Price Guides - January 2005: CPUs Galore

AMD Sempron/Athlon XP

For those of us who don't get the chance to choose our platforms or perhaps, against all sane advice, do not want an Athlon 64 system, the old Socket 462 can still provide some comparable performance. Unfortunately, that performance is just priced a tad disproportionately from the rest of AMD's offerings. The Athlon XP 2200+ [RTPE: AXDA2200DUT3C] and the Sempron 2500+ [RTPE: SDA2500DUT3D] are both aggressively priced value processors; though keep in mind, equivalently marked Semprons perform slightly slower than their Athlon XP counterparts.

If you really must grab one of those monster overclocking Athlon XP 2500+ chips, we insist that you get the mobile version instead, since it retails for about $10 less! These Athlon 2500+ Mobile processors actually overclock a little bit better than their desktop counterpart! Athlon XP processors continue to get marked up as supply drops out - but there still seems to be enough mobility processors to keep demand at bay. Just check out the current trends in both the 2500+ mobility and the 2500+ desktop.

Athlon XP 2500+

Athlon XP 2500+ Mobile

Our former value pick, the Sempron 3100+ [RTPE: SDA3100AIP3AX], has dipped in price a lot over the last six months, but not enough to warrant a purchase over the Athlon 64 2800+ for $8 more. Windows XP 64-bit Edition is already in release candidate, and the initial benchmarks show some pretty exciting performance increases out of the box. The unfortunate trade off of driver support is something that will have to be addressed in the future, but at least with an Athlon 64 2800+, you have the option to run 32-bit or 64-bit at a later date when support has been ironed out.

We recently received word from several distributors that the 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz Durons [RTPE: DHD1800DLV1C] are all but dried up. If you still want one for a pet project, you better act now before prices start to slowly climb back.