Price/Performance Charts

[NumenorLord]

I have a question. Why does Tom's use overclocked Intel processors in their silly price/performance charts but not overclocked AMD processors? That seems like it would slant Intel's way a bit more to make their price/performance curve seem better than AMD's.

 

[MU_Engineer]

Because they can.

Otherwise, I agree with you that it's dumb as the bottom-end chips are always the best deal since you can OC them a greater percentage versus stock than you can a higher-end chip. In fact, the top OC clock speed gotten by *all* chips of a specific line is pretty similar- about 3.0-3.2 GHz for AMD chips and 3.2-3.6 GHz for Core 2s.

I also don't overclock, so I just disregard the overclocked CPUs in the metric, which is what I think anybody who doesn't OC should do too. If they do OC, if they want the highest possible OC, then go with the highest stock-clocked chip. If they want the greatest bang-for-buck in overclocking, always get the cheapest CPU in the line. That's darn near written in stone as far as I have seen.

 

[NumenorLord]

Also, the graph should start at 0 for the "relative performance index." Starting at 1 makes the differences look a lot larger than they actually are.