One of the perks of working for a magazine about performance hardware is that, rather conveniently, all the latest high-end kit is sent to us in the post. We're sent low-end and mid-range kit too, which is also great, but it's the flagship products that really grab our attention, whether it's a GeForce 7800 GTX 512 or a set of Logitech Z-5500 speakers. Considering this, you might think that in a group test of every available CPU, the models that I'd be most excited about would be the super-expensive ones. But you'd be wrong.
Out of the 38 CPUs that arrived in our labs this issue, the one that was the most talked about and desired wasn't the £700 Athlon 64 FX-57, or the similarly expensive Pentium Extreme Edition 840. The CPU that everybody wanted cost just £95.
The CPU in question is AMD's Socket 939 Opteron 144, which is the base-level CPU in AMD's Socket 939 Opteron 1-series family. Technically, this isn't a desktop chip at all, since AMD's Opteron range is intended for workstations but, as the 144 uses standard Socket 939 packaging, it works in any Socket 939 motherboard. More importantly, the 144 is based on the San Diego core, which is the same core used for AMD's Athlon 64 FX-57. This means that despite its low clock speed of just 1.8GHz, the Opteron 144 has the potential to overclock to speeds similar to those of the fastest single-core CPUs that AMD produces. Depending on which stepping you buy, you could easily bag a CPU for £95 that can be overclocked to perform as well as, or even better than, one costing over seven times more.
The Socket 939 Opteron 1-series is a fairly extreme example of a low-end CPU being able to match the performance of top-end chips, but it isn't the only one. For example, a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3800+ will overclock to speeds close to - or, in the case of Extreme Prometeia's Tempest SF:X2 PC faster than - an Athlon 64 X2 4800+, and pretty much any budget Pentium 4 will overclock to frequencies comparable to those of the fastest chips Intel produces. This begs the question: is it worth buying a high-end CPU at all?
Confident overclockers will be able to answer this question easily, but even if you don't intend to overclock, the benefits of buying flagship CPUs are still quite small. As our results show, in particular our 'bangs per buck' and 'value for money' graphs, performance doesn't increase proportionally with cost, regardless of whether you're editing photos or playing games. For the enthusiast, it makes sense to spend less and make up the difference from overclocking.
However, while the Opteron 144 is basically an Athlon 64 FX-57 in different clothes, the same can't be said of other hardware. For example, you can't buy a GeForce 6600, double its memory bus width and the number of vertex shader and pixel pipes and quadruple the number of ROPs to create a GeForce 6800 GT. It would be nice if you could, but it simply isn't possible. The same goes for motherboards; there's no chance that you'll be able to buy a cheap motherboard, de-solder and replace the chipset and power circuitry, and hack the BIOS so that it supports new features. If you want a board that overclocks well and supports high-end features, then you have to buy a high-end board - not so with CPUs.
Sometimes there's no escaping the fact that to get good performance you simply have to spend more money, but the Opteron 144 goes to show that the most expensive, most blingtastic hardware isn't always the most exciting.
Author: Gareth Ogden
Custom PC Online