Price Guide, June 2006: Processors

AMD and Intel Budget CPUs

Moving on to the AMD budget offerings, things have become both more interesting and less interesting. With socket AM2, you can now run everything from a lowly Sempron up through the fastest Athlon FX-62 on the same motherboard. Sounds great, right? The dual channel memory controller present on all AM2 processors should also improve performance relative to the older socket 754 Semprons; in fact, Sempron chips running on socket AM2 should be very close in performance to single core Athlon 64 chips. So what's the problem? Prices. Here are the socket AM2 Sempron offerings.


Other than the Sempron 2800+ [RTPE: SDA2800CNBOX] ($65) and the Sempron 3000+ [RTPE: SDA3000CNBOX] ($75), all of the Sempron AM2 parts cost as much as equivalently clocked Athlon 64 AM2 chips. The 2800+ and 3000+ are clocked at 1.6 GHz with 128KB and 256KB of L2 cache respectively, with the 3200+ and 3400+ clocked at 1.8 GHz -- the same as the Athlon 64 3000+. If you're looking to save money by purchasing the cheapest processor available, go ahead and grab the 2800+. Otherwise, you might as well skip the Sempron line and go straight for the single core Athlon 64s.

What about socket 754? AMD has indicated that socket 754 will remain around longer than socket 939 in terms of chip production, but that's probably more for the mobile sector than for budget offerings. If you've already got a socket 754 system you might be able to find a reasonable upgrade, but as more time passes socket 939/AM2 are only becoming more attractive for the desktop. Anything beyond the Athlon 64 3400+ Newcastle [RTPE: ADA3400AXBOX] ($146 retail) and you should look to upgrading your motherboard as well as processor instead. (We mention socket 939 as an upgrade option simply because if you already have DDR memory you will be able to keep that, move to a dual channel memory controller, and get the option for dual core processors as well.)


We didn't include the non-64-bit Semprons, simply because they are priced basically the same as the 64-bit versions so there's no reason to lose that feature. Also note that similar to the AM2 processors, there's no reason to get anything above the Sempron 64 3000+, as the socket 754 Athlon 64 parts are priced about the same as the Sempron 64s with the same clock speed.


Intel's NetBurst architecture is far less forgiving of L2 cache size reductions, so even with higher clock speeds than Pentium 4 chips the Celeron D will often perform worse. If you need a cheap socket 775 chip and you don't want to spend $85 on the Pentium 4 506, we would suggest going with the Celeron D 331 [RTPE: BX80547RE2667CN] for $53. For about $10 more, you could also upgrade to the Celeron D 341 [RTPE: BX80547RE2933CN]. Even with a clock speed of 2.93 GHz, though, the 341 will typically be outperformed by the 2.66 GHz Pentium 4 506.