CPU prices adjust for Christmas buying season
Click to enlarge
As we approach Thanksgiving and the beginning of the intense part of the holiday shopping season, the graphs for both AMD and Intel sunk a little from last week, indicating the overall price decrease trend, including Intel's Pentium D 805, which reached an all-time low for our price/performance charts.
AMD's correlation went up this week, after a declining trend for the past three weeks, to 0.880. This is thanks in large part to the repositioning of the FX-60 and the FX-62 in the charts, though the FX-60 is still sticking out from the trendline a little bit, showing that it is a bit pricey for the level of performance it offers, compared to AMD's other offerings. If you are looking out for an AMD dual-core processor upgrade this week, your eyes should be especially focused on the 4200+ and 5000+ models.
Intel's correlation coefficient for this chart, which includes overclocked processors, is 0.609, almost exactly what we saw last week. Since most of the prices actually dropped in relative terms with one another, and the price of the Pentium D 830 put itself more in between the 820 and 840 than in previous weeks, the strength of the price/performance relationship was nearly unchanged.
Any Core 2 Duo processor currently offers a tremendous value for the money.
Click to enlarge
Taking out the overclocked processors, Intel's coefficient jumps to 0.650, which, interestingly, is less than last week. Because of the price decreases on most all processors other than the QX6700, the overclocked numbers for that processor were able to keep it more in line with what we saw last week. However, when that point is omitted, the trend line sags more easily as a result of the price decreases.
Now, we just have to play the waiting game with AMD, as they prep their new 4x4 platform, which should cause some interesting shake-ups in these charts.
