AMD and Intel $300 Budget PC Shootout

Tom's Hardware Guide finds out if an AMD or Intel powered system with a $300 budget offered a better deal. The budget excluded the purchase of a display and software.

"The remaining question is: Which is the better low-cost solution, the AMD or the Intel system? Most of the benchmarks are dominated by Intel's Celeron D processor 352, which was even cheaper than the Sempron 3400+. AMD, however, also offers a reasonably priced Sempron 3600+ and single-core Athlon 64 processors, which can speed the system up, but this would add more cost. Both solutions roughly consume the same amount of energy, which is ~53-54 W in idle and ~60-62 W under load. Differences thus can be found in performance. Ironically, Intel won this shootout with a product that is based on its often criticized NetBurst architecture. Such is life." [Tom's Hardware Guide]

The factors that contributed to the Celeron's better performance could be the higher clock speed (Celeron: 3.2GHz vs. Sempron: 1.8GHz) and a larger L2 cache (Celeron: 512kB vs. Sempron: 256kB). The reviewer did mention that an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ at 2.0 GHz and 512 kB L2 cache would have been a better choice, but was $10 over the processor budget.

I noticed that the AMD rig used a VIA K8M890 chipset. Was it a better choice than using a board with the Nvidia 6100 / Nforce 4 chipset? I guess they would have performed similarly using the built-in graphics, but can the Nvidia chipset be a little better if you decide to add a graphics card?

Notes on the review article:

• AMD socket 939 and socket 754 are outdated. Be sure to get AM2 (socket 940).
• The Core 2 processor is far superior and more energy-efficient than anything else.
• A decent motherboard would usually cost around $150.
• Anything below 512 MB RAM is unacceptable. Windows Vista requires one gigabyte of RAM to run smoothly.
• Go for at least 350 W Power Supply today if you want to use a dedicated graphics card. The more the better, but anything above 500 W is only necessary for high-end systems with multiple graphics cards and other components.

You usually get what you pay for, but of course, not all people would want to spend thousands of dollars on a PC box for office and multimedia tasks.

Technorati : amd, budget, celeron, intel, processor, sempron