Phenom Preview Discussion Thread

It's been a VERY long weekend. I hope everyone appreciates the game testing. We took a lot of time installing, patching, and testing any game we could easily bench in the 2.5 days we had this CPU in our hands.

[Prof. Dr. Silver]

Who What Where??? If my eyes are letting me down...I don't know...could be all the beer by now....but ehm...did you like wipe out a set of numbers on the CPU in your picture? And does that date really say 2006???

Anyways....Great (P)review! Little disappointed though in AMD's performance here.....

[SKYMTL]

Yes, that is the serial number. Since it is a product from the retail channel, we want to keep the number secure.

[magictorch]

Nice review though.

You must have been scratching your head with this one.

Hopefully bios updates will help.

[SKYMTL]

The horrible overclocking makes sense actually. Why else would AMD have limited themselves to the current crop of low clock speeds? Methinks there are some serious yield problems here.... :(

[magictorch]

If this is a binning issue then AMD is going to have some serious problems moving these chips at that price. While Intel is going to slow the pace of improvements and take their time.

I just hope the prices stay low and AMD can release some better binned chips with more headroom to stop Intel from getting too complacent.

My overclocking results appear to be pretty typical. It's important to note that our chip is a RETAIL sample, not some magical cherry-picked one. We are one of the few sites that had the balls to review this thing without any help from AMD.

One thing I'd like to address here is performance differences between ganged and unganged memory. We chose ganged because it offered higher game performance, but some applications (at work now, no access to my internal charts) did suffer slightly for it. We found it to be the better compromise, and we're running the system the way we would if we owned one.

[sectorz]

Hi SKYMTL if you can do this juste

Bench the Phenom in game with the 2.7GHz and 2 others bench for view the performance and try bench with memory 800MHz 3-3-3-9 if possible , juste for see what is the best with a Phenom.

Hi sectorz,

The review is actually by me. There's no way you'd get 3-3-3-8 out of any of the memory I have one hand unfortunately, and to be honest, changes in memory speed weren't doing much to the Phenom in terms of performance. I spent some time testing with super pi and cinebench to figure out what was best, and I ended up with 1066 5-5-5-18 being about the best I could do with stability while only doing an "average joe" level of memory tweaking.

Phenom at 2.7GHz is faster than Phenom at 2.3GHz, but at this point it's been a very long weekend and I've already broken down my test bed (including my water cooling gear). The hard, cold reality is that 2.7GHz is not going to be much faster than 2.3GHz. I could run benches forever to eke the best performance possible out of Phenom, but in the end it'll only net a few percent improvement... Phenom simply isn't what we were expecting.

~Miso

[Cheator]

A nice review. While the Phenom doesn't perform as good as I wanted, its nice to see it layed out clearly, here. Clearer than other sites with pages upon pages of useless text. This is straight out decent and shows good real world stuff. So thanks! (Plus its cool to review something so new. One of the reasons I am trying out).

As for the Phenom itself, this is a first step for AMD at least. I am glad to see that at least they bring SOMETHING to the table. Sadly, however, I am thinking of going Intel for my new rig because of the delays and performance... its not a happy thought for me.