Digital Home Thoughts: Core i3 and Athlon II, Where Value is King

"For one, Clarkdale CPUs have proliferated everywhere, and we've gotten our hands on one model, the Core i3-530, that promises to be a much better value than the relatively high-end Core i5-661 that we first reviewed. To counter, AMD has introduced five new value-oriented CPUs, ranging from two cores to four, including the Athlon II X4 635, a potent value quad-core priced directly opposite the Core i3-530."

The two CPU giants are battling it out again, this time in the lower cost segment of the industry. Both CPUs run great, and each have their own advantages which highlight the recent trends each manufacturer has been following. AMD tends to favor great value and performance, while Intel offers better power consumption and overclocking. What is even more interesting is that The Tech Report was able to borrow a Pentium 4 computer from a museum to see how it would compare. The results reveal two interesting facts. First,per CPU performance has not significantly improved over the past few years and has instead improved speeds through more cores. Second, and perhaps more importantly, power consumption for work done has gone down considerably. This would certainly explain why I see so many aging computers around. They still have the oomph to handle all but the more demanding tasks. Now I do not feel so bad for gifting some of my older computers away! What are you using? The latest and greatest, or does your computer still have Turbo button?