All Processors

The Bottom Line: AMD's Athlon 64 FX line has worn the desktop CPU performance crown for over a year. The king is dead. Intel's new flagship Core 2 Extreme X6800 not only hands AMD a defeat on all of our benchmarks, but it's also a more efficient, better designed chip overall.

Specs: Processor, Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

The Bottom Line: Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 offers the best price-to-performance ratio we've seen in a desktop chip. For half the cost of AMD's top-of-the-line chip, you get identical if not superior performance and better power efficiency. AMD surprised us last year with its completely dominant dual-core chips, but Intel regains the crown with Core 2 Duo.

Specs: Processor, Intel Core 2 Duo E6700

Editors' Take: Overclocking might give it fits, but at stock speeds, AMD's new dual-core elite chip is as fast as we had imagined.

Specs: Processor, AMD Athlon 64 FX FX-60

Specs: Processor, Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955

Specs: Processor upgrade, Intel Xeon

Specs: Processor, Intel Pentium III

Specs: Processor upgrade, AMD Second-Generation Opteron 2216 HE

Specs: Processor, Intel Pentium III Xeon