Midrange CPU Roundup: It's Time to Buy

@ 2007/09/28
Throughout the past few CPU articles we've mentioned that now is an absolutely wonderful time to be building a new system thanks to incredibly competitive CPU prices. The AMD/Intel price war has really paid off in making the marketplace more competitive. The fact that you can buy a very fast quad-core processor for less than $300 is just incredible.

At the same time, it's very easy to get caught up in recommending the higher end parts simply because they are priced so low now. AMD's entire Socket-AM2 product lineup can be had for under $300, but we've primarily focused on the $150 - $300 range, when both AMD and Intel have some very powerful CPUs available at or below $100.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/09/28
Very much liked the fact they included Overclocked results for the systems, really shows the headroom of Intel CPU, making the cheapest E2140 best the most expensive AMD CPU in the test.

Quote:
Here's the problem: the fastest AMD CPU we tested gets around 45 fps in our WME test, while the cheapest Intel CPU when overclocked gets 51 fps. There's no simpler way of putting it: if you take overclocking into account, there's just no way to even consider the AMD CPUs. With the Pentium E2140 and 2160 boasting 65%+ overclocks, their performance reaches levels greater than the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (and some of the faster Athlon X2 CPUs as well).