Price Guides July 2004: CPU and Motherboards

Now that AMD has had a little more time to produce additional Athlon 64's is it finally time to bite the baited hook? Maybe. While Microsoft hasn't released a final edition of their 64-bit version of Windows XP, AMD's foresight can still make the A64 processor a viable option.

If you choose to go the MS Windows route, you won't necessarily be able to take full advantage of everything A64's have to offer, but you can still get some noticeable performance improvements in CPU-intensive tasks such as gaming and media encoding. If you were to feel up to the challenge, a 64-bit flavor of Linux could even let you run applications even more efficiently.

For the above reasons, and others, this week's top pick goes to AMD's Athlon 64 2800+. With recent price drops, the A64 2800+ gives you more crunching power to keep your system going for now, and for quite some time to come, while costing less than some 2.4GHz P4 processors. Additionally, the 2800+ will allow you take advantage of Windows XP 64-bit edition once it becomes available which further future-proofs your investment. On that note, be aware that socket 754 is already being phased out by AMD in favor of 939. While this may be a concern if you tend to swap out processors frequently while keeping the same motherboard for as long, it should not be a hindrance if you intend to keep this chip for a while. Additionally, AMD will be releasing up to the 3700+ mark for this socket, so not all hope is lost. Best of all, as AMD ramps up its socket 939 production and rollout, 754 will only become more affordable as the last few weeks have shown us.

Back on the 32-bit side of things this week's pick goes to the Athlon XP 2600+. This is a very small change from our previous recommendation of the 2500+ but is brought about by lowered prices to the point where the 2600+ is lower in cost. Just as good for overclocking as the 2500+ Barton, which has been known to reach the equivelant speeds of an XP 3200+, the 2600+ maintains AMD's hold on the value segment.