 3.2 GHz P4 for $80-$100 less. Of course, as an added bonus, you also get the luxury of running 64-bit applications natively (assuming you either have a pre-release version of Windows XP 64, or possibly a Linux distribution that is compiled for the A64 platform). The future-proofing that the A64 3000+ gives earns it a place as the top recommendation for AMD-built 64-bit computing.

Since AMD has started its socket blitz, two other sockets have hit the market aside from the initial 754 that you can find on chips such as the above A64 3000+. Currently available from numerous online retailers are chips based on the new socket 939 and 940. While both of these sockets will eventually overshadow the old, they are still much too pricey for us to recommend in this guide.