Price Guides August 2005: Motherboards

Intel Motherboards

Although Intel does not quite have the same rich selection in motherboard manufacturers and products, there are some pitfalls you need to watch out for when buying current generation Intel hardware. Let's look at the cost of two comparable systems with the costs of hardware in August 2005 prices:

So technically, Intel has the much cheaper dual system right now. Unfortunately, if you value gaming performance at all, the Intel system is not the way to go. In fact, in Anand's recent benchmarks the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ pretty much swept the Pentium D 830 in every benchmark except office productivity (and even then that was in a synthetic benchmark). If we were to factor the price of the chips above to feature the Pentium D 830 instead of the X2 3800+, the Intel system would still come out ahead in price, but not by much. We still like the Pentium D, particularly for a work machine where you're expected to chug away in Outlook rather than play Doom3, but for the average workstation AMD is looking more and more attractive.

With Intel, the only real choices on a motherboard right now are 955X or 945G/P. The 955X boards are great, but insanely expensive. If you plan to go the way of cheap dual core (the only advantage Intel has right now), you don't want a 955X motherboard. On a mildly related note, ASUS's P5WD2 Premium WiFi-TV is the only motherboard in the last 5 years that managed to jump an extra $50 less than two months after its debut. In fact, 955X motherboards everywhere seem to be drying up and increasing in price. We sure aren't recommending them, so the initial runs must have been very low quantity to dry up by now.