The last Intel vs. AMD comparison was made back in July of 2006 when the Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 was released. Since then it has seemed somewhat pointless to pitch the aging AMD Athlon64 processors against the Core 2 Duo lineup. While the AMD dual-core processors are still very impressive and are the one and only reason that we have these Core 2 Duo processors, AMD needed to slash prices by more than 50% if they wished to remain competitive. Of course AMD being who they are did this and while the Athlon64 X2 4800+ cost $650 US when the Core 2 Duo processors were first released, it now costs just $215 US. This is a massive 67% decline in price for the 4800+ in just 7 months.

Even the mighty Athlon64 FX-62 has taken a serious dive, as it cost a little over $1000 US when the Core 2 Duo series we released. Today this impressive processor can easily be had for half that value! While it is amazing how aggressively AMD has had to slash prices in order to remain competitive, the Core 2 Duo pricing is just as amazing. Who would have thought that little old Intel would release a processor as powerful as the E6300 for just $180 US? Intel generally likes to ask this much for a Celeron type processor, something that would struggle to power a calculator. Instead they released their latest and greatest dual-core architecture with a 2MB L2 cache at this incredibly low price tag.

Despite where your loyalty lies, with AMD or Intel, everyone has to take their hat off to AMD for all they have achieved. If it were not for AMD I am almost certain we would still have 32-bit Netburst processors clocked at 3GHz going up in 100MHz increments. While not everyone likes AMD’s processors, this point really has to be recognized and in a sense AMD are just as responsible for the Core 2 architecture as Intel are. The question now is when and how will AMD strike back? Of course this story is for another day. Today we are posting our first AMD vs. Intel processor comparison in a long time and we are using just two processors!

Recently a friend of mine who happens to be loyal to AMD, was in the market for a new computer system and was wondering if he should give in and convert to a Core 2 system like most or stick it out with AMD. Without thinking I said get a Core 2 Duo, an option he was quite hesitant about and therefore we decided to see what AMD was offering in the same price range. The allocated budget allowed for a little over $200 US to be spent on the processor. The options in this price range were obvious, it would either have to be a Core 2 Duo E6400 or an AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+. The Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 is very well priced at around $220 US. It comes clocked at 2.13GHz and features the 2MB L2 cache.

Then we had the AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ which I decided to purchase anyway for the sake of this comparison. Amazingly the 5200+ now costs just $220 US, this processor is clocked at 2.60GHz and also features a 2MB L2 cache. The advantage of purchasing the 5200+ as we saw it was that the motherboard was also going to be a little bit cheaper. The high-end ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe which is a fantastic motherboard featuring the Nvidia nForce 590 SLI chipsets, costs just $180 US. The ASUS P5N32-E SLI on the other hand, featuring the new nForce 680i SLI chipset costs $250 US and although there are cheaper options, we wanted a fairly high-end board.

So now the real question is for around $220 US which processor presents itself as the best value solution? The AMD Athlon64 X2 5200+ or the Intel Core 2 Dup E6400? For this article we are going to try and forget about overclocking as many gamers are more interested in out of the box performance. Therefore, we will take each processor and run it through a number of memory and CPU related tests. Then finishing off the benchtesting phase will be six gaming titles using a GeForce 8800 GTX to measure each processor’s in game performance.