CPU Round-up: Sub-$100 Intel and AMD Processors Tested

TechSpot posted a CPU roundup of sub-$100 Intel and AMD Processors. Here's a taster:

Out of the range of sub-$100 processors tested we often found it was AMD's offerings delivering the best overall performance. Take the $100 price target for example, here we have the AMD Athlon II X4 630, Phenom II X2 555, Intel Pentium E6600 and Pentium G6950 processors.

Those seeking a quad-core processor -- and we suspect many of you are -- the Athlon II X4 630 is a godsend. If we were to break the $100 budget, its higher end Athlon II X4 635 sibling is roughly $5 more and carries a 100MHz speed bump which doesn't pose a meaningful difference.

An obvious take in from our tests is that any software program capable of utilizing four cores will place the Athlon II X4 630 at a significant advantage. Applications such as HandBrake and TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress strongly favored the Athlon II X4 630, making it the best choice for encoding. It also proved to be a respectable gaming solution despite its missing L3 cache. Keep in mind we were testing with a rather high-end graphics card, the ATI Radeon HD 5850, so GPU bottlenecking should not have been an issue here.

The Phenom II X2 555 is also a great choice at $100 if you want to unlock the two dormant cores. We were able to do this with our sample and obtained Phenom II X4 955 performance with the click of a button. Of course this is not guaranteed, but given its price we feel the risk is well worth the reward, especially given the high rate of success.

Intel's Pentium E6600 put up a decent fight, but it simply cannot hold a candle to AMD's superior offerings in this price range. Furthermore this processor is based on the LGA775 platform, which is now at the end of its life. The only reason we included this and other LGA775 parts is because that is what Intel continues to peddle at under $100.