The Horka Blog

Back in the “good old days” there weren’t all that many choices in the CPUs that were available. When people went shopping for desktop or mobile computers, it was fairly easy to compare models based on CPU and the description of the model usually included the CPU speed.

Things have changed and if you now look at computer offerings at Future or Costco or Staples, etc., the CPU is referred to by a cryptic code that means nothing.

To cut through the crap, you can go to the following Intel site which has descriptions of all their current CPU offerings. Click on the processor family and you will be presented with a chart of all the CPUs in that family. Click on any one item for details.

http://processorfinder.intel.com/Default.aspx

Then you can also go to sites like Microbytes or Tiger Direct which sell CPUs to get some sense of what the CPU in the computer you are considering purchasing costs and therefore how much of the total cost of the computer stems from the cost of the CPU.

http://www.microbytes.com/computer/ordinateur/index.php?cPath=2022000_2022004

or

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=1969

This way you can decide on the processor family you are interested in and indentify the sweet spot – the CPU which provides the most useful bang for the buck at any point in time. Intel has always had CPU variants that are obscenely expensive for the incremental function they provide for most people. So the average person should stay away from those. Right now, looking at the quads, I would argue that the sweet spot is probably the I7 920 with 4 x 2.66ghz cpus and 8mb of cache in the mid $300 range.