AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Considering this chip can be picked up for a mere $200 or so, it’s quite the powerhouse when it comes to games. It doesn’t lag far behind the high end chips either, as our benchmarks proved.
AMD traditionally don’t do too well in PCMark04, as Intel’s HyperThreading abilities really shine in this benchmark. So it’s no surprise to see that the 3200+ even lagged behind the lowly 2.8GHz Prescott Pentium 4. However, the picture changes when it comes to gaming performance, with the 3200+ solidly beating the slower Pentium 4 in every gaming based benchmark. The biggest difference between it and the Pentium 4 was in FarCry, where the 3200+ was around 25 percent faster than Intel’s offering.
Even though it was squarely beaten by the high end chips in 3DMark2001 SE, look to the 3DMark03 and FarCry results to see how closely this chip runs to the big boys in today’s games, where the video subsystem is more of a stumbling block. For only $200, you can’t really go wrong with the Athlon 64 3200+, as it provides more than enough grunt to run today’s games with ease.
Intel Prescott 2.8GHz
It’s hard to believe that you can now pick up a 2.8GHz CPU for less than $150. You could say that CPUs are now cheap as chips. Nyuk nyuk. Considering this processor should quite happily overclock to 3.3GHz, provided you don’t mind doing some tweaking, it’s amazing just how rapidly CPUs have become one of the cheapest parts of your PC.
But if you’re not comfortable overclocking, this Socket 478 CPU won’t offer blinding performance. As expected, it pipped the Athlon 64 3200+ in the productivity application based PCMark04, but it lagged behind in all of the gaming based benchmarks. It managed to keep fairly close to the 3200+ in the heavily GPU-dependent 3DMark03, but the real failings of this chip were displayed in FarCry, where it lagged behind by around 25 percent.
If you don’t mind heading into the BIOS to change a couple of settings, the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 could provide a nice performance boost for owners of older Socket 478 boards running CPUs in the 2GHz range. But if you’re looking to upgrade with the future in mind, it’s worth spending an extra $50 for the 3200+.
AMD Athlon FX-55
While it’s one of the fastest chips on the market, the FX-55 is a great example of why it’s not worth spending a massive amount on your CPU. If you can fi nd one in stock, expect to pay upwards of $1100 or so for AMD’s fl agship gaming CPU. For this price you’d be forgiven for expecting a massive leap in performance, but as our benchmarks show this isn’t the case.
It lags far behind the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 in PCMark04, but to be honest we’re not too concerned if a Word document takes 0.7 seconds to open rather than 0.5. Things are neck and neck between the two in 3DMark2001 SE, while the FX-55 lags behind a little in 3DMark03. It had a slight lead over the 3.73GHz Pentium 4 in FarCry, but not enough that you’d actually notice it while playing the game, unless you were Rain Man.
The fact that it’s not that much faster than the 3200+ in game performance means we can’t justify the six fold increase in price of the FX-55. Definitely a CPU for those with more dollars than sense.
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz
Just when you thought the FX-55 was ridiculously expensive, along comes the Extreme Edition. Sure, it runs at a super fast frequency (just think, 4GHz could be yours with a tiny bit of tweaking!) and a whopping 2MB of cache, but this comes at a price. Over $1500 in fact for most retailers. And once again the lowly $200 3200+ gives this chip a good run for its buckets of money. If all you’re worried about is your productivity applications running well, then by all means, spend as much on this one CPU as many people spend on their entire system.
And there’s no denying that its HyperThreading feature makes for excellent responsiveness when it comes to multi-tasking. But for those of us who don’t have a couple of million in the bank, the Extreme Edition is an extreme waste of money.
PCMark04
3DMark03
3DMark2001 SE (software render)
FarCry (800 x 600 high detail)
Issue: 137 | June, 2012