Thread: The CHIP CPU-GPU guide

Our top 50 has a new number one with the Core i7-965 XE. The newcomer proves its superiority particularly in the case of Cinebench as compared to the Core 2 Extreme QX 9770, which was the top CPU until now.

Even the other two Nehalems on the list-the Core i7-940 and the Core i7-920 were impressive, mainly due to their content creation benchmark scores. However, prices ranging from approximately for the top model to for the Core i7-940 and 920respectively make them far from recommendable.

Our purchase recommendation of the month comes from the other side of our top 50at approximately Rs 3,000, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 EE 4600+ is an absolute bargain. The "EE" stands for "Energy Efficient- this CPU has a maximum power draw of only 65 Watts. The Dual Core Athlon 64 is the ideal partner for a motherboard with the AMD 780G chipset, whose onboard graphics support DirectX 10. Even HD videos and games that do not need much horsepower do not pose a problem for this budget combination.



The market for notebook CPUs seems like an island of peace compared to desktop CPUs. There has been nothing worth mentioning in the recent past. Thus, the Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 stays as our purchase recommendation of the month once again.

The GPU list has six new entries. However, there are only two real novelties, the rest are only chips that are clocked differently. With the ATI Radeon HD 4550, AMD has an interesting GPU for living room PCs. The 4550 makes do with passive cooling, so it is not just the most economical but also the quietest GPU in our rankings.

The second innovation is also the purchase recommendation of the month: at approximately Rs 8,500, the ATI Radeon HD 4830 offers an extremely affordable entry into the powerful 48XX series, with all the features of the HD 4850 and HD 4870. Also, the 4830 comes with a 256-bit memory bus, 8-channel audio over HDMI, and DirectX 10.1.