Introduction

With the holidays just around the corner, chances are many of you plan to use the downtime to finally get around to upgrading your PC. Many a hardware enthusiast also knows that the holidays are also a popular time to upgrade the PCs of friends and family members. If either of these cases applies to you – or perhaps you’re just interested in seeing our top picks in hardware – hopefully this article will be helpful. With the wide range of price points for some system components, we’ve broken down a couple of the categories into multiple segments in order to hit a wider range of users. CPUs for example has been broken down into four sub-categories: $0-$150 budget, $150-$300, $301-$500, and finally for those of you who have been really good this year $500+.

For the sake of convenience, we used a combination of both Newegg and Pricegrabber for the bulk of our pricing data. Newegg is a pretty popular e-tailer among our readers, with aggressive pricing, a huge selection of products to choose from, and solid support. Newegg is also the e-tailer we here at FiringSquad use for many of our own hardware purchases.

I, Brandon, wrote the bulk of the article, while FiringSquad’s resident audio/video guru Alan Dang wrote the audio portion. We both chimed in with our own thoughts on PSUs towards the end of the article. Let’s get started with the processors first…

CPUs

$0-$150: Athlon 64 3000+
While Intel’s aggressively priced their dual-core Pentium D lineup offering processors at entry-level as well as high-end price points, AMD’s still delivering more performance per dollar. No CPU represents this better than AMD’s Athlon 64 3000+.

The Athlon 64 3000+ is built on AMD’s “Venice” core, which contains a revamped memory controller that has been tweaked to provide better support for PCs equipped with lots of memory. With Venice you can populate all four DIMM slots on your motherboard without seeing the performance slowdown present in previous Athlon 64 CPUs, Venice also supports mismatched DIMM sizes. Finally, to enhance multimedia performance, AMD added SSE3 support to Venice. The chip supports 11 of Intel’s 13 SSE3 instructions.

The 3000+ runs at 1.8GHz and contains 512KB of L2 cache. It is built on AMD’s 90-nm manufacturing process, allowing it to consume less power (and thus generates less heat) than competing Intel solutions as well as previous Athlon 64 cores.

By going with the 3000+ for our budget CPU pick rather than AMD’s Sempron, which is designed from the ground up for the value market, we get more performance and a more robust upgrade path. Although AMD will be moving to the DDR2-based Socket M2 platform next year, AMD will continue to support the Socket 939 platform throughout 2006. The future isn’t as clear for today’s Socket 754-based Sempron CPUs however. Overclockers are hitting 2.4GHz (or more) on the 3000+ also, making it an excellent value for enthusiasts looking for the most performance but are on a tight budget.

As we reported back in October, the Athlon 64 3000+ is no longer in production. This means that once supplies of the chip run out at retail, the CPU will be gone for good. Right now Venice-based 3000+ chips are selling for about $11-$20 less than the equivalent 3200+, so if you aren’t able to pick one up before supplies dry up, at least going up to a Venice-based 3200+ won’t cost you an arm and a leg.