Hardware Central's CPU Price Watch for July 15, 2009
Chips & Upgrades Article Published July 15, 2009
The prices we tracked in this week's guide held about as steady as we've seen them be in a while. Only two prices (one from each camp) dropped at all, in fact, and a few others moved slightly upwards. But by and large, prices held right where they've been for weeks.
Hardware Central's CPU Price Watch for June 17, 2009
Chips & Upgrades Article Published June 17, 2009
This week's CPU Price guide contains a few scattered price drops, a couple of which might pique some potential buyers' interests. But by and large, prices continue to hold about as steady as we've grown accustomed to seeing in recent weeks.
Platform Trends: AMD's Six-Core Comeback? By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published March 1, 2009
As AMD shows off a six-core Opteron processor, IT managers dream of cost-effective server upgrades and desktop performance freaks dream of six-core supremacy. Add a full slate of new Phenom II CPUs, and the underdog chipmaker might have a terrific 2009. So what's the deal with propping up the aging Athlon?
Platform Trends: AM3 At Last By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published February 16, 2009
Remember those Phenom II processors AMD introduced a month ago? They're history, as the chipmaker introduces triple- and quad-cores that plug into either existing Socket AM2 or new AM3 motherboards loaded with DDR2 or -- welcome to the present tense -- DDR3 memory, respectively. Intel Core i7 killers? Nope. Core 2 Duo and Quad challengers? Abso-plug-in-lutely.
Platform Trends: Hard Drives Get Bigger, Faster, and Greener By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published February 1, 2009
A couple of years ago, the advent of perpendicular magnetic recording kicked the storage industry's race for ever-higher capacity into overdrive, but Western Digital's cramming two terabytes into one desktop drive is still an eyebrow-raiser. So is the growing sophistication of the hard disk market, where lower noise and power consumption are starting to count as much as size and speed.
Platform Trends: The GeForce GTX Gets a Facelift By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published January 20, 2009
It took longer than hardcore fans expected, but Nvidia has rallied to reclaim the gaming graphics card crown from archrival AMD and the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. The secret? Revitalizing the GeForce GTX 200 series with a die shrink and some careful shuffling of clock speeds -- and, Vince Freeman adds, some very clever positioning of the company's dual-GPU card versus its dual-card SLI platform.
Platform Trends: Intel's Mainstream Mobile Core 2 Quad By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published January 7, 2009
Quad-core processors have filtered down from elite to mainstream status in the desktop PC market. It was inevitable that the same thing would happen for notebooks, but -- like notebooks passing desktops in overall sales for the first time -- it's come sooner than anyone expected.
Platform Trends: AMD's Phenom-enal New Athlon By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published December 19, 2008
You've got to draw the line somewhere, and AMD has drawn it between dual- and triple-core processors: While its newest dual-core has the same DNA as the chipmaker's Phenom X3 and X4, it carries the older Athlon name instead of the prestigious Phenom moniker -- but, while it's the new top of the Athlon line, it isn't the fastest. In other words, what gives?
Platform Trends: Intel's Core i7: Quad-Core of Solace By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published November 21, 2008
It's not true that every new Intel processor brings a different new motherboard socket to dash upgrade hopes: The Core i7 brings two. Even so, Vince Freeman says, the new CPU shows such a combination of brute force and flair it might be called the i007. Here's a look under the hood, with some thoughts about why the Core i7 needs more than one chipset and why AMD might be more competitive than you think.
Platform Trends: Taking the X58 Express to the Future By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published November 7, 2008
Radical changes in Intel's Core i7 processor bring radical changes to the usually evolutionary, not revolutionary, desktop chipset sector. The X58 Express takes advantage of the i7's onboard memory controller to allow colossal bandwidth, with a new QuickPath Interface speeding communication between chipset and CPU. But when it comes to peripheral support, Intel's looking strictly forward, not back.
Platform Trends: Nvidia and AMD Take Graphics in Different Directions By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published October 28, 2008
No niche is too small for the PC graphics giants to cram in a new product, but AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4000 series has lacked an entry in the $100 to $150 price range preferred by avid but unwealthy gamers -- until now. Meanwhile, Nvidia targets even more frugal desktop shoppers with faster-than-Intel integrated graphics ... although both vendors have already done that with under-$60 dedicated cards.
Platform Trends: AMD's Entry-Entry-Level Graphics Processor By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published October 14, 2008
You've heard of sharing the wealth, but AMD is doing it with a vengeance: Even though its ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, 4870, and 4670 graphics processing units now rule the high-end, mainstream, and entry-level segments, the company has added two more members to the HD 4000 family at a lower-than-low $55 and $39. Is there a market for deliberately limited-performance PC graphics? Vince Freeman says yes indeed.
Platform Trends: Nehalem Set to Fly with the X58 By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published September 29, 2008
After four years of LGA775 processors and motherboards, the socket-shufflers at Intel have struck again. But this time tossing your old platform is worth the cost. The Core i7 "Nehalem" CPU's all-new architecture promises a performance revolution. And the X58 desktop chipset may be even more impressive, combining colossal bandwidth with a three-channel memory controller, the return of Hyper-Threading, and a graphics-card surprise.
Platform Trends: AMD's Most Affordable R700s By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published September 15, 2008
Its ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 are the champs of the mid-priced PC graphics market, and the 4870 X2 wears the single-card crown for high-end systems. Now AMD unveils more bad news for Nvidia by bringing the same R700 graphics processor architecture to the under-$100 segment -- and a mix of price, performance, and power consumption that surpasses anything yet seen.
Platform Trends: Budget GPUs Galore By Vince Freeman -
Chips & Upgrades Article Published September 1, 2008
We're used to reading about AMD's and Nvidia's fastest, fire-breathing graphics cards, but the rivals are now hunting bargain hunters -- Nvidia putting its GeForce 9 Series technology on a $59 diet, AMD revving up a fast integrated-graphics chipset while preparing new ATI Radeon HD 4400 cards. How do these strategies stack up against each other -- or against simple price cuts on last year's cards?
