

Performance / Price for CPUs - prat
http://paulisageek.com/compare/cpu/

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cperciva
Price-performance ratios for CPUs are completely bogus, because you never run
a CPU by itself. If your case/power supply/motherboard/RAM/disk collectively
$400 and you have a choice between a $100 CPU with performance X and a $200
CPU with performance 1.5 X, the faster CPU has a performance/price ratio which
is 25% worse -- but using the faster CPU gives you a _system_ with a
performance/price ratio which is 25% better.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
That is assuming CPU is the defining factor in the speed of your computer. For
vast majority of users, this is just plain false -- a 60$ Athlon II dual core
with a 200$ SSD massively outperforms a 950$ i7 975 that is paired with a
traditional HD in nearly all of the use cases a normal desktop user encounters
-- And if you are into gaming, that same 60$ processor paired with a 300$
HD5870 high-end graphics card easily outperforms the same i7 paired with
HD5850, _the next-best model_ that costs only 50$ less.

~~~
manvsmachine
Good point, but not always true. It's a myth that game performance is
universally GPU-bound. Most notably, most MMORPG's, many RTS's and pretty much
anything made with the Source engine are more dependent on CPU performance.

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tedunangst
Apparently I'm the only one who only saw a single CPU listed, with a hundred
in the no price section?

Clicking update I get tons of:

Warning: preg_match() expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in
/var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19 {"name":"686
Gen","score":"267","rank":"718","search_name":"686 Gen"} Warning: preg_match()
expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in
/var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19 {"name":"AMD
Athlon 1640B","score":"705","rank":"442","search_name":"1640B"} Warning:
preg_match() expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in
/var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19 {"name":"AMD
Athlon 2500+","score":"423","rank":"567","search_name":"2500+"}

~~~
ptarjan
I was having problems with the newegg data stream. Updates are disabled until
YQL unblocks me in 1 day.

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tricky
Along the same line - GB/$ page for storage using prices from newegg:

<http://forre.st/storage>

Are there other aggregate sites like these?

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meroliph
Using a synthetic benchmark is not exactly very accurate in order to determine
price/performance, as not everyone is going to buy a processor to do
Passmark's benchmark all day, not to mention the fact that certain processors
might not contain the same features as others (ex: virtualization support).

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SwellJoe
Since I haven't bought a new desktop machine in nearly three years (until this
machine, I upgraded religiously every 18 months), because my current CPU is
still plenty fast for the work that I do (partly because I no longer work with
C/C++, and partly because processors are just so damned fast these days), I
would like to see power consumption / performance mapped out like this. So,
energy efficiency is a much more important factor to me these days.

~~~
ptarjan
If you find me a site that has the power consumption data I'll happily add it.

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dtf
Bookmarked! I hate having to do this kind of research every time I build or
update a rig.

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jderick
Don't forget Intel generally uses less power than AMD. That cost can add up as
well.

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lutorm
From looking at the list, it seems the benchmark assumes a task that largely
scales well to as many cores as you have. That's not nearly always the case,
many or most games are not well threaded and programs like Lightroom only use
2 cores max. It would be interesting to have the same table but ranked on
single-thread or dual-thread performance, too.

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keltex
Great site. Would love to see sliders for min/max price and performance. That
way you could slide the minimum performance to 4000 and find the best cheapest
CPUs that fit that criteria.

Or set your budget at $150 and see what pops up.

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lacrossegm
There's a reason why the AMD Phenom X4 9750 has the best cost to performance
ratio.

<http://techreport.com/articles.x/14424>

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jdunck
Not obviously true; the article you cited is reviewing a bugfix revision of
the Phenom. Or did I miss something?

~~~
lacrossegm
The whole line has been marred by the them continuing the ship buggy
processors with the bios work-around. Would you buy another Phenom if you had
the misfortune of getting one of these?

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m0th87
I was excited to see that the chart had an Intel 800MHz, but when I clicked
the link, it was to a AMD Sparta 2.3GHz. There might be other mislabeled
products on here.

~~~
ptarjan
Yeah, the poorly labeled CPUs don't search well on newegg. Please let me know
if you find any others. I've hand checked the ones I cared about and they
seemed good.

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dschobel
Very nice. The update link is causing problems in Chrome 4.0.249.43 on XP
though.

    
    
      Warning: touch() [function.touch]: Utime failed:   Permission denied in   /var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 44
      Starting update

~~~
alanl
Worked fine for me on chrome and xp

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dlevine
Interesting how AMD kills Intel on Performance/Price, but Intel's raw
performance is much higher. Still, the highest-end Phenoms are pretty quick
and still a reasonably good value.

~~~
jules
You need to factor in the other costs too. If you buy a computer you need more
than just a processor. If the rest costs $200 you have an extra cost of $400 +
processor costs for two AMD's against $200 + processor costs with Intel
(assuming two AMD's are equivalent to 1 Intel).

~~~
Retric
Most gamers, I know pick the best 100$ CPU they can on price performance
because CPU's are just not that important. Granted if your building a 3,000$
system you might want to look at the CPU, but why pay more so you can have
extra cores doing nothing all day.

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jcromartie
Very interesting that AMD delivers a great value, while Intel still dominates
in performance. It pretty much confirms my feelings about the companies.

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jasonlbaptiste
This is absolutely awesome, thank you for building it. No surprise AMD tops
the list here.

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briancooley
Not surprising since the list appears to be sorted alphabetically.

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daok
You are wrong ;) not alphabetic order

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anApple
Is the performance measured over all cores or over just one core?

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ptarjan
All cores (says the passmark guys)

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ryanelkins
Now if only you could sort.

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bestes
Maybe it just got added? Because I was able to just click on the headings for
Price and Performance to sort.

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ryanelkins
Yeah - looks like it might be a problem with IE. I opened it in Firefox and it
looks totally different. In IE (8) its just a plain list - not a table with
zebra stripes and sortable columns. It looks like the javascript for the
datatable is throwing an error in IE.

~~~
ptarjan
Oh interesting! I'll look at it tonight. Thanks.

