No Hand Holding Here.


At Hardware Canucks we’ve found ourselves in a bit of a unique position for the launch of the Phenom. Everything that we’ve done to produce this preview has been without AMD’s help. Our board is a retail board with the latest bios that we were able to obtain on our own (BIOS F2h was downloaded from the Gigabyte website just like an end-user would have to do). We also used AMD's HD 3850 graphics card with the only drivers we were able to find, the ones on the included disc, just like an end-user would have to do.


Another part of the reason that this is a “preview” rather than a “review” is that we haven't had much time with the chip before the embargo date. Also we are lacking all of the AMD marketing slides that go along with this launch outlining the architecture changes that have been made since the K8. For this reason, we’re going to focus on benchmarks rather than one long-winded descriptions of how well it ought to work based on what AMD’s marketing people told us.


So what does all of this mean? It means that our results were obtained with no one looking over our shoulder. We ran whatever benchmarks we saw fit with whatever settings we saw fit on whatever platform we saw fit. It also means that our results should accurately represent the experience an end-user will have if they run out and buy a Spider-based system today. Spider Platform = Phenom + 790FX motherboard + 1-4 HD3800 series video cards.