Midrange CPU Roundup: It's Time to Buy

Final Words

Looking at the platform as a whole, AMD has a much better integrated graphics story. The AMD 690G chipset is every bit as stable and reliable in our experience as Intel's offerings, all while offering far superior graphics performance at competitive prices. In our opinion however, if you really want to game with a machine built on one of these platforms you're far better off picking up a cheap graphics card rather than trying to rely on mediocre integrated graphics.

Both AMD and Intel have enough horsepower with their integrated graphics solutions to drive Windows Vista's Aero interface, so if you're not going to be gaming then either integrated graphics solutions is more than enough. Windows and animations did seem to render more smoothly on the Intel platform but we're not sure if that's a driver, GPU, or CPU advantage.

AMD and Intel are unbelievably close when it comes to mainstream CPU performance - far closer than we expected. There are a couple of exceptions, however. DivX encoding in particular is extremely strong on Intel CPUs where AMD just can't compete these days.

If you're choosing between the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and 4800+ definitely go for the latter. The performance difference is so small that we don't even understand why AMD has both speed grades. At the 2.5GHz+ clock speeds we're talking about, 100MHz differences don't amount to a significant enough performance difference to justify any increase in cost.

The Athlon X2 BE-2350 does reduce power consumption, but at a noticeable increase to cost. However, if you're building an AMD system, we'd recommend the BE-2350 over the Athlon 64 X2 4000+ given the reduction in power consumption. Power costs over the life of the system should eventually negate the $18 price penalty.

Although AMD remains very competitive in the vast majority of benchmarks, given the virtual price parity Intel's performance advantages in some tests make the Core 2 or Pentium Dual-Core a more sensible buy. Both the Core 2 Duo E4500 and Pentium E2160 are great choices, as are their lower clocked variants; it really boils down to price point.

Once you take overclocking into account though, it's tough to beat Intel's Pentium Dual-Core lineup. With 65%+ overclocks - with little effort and using stock cooling - the Pentium E2140 and E2160 are easily the best buys on the market today. If you're absolutely opposed to overclocking, then the AMD/Intel question is a tossup, but if you've got no problems pushing clocks then Intel is the clear choice at all price points.

Where does the future lie?

Performance between these two companies is quite close already in the mainstream segment but what about when Phenom and Penryn reach these affordable price points?

One of the biggest gaps we saw in the performance comparison is DivX performance. If we look at our Phenom Preview, it looks like Phenom will improve DivX encoding performance by around 11% at the same clock speed, which would be enough for AMD to be more than competitive; unfortunately, Penryn will also improve DivX performance by around 10% (and upcoming SSE4 optimizations could increase that figure dramatically).

It's really a question of whether Penryn or Phenom will reach these lower price points first, but we have a feeling that both may make it down here at about the same time. If that's true then it looks like although AMD and Intel will remain competitive in the future, Intel will hold the slight edge just as it does today.

We honestly don't expect Phenom/Penryn to really change the picture much from the overclocker's perspective either. While we're hearing rumors that Phenom will clock higher than K8, Penryn will be on a cooler running 45nm process, which should allow for even higher clock speeds (read: even higher overclocks). As long as competition stays reasonably tight, though, the real winner isn't going to be Intel or AMD: it's going to be the end-users. At least we won't have to feel too guilty about indulging our computer addictions.