Price Guides August 2004: CPUs and Motherboards

Since the last CPU guide Intel has brought out a few new weapons from its arsenal, although most (read: Nocona, Iriwindale) won't be hitting retail store shelves for a while to come. On top of that, being the newest bleeding-edge products, they won't be easily affordable by most until they've been on the market for at least a few months.

In the meantime fear not, as there are still a good number of options available. While AMD is busy pushing A64 Intel is simultaneously banking on solid name recognition and raw clock cycles to earn your money, and earn it they do. This week, as with our last CPU guide, the Pentium 4 (478) 2.8GHz 800FSB 1MB processor tops the charts for our Intel recommendation. Paired with a solid overclocking motherboard this chip can take on a new façade and tear through CPU intensive tasks quite easily. The Prescott core is known for its ability to scale performance and clock speed in a linear fashion which is music to most overclockers' ears. However, if overclocking isn't your thing, the Northwood core of the 2.8 Pentium is also a great choice.