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This is a good article over at The Tech Report. They review a bunch of the current top processors all the way down to the Athlon X2 6400+ (down... that's still pretty peppy to me). I think they were very politically correct in their review. Heck, they really didn't offer much opinion at all & said you should decide, which is best.

Anyhow, as would be expected Intel came out on top for many of the tests in raw performance, but when you consider the $300+ prices on the top processors, it's harder to accept the marginal increases. On the other hand, the Athlon X2 6400+ & Phenom II X3 720 are cheapie processors & weren't so far behind. Of course, there was no overclocking involved, but if you are like me, you don't want to overclock your buddies processor for him/her & thus want to get a processor & run it at the factory speeds & voltages. So, AMD is definately making sense for those builds. Heck, I have a E5200 (which was too low end to make the list) in my machine right now & haven't felt the need to overclock it on any of my games yet & thus haven't even though it's supposed to be a supreme overclocker.

Darn nice article. Proves my point that CPU performance has really leveled off.

There's a real limit to CPU speed we're hitting (notice that mainstream CPUs are no faster today (around 3 GHz) than they were 5 years ago? So now it's all about incremental improvements to the memory pipelines, faster memory speeds, instruction set efficiency (do more with less clock cycles), etc. More cores will eventually improve performance as well but right now there just aren't enough apps and OSes that make good enough use of multiple cores for it to make a difference except for specialized situations.

Yeah, I really believe that the video card has much more to do with games than the processors at this point. This is just the first time I've seen someone go through the trouble to show it. I believe that they pretty much predicted that higher than 3ghz wasn't going to happen 5 years ago too. Something to do with crosstalk within the CPU. I must say that those new Phenom II's are looking pretty good at the price they're selling at. If I didn't already have a farily modern rig, I'd jump on one.