Price Guides July 2004: CPU and Motherboards
by Anand Shimpi & Laura Johnston on July 23, 2004 9:32 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
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.
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KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
We added some new hooks in the engine to prevent dealtime from hijacking the *real* link and also to prevent out of stock items from showing up. Hope that helps.Kristopher
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
WarpNine: have some nocona tests coming up within a week.Trogdor, Yeah those cuts are nuts. Finding those Newcastles seems pretty difficult though - none of the big merchants are really carrying them.
Kristopher
TrogdorJW - Tuesday, July 27, 2004 - link
Gotta love the AMD price cuts (FINALLY!!!) on the A64. The "Real Time Pricing" engine is doing its job nicely. Too bad we're still missing the 3200+ 2.2 GHz w/ 512K cache and the 3400+ 2.4 GHz with 512K cache. I think I would take the increased speed over the increased cache on A64 chips.With the new prices, all of the socket 754 chips are now much more affordable (except the 3700+, of course). The 3500+ is still too expensive, but with a price drop of $132, it is now at least a possibility, while at ~$500 it was simply way too expensive. Building my next PC just got a lot cheaper, needless to say. :)
WarpNine - Monday, July 26, 2004 - link
Where is the Nocona?? do you have any ETA when this chips will comes??PrinceGaz - Sunday, July 25, 2004 - link
Yeah, I'm holding out for 90nm S939 too. Its due out in the second half of this year according to the roadmap, but I don't know how many months we have to wait yet.It should be interesting to see how the 1066FSB Prescott's perform, especially as they have 2MB of L2 cache rather than 1MB. I wouldn't have thought the increase in cache would make much difference in performance (not enough to justify the increase in core size), but along with the faster bus speed it should help keep it competitive with the S939 A64's. Now all they have to do is turn on 64-bit capability.
ThePlagiarmaster - Sunday, July 25, 2004 - link
Pumpkinierre:Scarcity. Only 5 places are even advertising the 775 3.4E. Nothing to do with overclocking when nobody can get them to even try to overclock :) While some could go by reviews of chips, they're all marked Intel Confidential from what I've seen. No retail 3.4E 775 has been reviewed AFAIK (though some may have been sold no doubt). HardOCP might have done a review of a retail chip. They usually do...knowing the ES/Confidential ones might not represent retail experiences. I haven't been there in a few weeks.
Unfortunately (for AMD's stock price/profits) they are lowering prices, instead of just dropping in a lower model#. Morons. :) Guess I'll bite now...LOL. Then give it to my dad after the 939 .09's come out. That's the chip that will be the real OC friendly part. With no heat problems showing yet on .13, .09 should be great for them and SOI. With people hitting 2.6 (.13) we should get 3ghz from .09 OC'ed I'd hope.
KristopherKubicki - Saturday, July 24, 2004 - link
danidentity:http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=204...
danidentity - Saturday, July 24, 2004 - link
What is the Intel 925XE chipset? A different revision for the 1066MHz FSB CPUs? I haven't heard anything about that.KristopherKubicki - Saturday, July 24, 2004 - link
Pumpkinierre: I dont want to speculate too much, but if Intel keeps the stock purposely low on the better valued chips right now, the transition to 775 will occur easier.Kristopher
Pumpkinierre - Saturday, July 24, 2004 - link
Sounds like AMD are finally cracking. I notice S478 2.8 celeron-D and 3.4 P4Es have gone up massively in price. The last one 80 bucks more than the S775 3.4E! I wonder why- demand (or scarcity) for upgrade or good overclockers?