Price Guides March 2005: Processors

AMD Athlon 64

Little to anyone’s surprise, the 90nm, Socket 939 Athlon 64s remains our processor of choice on the desktop. Choosing the Socket 939 Athlon 64s over the Socket 754 processors is an easy choice for any buyer; the “sweet spot” Socket 939 Athlon 64s cost anywhere from $10 to $20 less than their Socket 754 counterparts. Now that MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte all have relatively inexpensive nForce3, nForce4 and K8T800 Socket 939 options, there should be no excuse to stick with the socket 754 socket.

In our opinion, the greatest advantage of going Socket 939 over 754 is the PCI Express capability. If you already have a nice AGP video card, then perhaps an nForce3 939 motherboard might still be in your future. However, notice that the ATI AGP video cards already lag three months behind their PCIe SKUs. If this trend continues, we will be very lucky to see any current generation AGP cards by the end of the year!



We established Socket 939 as a viable option over Socket 754 without even delving into the ever controversial dual channel versus single channel argument. The Socket 939 chips that we like the best (the Socket 939 Athlon 64 3000+ and Athlon 64 3200+ [RTPE: ADA3000DIK4B, ADA3200DIK4B]) are 90nm processors only. AMD will start to release new 90nm SKUs before the summer, but we are fairly limited to only a few processors at this point. Don’t forget to check out our initial impressions of 90nm AMD processors back in October of last year.

You’ll notice from the chart above that our price engine didn’t pick up any Turion 64 processors anywhere. We were supposed to see Turion laptops by now, but considering the carefree release schedules of everyone from AMD to ATI to Intel to NVIDIA, we probably won’t see laptops or retail processors for several weeks (or months?). The DTR and mobility Athlon 64s don’t appear to be showing any signs of age yet; all of the Athlon 64 DTR processors continue to drop a steady 6% each month – you can almost set your calendar to it.

Last but not least, there are always the little Semprons. The silently launched Socket 754 Sempron 2600+, 2800+ and 3000+ [RTPE: SDA2600AIO2BA, SDA2800AIO3BA, and SDA3000AIO2BA] pack some of the bang-for-buck punches that we have seen in a long time; particularly for sub $100 processors. Only a few merchants carry the newest Semprons, but if you have an older nForce3 motherboard lying around, an $80 Sempron 2600+ becomes an awesome platform to give that pet Linux or PVR project a try.



For those still interested in prolonging the inevitable death of Socket 462, the Sempron lineup offers several modified Athlon XP choices. However, as many die-hard Athlon overclockers know, the wonder chips always were, and still continue to be the Athlon XP Mobile chips.



They aren’t the speed demons that they once were, but for the dollar, you can still crunch some incredible performance out of the Athlon XP Mobility line on chips that will clock higher than their desktop counterparts. If you aren’t ready to take the penalties of the Sempron cache size without willing to give up on Socket A just yet, the XP-M chips are your last hope.