Price Guides November 2004: CPU and Motherboards
by Adam Rader on November 18, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
AMD Processors - Athlon 64
PC gaming is one of the areas that drives a very large percentage of hardware purchases. AMD knows this and they currently lead the pack in gaming performance with their Athlon 64 lineup of processors. Even without running a 64-bit operating system or even applications, it's possible to get leading performance in a wide variety of PC game titles from these chips. As soon as Microsoft has Windows XP 64 ready for the public, and hardware vendors create functional drivers for their devices to run in this new environment, it will only help boost the longevity of any Athlon 64 processor purchased today.The really good news for these high-performance chips is that they are not terribly expensive and are widely available - two facts that don't come together as a mere coincidence.
Socket 754
This week's top pick for an entry-level Athlon 64 goes to the Athlon 64 2800+ (Newcastle/Socket 754), which is available for as low as $120. The actual clock speed of the 2800+ is 1.8GHz and has shown itself to be a great choice as an entry into the 64-bit world as well as for gaming and general desktop usage.
Socket 939
Socket 939 has started to become a bit more attractive lately as prices have been on a downward trend these last few weeks. To top that off, the K8T800 Pro chipset has become more widely available on motherboards while NVIDIA is just starting to bring nForce4 to market. Granted, 939 has always held a bit more leverage, since, unlike socket 754 chips and boards, it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.To keep things relatively affordable, as well as preventing extreme levels of overkill on both power and price, the AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Winchester/Socket 939) comes out as the top choice. This chip does a pretty good job of balancing the power to performance scale and throws in the fact that the 939 platform is the one that AMD plans to keep around long enough to realize higher clock speeds. This makes for a stable future upgrade path that should keep you from feeling buyer's remorse a year or so down the road. The 3200+ is already clocked at 2.0GHz and, when paired up with the right motherboard, is capable of some nice overclocks.
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Chadder007 - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
"N'wood S478 3.4c $133 more than 3.4 Prescott. Unbelievable. You can see what people are buying. intel should continue with N'wood and S478. "I agree about Socket 478....Intel didn't care to give those users too much of an upgrade path and just jumped all over to the new socket way too soon with little justification to do so.
qballshalls2002 - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
Still waiting for the nForce4 boards to show before I go slurging again. Hehehe!aw - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
Haha...sorry...I meant if you were trying to get to 1:1 DDR600 like a lot of Anandtechers are inclined to do. My DDR is bigger than your DDR;-)
jmke - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
" The only thing that will hold it back is the quality of your RAM... "most A64 boards features excellent memory:htt(fsb) dividers, and the impact on performance versus running memory at 1:1 is minimal
aw - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
I agree with #8. My new 3000+ easily hits 2.4ghz which makes it $160 3800+. The only thing that will hold it back is the quality of your RAM...arswihart - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
why get Athlon64 3200+ 90nm instead of 3000+? Can't they both overclock the same, as shown in Anand's own tests?bofkentucky - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
In the 9xx board section, its is the intel 915 chipset, not 912.Pumpkinierre - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
N'wood S478 3.4c $133 more than 3.4 Prescott. Unbelievable. You can see what people are buying. intel should continue with N'wood and S478.PseudoKnight - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
The Athlon XP 2800+ is flipping me off. I'm scared.slurmsmackenzie - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
how come the 915 chipset isn't listed? it offers pci-e without the conversion to ddr2? anandtech always puts the emphasis on the fact that an upgrade to 775 is an entire system overhaul, when 915 offers the meager upgrade of processor/mobo, or cpu/mobo/video card without a performance drop from 925x. so why a 925x board is suggested for price/performance efficiency is beyond me.