You should update this 2-3x a year. prices are down quite a bit. I picked up an E8400 for $130 this past thanksgiving, for example, $50 less than this article.

Fantastic job. Exactly what I had been looking for all along.

Other sites doing value analysis would stop at ranking price/performance ratios, which are useless unless you map them against the absolute price, because in the real world people have budgets. That's the reason you cannot do a proper value review without 2-D scatter graphs such as yours.

Now for a few suggestions.

1. Take the more ridiculously-priced Intel Quads out of the picture. Show one graph including them, then kick them out. Or find a graphical metaphor equivalent to a footnote, or zoom-in.

Once you've seen one of those graphs with those 1 000 $ + processors on the right-hand side, it becomes very clear they are not intended for value-seeking buyers. And their presence muddles up the details in that 100 - 250 $ segment, which is precisely where one would like to dig deeper.

2. Include (or make a special review for) lower-priced processors. Pentium dual-cores and cheaper AMD dual-cores are obviously prime candidates for value-seeking buyers.

3. Keep (or increase...) the level of differentiation you have reached between applications (office vs. games), core usage, processor price vs. system price, etc. Any less detail, and value analysis becomes next to meaningless.

I'd especially like to see you develop the system value angle, which is one of the strong points of this review. Expanding the scope to a lower price segment would probably introduce price differences between equivalent Intel and AMD motherboards, which we do not have here. So the global AMD / Intel picture could change quite a bit. Also, including the integrated graphics option would be interesting.

4. Do this more often. An update every six months would be very useful.

5. Even better: enable permenent update through automatic price acquisition (I think one of your competitors does that). Of course, analysis cannot be updated in real time.

6. And finally, in the dreaming awake department, is there a way you could enable your readers to tinker with the results in order to analyse them in a specific way appropriate to their own usage, without giving away your work to competitors? (Basically, something equivalent to having the raw data in Excel format, and being able to generate your own graphs.)

Ha! My math teach said I would never see a scatter plot in the real world... I'm sending her the link right now, AND bringing this up on the overhead at school! That'll show her!

Great article, very informative, thanks for all the hard work you guys put in these things :)

Keep'em coming!

Why not make a separate article for high end Extreme Editions and avoid skewing the graphs so severely?
That would address most of the concerns posted so far and also make for a
an occassional "Best of the best" article which I'm sure would be appreciated by all the horsepower geeks here :)

The test configuration used to test the Phenom X4 9850 (and all other AM2 CPUs) is bad, resulting in misleading low numbers for the top AMD CPUs.

Some Background Info:
The Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition 2.5GHz used in the test is an AM2+ processor.

The MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard used in the test, supports 1066 MHz
Dual Channel DDR2 for AM2+ processors.

The Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5D DDR2 SDRAM is 1066 MHz Memory.

The problem with the test setup used:
The Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5D DDR2 SDRAM was configured to 800MHZ not 1066MHz.

The results of the tests are not valid and are misleading, causing the AM2+ CPUs to have lower scores then they should.

Until the tests can be rerun, a disclaimer should be put at the top of the review.

You...you broke your graphs! What happened to zero-basing everything? The zero-based graphs were literally the reason I stuck with TR back when I started reading review sites. When I opened this article up I said "how does an A64 X2 get half the framerate of a Core2?!?!" until I realized that the unthinkable had been done. :( Even worse, once you know that it's not zero-based you still can't regain the information because the visual representation is all off. Please, please, PLEASE keep all your charts zero-based for fairness and accurate display of information.

I think another benchmark with real world implications would be a Windows XP and Vista boot time chart. And I don't just mean the OS, but the OS bloated with a bunch of startup programs like AVG anti-virus, Webroot Spysweeper, HP printer drivers, Itunes, and whatever else you can find clogging up most boxes. Microsoft has a utility for benchmarking XP's boot times (BootVis) which they no longer offer at their website, but can be found at other download sites like Major Geeks or Softpedia.

You did an article on the value angle and completely omitted the Pentium Dual Core E2xx0 series? Wow. That's a pretty egregious omission. (Not to mention the Celeron 4x0 series, Celeron Dual-Core E1x00 series, Sempron LE series and Athlon LE series, which are among the cheapest processors and can be expected to perform disproportionately better than the more expensive dual- and quad-cores you've chosen.)

I'd rather see the currently available E2xx0 processors, the E2160, E2180, E2200 and E2220, rather than the E6750, which is essentially superseded at the same price by the E8400 (which no longer carries the insane premiums it once did).

I'd also like to see the Q6700 among the quad cores, since the Q6600 fell to $224 (superseding the Xeon X3210 at 2.133 GHz) and the Q6700 fell to $266, which just isn't that much more than the Q6600.

In fact, I'd like to see the Q6700 go up against the Q9300. Similar price, more cache, faster clock speed, but slower microarchitecture revision.

Finally, please consider starting the Y axis on your scatter charts at zero. This makes it easier for us to judge value. (Draw a line from the origin to a point; the closer the line is to vertical, the better the value.)

Xbit labs did a test with three processors at around the same clock rate from the Core 2 Duo E6xxx and E4xxx and Pentium Dual-Core E2xxx series. They found that the main differentiator, cache size, had, on average, a 0-5% effect on the E4xxx compared to the E6xxx processors, and a 3-10% effect on the E2xxx compared to the E4xxx.

You only have 17 processors on the power Power efficiency page.
Missing are the E8400, Q9450, 8450

I'm a bit torn on the logarithmic price axis thing.

I considered suggesting it last time around, but my reasoning then was that in addition to compressing the high end, it arguably more accurately represents price sensitivity. If someone is after the best value processor, they are going to be more sensitive to smaller fluctuations than someone who has much more "money no object" opinion at the very high end. Hence the expansion of the low end and compression at the high end might be appropriate.

But using it then creates an arbitrary opinion of value. So you can argue that either way.

I just purchased on e-bay an Conroe-L 420 (1.6 smokin' Ghz), to use in a file server box. I can tell ya that I wouldn't want anything weak like an E2140, E4300, any of the X2 lineup below 5600+, in any of my daily driver PC's, unless you overclocked them to satisfactory performance.

Keep the mid-range, though including the E4700 @ 2.6 Ghz stock would be very revealing. It's currently $139 at the egg.

To the fellow who said to buy the cheapest...I can't do that with cars, scotch, CPU's or women - you always pay more in the end and sometimes the payment is extracted in frustration, anguish, or hangovers.

After my brother read this, he's basically stuck on what he wants to buy: Q6600 or E8400. Not many games scale linearly across four CPUs and Ghz is still king. He can plop in some uber quad later (before nehalem, I know), so he has a little life in the rig.

#80...exactly. IF you're will to go for the reward vs. what appears to be low risk. The internets show lots of OC proponents hugging their Intel E2xxx series with a pretty stellar, stable OC.

I would add the E2220 @ 2.4 Ghz to the article, too. It is only $90, but can demonstrate what a 'value' processor can do.

I also agree that everyone buys to their own needs/wants.

There is only one answer to your question or statement;

BRAND POWER!

The price of those high end quads really convolouted the graph, none the less ultimately it still pretty much confirms what I'd figured all along, get a cheap as hell quad, overclock the heck out of it, with CPU prices as low as they are, you can't go wrong.

It also confirms AMD is in a WORLD OF PAIN - pretty much a budget CPU at this point, such a shame :(

page 4 - panorama factory scatter - E8500 is the wrong color. :)

also, you really should have left skulltrail out of the last few scatters. :-/

Two comments.
First, the overall performance/system price graph on the last page does not add any information to the previous graph (performance vs cpu price). You're basically just adding a constant to all cpu prices and rescaling the x. One could wish it were otherwise, but constants are not interesting to anyone but *the* most die-hard geeks.

Maybe what you're trying to get at is the *share* of the total system price that the cpu takes up, and how much performance varies by changes in the *share* of the system price? Since the system price is a constant, though, I think this would again boil down to differences in cpu price.

Second, the 100% baseline in the graphs means the bottom third of the graph is unnecessary :).

why did the q9450 disappear from the power consumption page?

One issue about the motherboards is that typically the AMD motherboards can be less expensive. If I'm about to order a $65 processor, I'm not going to shell out for a $150 motherboard... a $60 or $70 motherboard is going to be all I need. This scaling of costs will kew your graphs even more.

question: what is the "percent" x axis on the last page? I can't find an explanation in the text.
Comment: In every page but the folding at home etc. page, the $/performance champs are mostly the 5600 and the 7200, with a few stray others in the mix.
This fact deserves to appear in the conclusions on the last page since it is more or less the common, er, thread of the article.
That is all.

hmm there's something that really bothers me about charts with arbitrary starting points and how that shapes the imaginary diagonal line and gives weird impressions.

also... i've proved with my own testing that for games the CPU barely matters anymore. it would be much more interesting to me if in this type of comparison 1920x1200 was used for games and the best GPU.

this would show a better "gaming value" because for gaming you're not going to play at low res. run the benchmarks at what you'd actually play at and then see how much the CPU really makes a difference.

What happened to all of the scientific simulations that TR used to run?

Just a suggestion for the scatter graphs.

You might consider putting in a big X in the background, then light colors in each quadrant to indicate low price/good performance, low price/poor performance, low price/good performance, and high price/poor performance.

Additionally, because these are all pretty much clustered in the left side, I would probably scale the bottom line differently, perhaps logarthmically.

Nice article.

I have a proposal for an article, as if you're bored without enough to do ;) Some time I know there will be a lull in hardware releases though. What I'd like to see is a test of CPU speed scaling in gaming for resolutions that are actually used by people playing games. CPU scaling at 1024x768 is all well and good for what it shows but it's not very real-world. Something along the lines of resolutions and AA/AF used in GPU testing would be nice, just with a high-end GPU setup and scaling the CPU frequency instead of scaling GPUs. I want to see if there's anything to the 'faster dual core is better than slower quad core' for resolutions and graphics settings at which people actually play.

Nice analysis.

My suggestions would be:

1)Possibly put a separate graph not including the extreme edition processors, since people usually don't consider those chips "values".

2)It would require more work, but I would like to see how the lower-end chips compare with the latest chips.

Very nice summary of all your recent CPU testing from a value point of view, but I'll add yet another voice asking for the Extreme Editions to be removed from the scatter plots. Just a couple of plots with those included would have been enough to make the point that you'd be nuts to buy any of them unless you're after a professional rendering workstation where time literally is money.

The final full system price comparison is very interesting. Arguably the system is a bit low on RAM and HDD capacity for the average system being built by people around here (take a look at the SBA forum), and probably should include typical case, PSU, and operating system costs to yield a more representative total system price. This would tend to favour the more expensive processors even more, which is perhaps unfair if people's primary use will be gaming where performance will most-likely be GPU-limited. Perhaps that's the next article, where the CPU & GPU analyses are combined to scientifically identify best-value systems for different usage scenarios - free 3D glasses included for viewing the plots. ;-)

Sorry if this comes over as too critical. I really like these articles and hope they continue to be updated.

Nice Job guys.
I am running a AMD 9500 now, and am looking to build a 2nd Quad Core.
Looks like I may end up going with another AMD CPU.

OK, these articles are terrific, but if there is one overarching request I'd like to make, it's that you drop the high end CPUs and stretch the graphs in the X-axis (price) so that price differences in the all too crammed $100-$300 range are more perceptible. I'd argue that if you are buying a CPU above $500 that you aren't as much interested in getting value as you are in getting the fastest CPU that you can.

If you just excluded the three highest priced processors, look how much more dynamic your graphs would be.

wow, we really have the worst-looking money in the world.

I agree about the need to remove the the $1000+ CPUs. I don`t think they bear any relevance for any selfrespecting TR reader and just make the relevant information hard to read. Especialy the last two overall graphs would improve by much. Or just add there another two where the performance axis is 100%-200% and the price is $0-$500.