Introduction

With Christmas just a couple of weeks away, it’s that time of the year again folks: time for us to pick our top holiday upgrades in PC hardware!

This article has quickly become a tradition around here. In it, we’re going to pick our favorite hardware upgrades in CPUs and motherboards. We know that for a lot of you, the holidays are the only time of the year where you’ve got enough downtime to delve into the innards of your PC. The holiday shopping season is also rife with sales and tech deals, making it a popular time to upgrade a component or two (or your whole system) on the cheap. With this in mind, let’s get started with our top CPU picks first.

CPUs

$0-$150: Athlon 64 X2 3800+
Average Overclock: 2611.6MHz

While Intel’s Core 2 CPUs end up dominating our CPU selections this year, Intel doesn’t make a Core 2 CPU below $150. Yet.

As we outlined in our CPUs and GPUs for ’07 article, Intel’s currently prepping a cheaper Core 2 Duo E4300 CPU for introduction in the first quarter of next year. The E4300 is expected to support Intel’s slower 800MHz FSB, it’s also believed that the chip will lack support for Intel’s virtualization technology, but it will support 64-bit and execute disable bit.

It’s also rumored that the E4300 will utilize Intel’s tried and true Allendale core, which is used in the Core 2 Duo E6300 and E6400 today, with the chip sporting a 2MB L2 cache and 1.8GHz clock speed. Pricing may be slightly higher than the $150 price point however, as DigiTimes believes the chip will launch in January priced at $163.

Until then, AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is our CPU of choice at the $150 price point. The X2 3800+ sports dual processing cores running at 2.0GHz, with 512K of L2 cache per processing core. As we found in our GeForce 8800 GTX Performance with Athlon 64 article, at 2.0GHz, the 3800+ isn’t as peppy as some of AMD’s faster CPUs, but if you’re gaming at high-res anyway this isn’t too big of a deal. And besides, there’s always overclocking.

According to our CPU overclocking database, the average overclock for the X2 3800+ is 2611.6MHz, with the highest speed recorded by dbro972000 at 2.85GHz. That’s pretty good for a sub-$150 CPU.

Because of all this, the 3800+ has proven popular with enthusiasts on a budget due to its price/performance ratio.

For now the X2 3800+ is AMD’s least expensive dual-core processor, although rumors persist that AMD’s X2 3600+ may hit US shores next year to combat the Core 2 Duo E4300. The X2 3600+ is currently available in price-sensitive parts of Europe and Asia, where it has been picked up by many OEMs. It’s built on the same Windsor core as the rest of AMD’s Socket AM2 X2 CPUs, and it runs at the same 2.0GHz clock speed as the 3800+. The only difference is that half its L2 cache is disabled, leaving it with 256KB L2 cache per core (2x256KB).