Philip Webb wrote:
070709 Julian Simioni wrote:
Since Core 2 Duos are so inexpensive
and will easily outperform and use less power than an Athlon64,
why stick with AMD ? My 4300, which I bought a few weeks ago for $ 110 ,
is the slowest Core 2 Duo, but would probably perform similarly
if not outperform either of the AMD processors you listed.
Intel is going to be announcing some nice price cuts on the 22nd:
esp Q6600, a 2.4GHz quad-core part will be available for a mere $ 266 .
I just checked my usual store's site & prices have dropped dramatically
(that's in the last few hours!), so the AMD 6000+ is now reasonable:
it needs 125 W , but hopefully that's not too much;
it's rated at 3 GHz with 2 x 1 MB L2 cache ; price CAD 197 .
As for Intel, the 4300 is rated at 1,8 GHz & costs CAD 140 ,
while the Q6600 costs CAD 610 , way beyond my limit.
So I'm inclined to stay with AMD, which has worked well since 2003.
If you have to buy right now, there's no way around the fact that the
Core 2 Duo's are just a better chip. Better performance across the
board for less wattage (lower power usage and the machine runs cooler).
AMD is barely staying competitive right now by aggressively slashing
prices to keep its chips close in price/performance ratio. If you
really want to buy AMD, you may be better off waiting for Barcelona in
August. Don't get me wrong, I love AMD. Almost all of my machines at
home have AMD inside, but they're listing along with an old architecture
(The Dual-Core K8 chips were first released in August 2005, K8 itself
was sometime 2003).
The other nice thing about Intel + Linux right now is open source
drivers (assuming you aren't a gamer and thus in need of one of the
NVidia discrete graphics cards)
Back in April (2 price-cuts ago), I got myself the following:
(All prices CAD, tax not incl.)
114.38 - Antec NSK1300 (mATX case + PSU)
169.99 - 2x1GB Corsair DDR2-667 RAM
112.70 - ASRock Conroe 1333-DVI/H Motherboard (mATX, PCI-E, onboard
Intel 945G graphics, onboard sound, GBLAN)
243.10 - Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 (1.86Ghz, 1066 FSB, 2MB Cache)
DVD-ROM and Harddrive (some SATA 200GB drive) were scrounged from
amongst existing machines.
Right now I've got 64bit Fedora 7 on it, but the machine absolutely
flies at everything I use it for. Eventually I'll find time to run
Gentoo on it and tinker with E17. And yes, the 2GB RAM is probably
overkill since I've never actually taken it all that close to filling up
RAM let alone swapping to disk.
Seriously, give the Core2's another look.
Hope this helps,
O.
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