Head to Head Cheap CPU Chips (Sandra Prior)
Nov 14, 2009
AMD Athlon X27750+ Black Edition. Price: $100
An AMD Black Edition processor for just $100? What devilry is this? Well, despite the arrival of the improved Phenom II, the lower end of the scale is where AMD still overwhelmingly operates.
An unlocked CPU multiplier for easy overclocking is a feature that only comes with Intel CPUs costing well above $1500. The 7750's other item of interest is 2MB of shared L3 cache. That's right, this chip is actually based on the first-generation 65nm Phenom architecture and therefore benefits from a few added extras included wider floating point execution.
Overall, a pretty nice dual-core CPU at the stock 2.7GHz operating frequency. The only slight let-down is its inability to clock beyond 3.lGHz.
Intel Pentium Dual-core E2180. Price: $100
Intel's baffling alphanumeric naming scheme requires a sextuple first in philology to correctly identify any of its current legion of low end PC processors. But the 'Pentium' branding shows that this is a very modest beast.
Headline specs aren't blinding. It chugs along at a wheezy 2GHz and sports just 1MB of cache memory, and 65nm is elderly by Intel's standards. It is at least based on the Core 2 architecture. So it's not some ghastly old Pentium 4 Netburst atrocity resurrected for one last ride.
At stock clockspeeds, there's no point pretending it's anything other than snaily. But here's the thing: it will happily run at beyond 3GHz. In that context, it's a bit of a bargain.
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