Phenom Preview Discussion Thread

[Thund3rball]

I have a certain amount of hope for the Spider Platform. It's a great concept with what seems to me, is a typical 1st generation bump in the road. AMD has their eye on the bigger picture and this is the first full-line we are seeing from the merger. With this launch under their belts and a full steam ahead attitude we might see great things in the future. They have some work to do, know doubt, but maybe they can push through the struggles and deliver some real magic down the road. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Great (p)review BTW. Thanks HWC, you really know how to deliver the goods.

[Wankerfx]

Originally Posted by Misoprostol

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

It sucks, all the AMD fans had a ton of hype over Phenom, and now it's going to be brushed aside.

Hopefully AMD will come out with newer and better revisions sometime soon to fix the overclocking/performance problems.

[SocketMan]

My guess as to why the SANDRA's memtest was so low is because of something called the L3 cache, that thing is much slower then L1/L2 caches.
As for Phenom's performance, the next batch/stepping should be better/faster, that was the case with the K8 if I remember correctly.
Great Preview btw, I am actually glad it did not have too many comments,
a picture (of the charts/numbers in this case) says a 1000 words, nicely done
especially considering how much time you had.
I think the key to Phenoms success will be scalability, in particular with the CrossfireX ,when the drivers mature among other things (like the 3870 x2)
because games drive the industry.

A couple of guys in this thread have hit the nail right on the head I think. This launch is less about Phenom and more about Spider. Honestly if ATi can get their act together scaling-wise for quadfire, we may have a fight on our hands for the hardcore graphics buff's hard-earned dollars. So far Phenom is the only platform that can load up 4 graphics cards (not counting quad SLI...) and honestly throughout my testing, the Spider system was VERY stable. Much more stable than some of the other multi-GPU platforms out there, even when I was playing around with the memory settings.

Basically, for a new platform, things are not half bad. Performance isn't where some people were led to believe it would be (I re-ran my benchmarks FULLY another time after I saw the slides from AMD showing the Q6600 would be equal to the 9600), but all is not doom & gloom. AMD has been the runner up for a VERY long time, and now they're just back to their roots as far as I'm concerned. For those concerned that AMD is going to go under...... Just stop worrying. Intel would have to be crap-for-brains to let AMD die. A competitive market is better for everyone concerned.

I'm glad you all enjoyed it and I look forward to hopefully branching out from my water cooling reviews a little more in the future.

[sectorz]

Originally Posted by Misoprostol

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

OMG you tell , The phenom at 2.7GHz is not very more best then the 2.3GHz ? if yes AMD is in the big trouble lol (sorry if for be sure i am french and not understang 100% correcly in english)

Phenom at 2.7GHz is going to be about 15% faster than Phenom at 2.3GHz. Performance scales with clock speed. At 15% better than 2.3GHz, Phenom is still neck and neck with the Q6600.

There's no magic remedy to this. AMD either needs to refine the design of the CPU (unlikely at this juncture) for faster performance per clock, or they need to refine their manufacturing to get the clock speeds up.

[MpG]

Nice review. Looks like my next build is going to be Penryn, though. Too many of my games are RTS, and they need lots of CPU clockcycles to really shine, even with four cores.

I wonder if there's any relation between the memory performance here and the poor cache latency found on AMD's 65nm shrink of K8? Maybe AMD still hasn't figured that part out?

[Mars]

Originally Posted by MpG

Nice review. Looks like my next build is going to be Penryn, though. Too many of my games are RTS, and they need lots of CPU clockcycles to really shine, even with four cores.

I'm not sure how important cpu speed is for gaming... with a strong video card, at high graphics settings, most games only seem to vary a few fps between mid-range and top of the line cpus.

Of course, that doesn't help AMD a whole lot, you can't advertise products as being "only a few fps slower".

[Squeetard]

I disagree. When I upgraded from the C2D to the Q6600 my game scores in FEAR, 3dmark, HL2 and Oblivion all jumped by a huge amount, like 20 fps on average. same mobo, same vid card.

[MpG]

Interesting, I didn't know Oblivion had been multi-core optimized. It's always been known foremost as a GPU-killer.

Even on the games that use multiple cores, usually the first core is still doing a large proportion of the work, which makes higher clock speeds still important. And my current favourite, Supreme Commander, just slaughters all of my CPU cores, even at higher graphics settings.