Price Guide, June 2006: Processors

Intel Single Core/Midrange CPUs

While AMD's single core chips are still reasonably attractive given the high prices of the X2 lineup, the same does not hold true for Intel. If you plan on spending anything more than $100 on an Intel chip, you should clearly be looking at the Pentium D lineup. AMD's Athlon 64 chips also have a definite advantage in terms of price/performance, with the single core 3800+ outperforming pretty much any of the Pentium 4 offerings. About the only reason we would even consider a Pentium 4 chip at this point in time would be as a replacement or upgrade on an older motherboard that can't support Pentium D. Even in that case, we would give serious thought towards upgrading to a new motherboard and CPU instead. Here's a quick look at the Pentium 4 prices. (Note that the Extreme models that show up in this case are actually single core + Hyper-Threading models -- not that we'd recommend them at current prices.)


Other than the Pentium 4 506, all of the Pentium 4 prices bottom out at around $150. The 506 is also limited by a slower front side bus, and it has the same clock speed of the dual core Pentium D 805. An extra $30 will basically double your theoretical computational performance. If you really need a Pentium 4 processor and you can't use (or don't want) Pentium D, the best price/performance option is the Pentium 4 541 [RTPE: BX80547PG3200EK], priced at $168 for the OEM version. If you need a retail processor, on the other hand, go for the Pentium 4 631 [RTPE: BX80552631] for $173. It has a slightly lower clock speed but comes with 2 MB of cache. Flip back to the Pentium D prices and you'll see why neither of these is a great buy -- you can basically get the second processor core for free!