Price Guide, June 2006: Processors

Intel Dual Core/High-End CPUs

While AMD has just finished launching their new platform, we're still waiting for retail availability of the Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors. All of the preview testing that we have conducted is extremely promising, and while there may be a few benchmarks that AMD can continue to win, we're quite certain that Intel will hold the overall performance crown in the near future. The one major question that remains unanswered -- and we're not too optimistic here -- is what the retail availability of Core 2 Duo parts will be at launch. Intel's prices on Core 2 Duo parts are pretty competitive, but if supply can't keep up with demand we expect to see some price gouging in the short-term. It may be that your best bet for getting a Core 2 Duo configuration near launch will be by purchasing a computer from a system vendor: Dell, HP, Falcon Northwest, VoodooPC, etc. That's all in the future, however, so let's look at the current processor offerings.


Intel seems well aware of the fact that everyone is waiting for their new processor line to launch. In the meantime, how do you get people to buy your current products? By making the prices more attractive, naturally. You can see that Intel made some major price cuts on most of their Pentium D offerings about two months ago, and while they continue to draw more power and run hotter than the Athlon X2 processors, their prices are far more compelling.

Roughly matching the X2 3800+ in terms of performance (though it remains slower in games), the Pentium D 930 is now selling for $176 [RTPE: BX80553930] -- you could almost purchase two of these for the price of the cheapest Athlon X2 chip. If you're more interested in spending the same amount of money, you can add an extra 400 MHz and pick up the Pentium D 950 for $328 [RTPE: BX80553950]. Either of those options is more than reasonable, but perhaps the most interesting Intel processor right now remains the Pentium D 805 [RTPE: BX80551PE2666FN], going for $112. The slower FSB speeds hamper performance, but it also means that you can usually get reasonable overclocking out of almost any motherboard. 3.5 GHz appears to be a relatively common result using the included heatsink, and even without overclocking it's hard to beat the price/performance offered by this chip.


At the other end of the price/performance spectrum, you can find Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition offerings. Dual cores along with hyper threading give you the ability to run up to four threads simultaneously, though whether or not people will realistically be able to make use of such a configuration is debatable. If you're looking to spend over $1000 on a processor, we definitely recommend AMD's Athlon FX processors over the current Intel Pentium XE chips. A better recommendation would be to wait for the launch of the Core 2 Extreme, as it will carry a similar price while offering more performance and lower power consumption.