Price Guides - January 2005: CPUs Galore

Intel Celeron, Xeon, AMD Opteron

The Xeon and Celeron portions of our CPU guides are always the hardest to analyze for us. We went several months without Socket 775 Celeron D processors, which wasn't the end of the world, but now, Celeron has started to retake some limelight now that significant numbers of 915G [RTPE: Intel 915G] and 915P [RTPE: Intel 915P] solutions exist. Celeron D certainly is no wonder chip, but it does give Sempron a run for its money – and both Sempron and Celeron are priced comparatively these days. The 2.66GHz Celeron D 330 [RTPE: BX80547RE2667C] clearly has the best price/performance ratio of all the Celeron D's and that remains to be our Celeron pick if you insist on choosing Intel over AMD this week. We still think that Sempron comes out on top in the price/performance race, but in most benchmarks, the results are extremely close. Since AMD motherboards are generally cheaper, the Sempron route is still the way to go if you want to save a few bucks.

Xeons are a particularly fun chip to watch because even though Intel will change the MSRP, the few large merchants usually play a tit-for-tat bidding war instead of a single massive drop like we get with the desktop chips. Similar to the Pentium 4 "J" series processors that, overnight, started to replace processors without XD stack protection, the Xeon "A" processors literally showed up one day and replaced almost all variants of the 3.4GHz [RTPE: BX80546KG3400E] and 3.6GHz [RTPE: BX80546KG3600E] vanilla processors. The "A" versions only add XD stack protection, since EM64T was present in all (both) Intel Xeon processors during the 3.2GHz days. Although Intel has the price floor set relatively low on the 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz models, the few merchants that carry the chips are taking advantage of the comparatively strong demand and high margin. Check out the 3.4GHz Xeon, which was marked down in September by Intel, but continued near its old price for months – even into today!

For sanity reasons, we just lump the "A" versions with the vanilla processors in our engine just as we do with the "J" versions of the Pentium 4 processors. There is no cost premium on the XD stack protected versions, which we feel is a great decision on Intel's behalf. Unfortunately, that still doesn't mean that you won't pay through the nose even though new Xeon and Opterons aren't far behind.

Xeon 3.4GHz

While the majority of our readers would never come across a situation in which they would ever need to buy a Xeon or an Opteron, here are the weekly deltas for both product lines.