Are High-End CPUs Worth The Money?

Rampaging Goatbert (aka Jeff Feld) has posted a story at Newsforge about something you may want to argue about with your boss or significant other. Specifically, whether high-end CPUs are worth their high prices. Personally, I look even lower on the processor food chain, but watching those price-curve inflection points makes the runner-up chips pretty tempting. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

Re:google

[Anonymous Coward]

Not every program scales well to multiple processors, though. In some cases it makes sense to have a single blazing fast cpu.

They can be

[chennes]

In computational fluid dynamics, where simulations run days or weeks, non-stop, maxing out the CPU the whole time, 5% faster is a lot. The price tag is actually relatively small when compared to the time savings that you can achieve. They certainly don't make sense for the average consumer, but for some simulations, they're worth every cent.

Worry about more important things...

[supabeast!]

Unless a CPU is going to be used for high-end gaming with pure performance in mind, buying the high-end monsters is a waste. The money is much better spent on RAM (Especially in a Windows machine.), or faster hard disks.

Even if the machine is to be used for gaming, the money is still better spent on a nice video card with a boatload of RAM, to compensate for the extreme sluggishness of a PC's system bus.

Obvious answer:

[proxima]

Are High-End CPUs Worth The Money?

No.

Now, for a better question. Are high-end motherboards worth the money?

Every penny.

In the many, many computers I have built and fixed (I don't know how many hundred..I never counted), one thing became crystal clear: don't skimp out with a cheap motherboard in order to buy that next higher-up processor.

Motherboards are not created equal, not even close. In fact, from my experience, they are either the cause of good reliability or they are to blame for crashes and instability (in terms of hardware). Buying a good chipset put together by a good hardware manufacturer (Abit, Asus, etc.) is key to building a reliable system that will last several years of hard use.

A good review site for motherboards will describe not only the features it has but how those features are laid out. A well designed motherboard has shorter interconnects and well placed components. Also, a motherboard should have a nice array of capacitors that keep maintain the electricity going to the processor. There should be ample room around the processor to stick the larger and better cooling cpu fans (another things never to skimp on). A heatsink and fan on some of the chipsets helps to improve reliability.

But from my experience the best part about going with a better name is a reduced likelihood of getting a dud. I ordered a cheap Soyo motherboard to fit a K6-2 450 Mhz processor I had sitting around - I wanted a cheap computer. The first one was a dud, the second one was a dud. I ended up going with a different manufacturer and getting a 750 Mhz Duron. I had previously purchased an Abit with a Duron 700 Mhz and had no problems whatsoever. You pay about $20-$30 more for the motherboard, but it's definately worth every penny.

In short, don't bother spending that extra $30 to get however many more Mhz, or even to get the difference between a PIII and Celeron or Athlon and Duron. More important than speed in most systems in reliability, and for that you should plunk your spare dollars into the motherboard and a decent heat sink/fan.

Depends what you do..

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the things I like to do is compress mpeg2 video down to mpeg1, both from a digital camcorder and/or dvd's I have to watch on a plane (my laptop is too old to have a dvd drive and doesn't have enough cpu to watch dvd's anyhow).

Compressing 3 hours of video and adding subtitles on my dual p3-450 was 18-20 hours.

On a 1.4ghz athlon it's about 6.5 hours.

YOW...definately worth the upgrade!

Per CPU licenses

[cDarwin]

If you're paying through the nose for per CPU licenses then it often makes sense to get the fastest processor your application runs on.

Re:there is always a price break in the curve

[Enigma2175]

MHz - - - - price

900 - - - - -$65 - 13.85 Mhz/$
1000 - - - - $85 - 11.76 Mhz/$
1200 - - - - $100 - 12.00 Mhz/$
1333 - - - - $130 - 10.25 Mhz/$
1400 - - - - $175 - 8.00 Mhz/$

It seems to me the best value for the dollar is the 900 Mhz CPU, followed closely by the 1.2 Ghz.

I look to buy the one just below the major increase in slope. there is ALWAYS this trend.

You say this, but then you say "It only makes sense" to opt for the 1.3 Ghz when in actuality the 900 Mhz and the 1.2 Ghz are much better values.