Got &pound;50 to spend on a CPU? Read this.

Conclusions

There's a hell of a lot of value to be had when shopping for a CPU with only £50 in your pocket. Intel and AMD both offer decent performance from their Pentium Dual-Core E2160 and Athlon X2 BE-2350, respectively, to run the usual gamut of productivity-based applications with consummate ease: Word, email and basic image-editing was comfortable on a single-core processor, really.

These low-end processors were chosen as they provide the optimum environment in which to engage in some overclocking adventures. The Athlon X2 BE-2350 is a low-power processor that's based on AMD's 65nm process and the Pentium Dual-Core E2160's 800MHz FSB and Core underpinnings ensures a high frequency ceiling.

Our testing showed that a 33 per cent increase over default-clocked speed required a 10-minute play in the motherboard's BIOS, as far as the BE-2350 was concerned. Performance increased almost linearly and gave an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 a fright or two. Opt for the processor, put it on a £50 AMD 770 chipset-based motherboard, add 2GiB of DDR2-800 memory for, say £40, and there's every chance that you will have the guts of a 2.8GHz-plus dual-core system that'll cope with almost anything you throw at it.

We'd urge AMD to consider its installed user base, made up of countless thousands who jumped shipped when AMD was beating Intel on a clock-for-clock and price basis, made the transition to S939, and now have been left no upgrade path. Surely a BE-2350 S939 makes implicit sense?

Coming back to presently-used sockets and thinking of LGA775, more performance is always better, right? Our off-the-shelf Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2160, running at just 1.8GHz in stock form, can be considered an underclocked Core 2 Duo, so don't let the Pentium nomenclature fool you. Our sojourn in to the world of overclocking highlighted that 3GHz should be a fairly routine clockspeed to hit with the shipping cooler, indicating significant frequency headroom.

Performance, too, is excellent in its overclocked state, often comfortably beating out a £110 Core 2 Duo E6750 - no mean CPU in its own right - in a range of benchmarks. What's more, with cheap-o motherboards now rated to 1333MHz FSB, a 3GHz E2160 falls right into spec. The Achilles Heel, we suppose, is the lowly 1MiB of L2 cache that's exposed with applications such as gaming, where execution code doesn't quite fit in, but it's hard to ignore a 68 per cent overclock, right? Thinking of associated budget components, we'd put it on a £55 nForce 650i Ultra motherboard and add the same 2GiB of DDR2-800 memory as the AMD-based platform.

In short, picking the right low-end SKU and marrying it up with quality components needn't cost the earth. £150 will buy you a wholly decent subsystem to replace that four-year-old system that's now beginning to show its age. Then just add in the PCIe-based GPU of your choice for some high-octane gaming action.

There is a clear-cut winner here, folks, and it's you, the consumer. Intel hammers AMD with the potent mix of technology and low pricing. AMD fights back with inventive SKUs that offer sound price-to-performance ratios. The slugfest ensures that, in the short-term at least, the consumer wins.

HEXUS Awards

AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350

Intel Pentium Dual-Core 2160

HEXUS Where2Buy

The AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 can be currently purchased for £53 here.

The Intel Pentium Dual-Core 2160 can be currently purchased for £48 here

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any of Intel or AMD's representatives choose to do so, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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HEXUS Forums :: 14 Comments

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Posted by SiM - Tue 04 Dec 2007 00:34

Nice review - thanks!
More disappointment here from a 939 user - looks like intel wins again :(

Posted by nichomach - Tue 04 Dec 2007 09:28

We'd urge AMD to consider its installed user base, made up of countless thousands who jumped shipped when AMD was beating Intel on a clock-for-clock and price basis, made the transition to S939, and now have been left no upgrade path. Surely a BE-2350 S939 makes implicit sense?

Nice idea, but given the A64s all have an onboard memory controller, I reckon that the costs of re-engineering a DDR2-supporting processor to effectively downgrade it to DDR1 (since S939's pretty much a DDR1 platform) would probably wipe out any benefit. And I say that with some regret, being a S939 user myself.

Posted by Tarinder - Tue 04 Dec 2007 10:11

I dunno,

Limited-run production with S939 as the main selling point would be beneficial for AMD, even if the processor is priced at £20-£25 more than the AM2 equivalent.

AMD needs to start trying new things and this could be one of them.

Point noted, though.

Posted by MrP - Tue 04 Dec 2007 10:27

nice to see something aimed at those of us on a seriously tight budget.

any chance of seeing what impact different memory dividers has on performance though (ie 1:1 1:2 etc)

cheers :)

Posted by pendulum666 - Tue 04 Dec 2007 10:43

Socket 939 here as well. Debating whether to go core2duo with this e2160 or not. Looks a good value way of upgrading.

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