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GeForce GTX 295 @ TweakTown

AMD Phenom II @ Hot Hardware
DailyTech's roundup of hardware reviews from around the web for Thursday

AMD Phenom II
@ TweakTown
@ Elite Bastards
@ Lost Circuits
@ Hot Hardware
@ The Tech Report
@ bit-tech
@ Overclockers Club
@ Guru3D
@ AMD Zone
@ Legion Hardware
@ Hartware.net
@ Legit Reviews
@ t-break
@ TechSpot
@ Bjorn3D
@ Driver Heaven

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
@ t-break
@ TweakTown (2)
@ PC Perspective
@ Hartware.net
@ bit-tech
@ Hot Hardware
@ Guru3D (2)
@ OCC

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Anandtech down?
By UNCjigga on 1/8/2009 11:23:39 AM , Rating: 2
Wanted to read the reviews over there, but I'm getting the dreaded "Service Unavailable" message. Hmm.




RE: Anandtech down?
By CheesePoofs on 1/8/2009 11:34:58 AM , Rating: 2
Same here. And I was halfway through the article too :(


RE: Anandtech down?
By TomZ on 1/8/2009 11:37:50 AM , Rating: 1
Maybe too many hits of people reading the review. I also noticed that Tom's was falling apart this morning.


RE: Anandtech down?
By amanojaku on 1/8/2009 11:47:33 AM , Rating: 4
quote:
I also noticed that Tom's was falling apart this morning.
Please restrict your use of four-letter words, thank you.


RE: Anandtech down?
By TomZ on 1/8/09, Rating: 0
RE: Anandtech down?
By AmazighQ on 1/8/2009 12:15:37 PM , Rating: 1
its not overblown just read there review on the PII and it sucked
they are comparing the 6600 to the PII 940
that is 65 nm vs 45 nm


RE: Anandtech down?
By AmazighQ on 1/8/2009 12:15:37 PM , Rating: 2
its not overblown just read there review on the PII and it sucked
they are comparing the 6600 to the PII 940
that is 65 nm vs 45 nm


RE: Anandtech down?
By just4U on 1/8/2009 12:42:55 PM , Rating: 4
That was not a bad idea on their part if you think about it. I'd say out of all the intel based cpu's enthusiasts are currently using (that read these sites and build computers) the Q6600 is probably at the very top. Measuring the PIIX4 against it is a good gauge on weather it's a possible candidate for future builds.

I don't know about the rest of you but when I do go with Amd lately the only two cpu's that come under consideration are the 5200+ and the X3 8650. Now with the release of these parts it's safe to say ill be adding atleas the 920 to that lineup if the price is where I think it will be.


RE: Anandtech down?
By TomZ on 1/8/2009 12:49:50 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
they are comparing the 6600 to the PII 940
In addition to what just4U said, I think they wanted to pick out which Intel processor came in just "below" the PII, which would be the Q6600. Pick any of the faster processors like Q9550 on up, and the PII falls behind.

I also liked the platform-wide comparisons that Tom's made concerning total system cost and total system power. That is a good observation that didn't show up in other reviews like the one on AnandTech (although I did like the latter review as well).


RE: Anandtech down?
By MrBowmore on 1/8/2009 9:09:35 PM , Rating: 1
Like in the Pentium 2?
I don't get it. Seriously.


RE: Anandtech down?
By wordsworm on 1/9/2009 12:00:24 AM , Rating: 2
You really should have taken a few more minutes to think of what P2 might stand for in this millennium. Let's see... CPU terms that might start with a P. Pentium is one, yup. And... Phenom. Hmm... could it be that he's referring to the Phenom II 940 chip when he said P2 940?

Were you really confused, or was it just a joke?


RE: Anandtech down?
By Chocobollz on 1/10/2009 2:05:30 PM , Rating: 2
Well.. I myself gets a little confused when I read that line at first. I thought he meant Pentium 2 940 Mhz, really (WTH??? :p). Because there's of course an articles about Pentium 2 on THG. I think the best is not to use abbreviation where it's not appropriate. I know most of DT's readers could be considered as advanced but still, there're many guys who will get confused by that kind of things, at least for a few seconds :p (including me :p).


RE: Anandtech down?
By KC7SWH on 1/8/2009 12:16:20 PM , Rating: 2
Tom's use to be a great site but that was before Anandtech and it's been going downhill ever since.


RE: Anandtech down?
By Reclaimer77 on 1/8/2009 4:49:45 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Seriously, though, I think the hate of Tom's is a bit overblown.


Didn't they get in trouble a few years back because they were giving favorable reviews to whoever gave them the most free hardware and money ?


RE: Anandtech down?
By KC7SWH on 1/8/2009 12:12:05 PM , Rating: 2
Must have been Tom's of Maine that he was referring to. :-)
http://www.tomsofmaine.com/


RE: Anandtech down?
By yacoub on 1/8/2009 12:36:44 PM , Rating: 4
well at the moment, there aren't any Anandtech links listed in the reviews lists. 0___o


Let me sum it up in Tweaktown quotes
By FaceMaster on 1/8/2009 1:39:24 PM , Rating: 3
Just copying and pasting the concluding comments from each section...

quote:
it still isn’t able to keep up with the Core 2 based CPU’s.


quote:
Media encoding has always been AMD’s weak point compared to Intel and the stakes haven’t changed


quote:
its K10 architecture isn’t as advanced as we are told it is.


quote:
We can see here that the Phenom II is sadly disappointing up against the Intel counterparts once again.


quote:
Again we see in the synthetics that AMD simply isn’t able to produce anywhere near as much raw CPU horsepower as the Intel Core 2 series in order to keep up. And never mind Core i7.


quote:
Phenom II seems to be lacking any real CPU power, even when compared to the Core 2 series and is certainly much less than Core i7.


quote:
3DMark Vantage does give AMD a much better result than our previous tests, but it’s still not able to compete with Intel’s top flagship.


quote:
In real world gaming we see that Crysis favors the Intel platform here.


OUCH. On a plus side, 'it’s even better than the Core i7 with the 940 version. How it scales we will see very soon in our extreme overclocking tests.' ...sadly the Intel platform offers more performance per watt.

I expect to be rated down because AMD 'isn't trying to compete with those products' or what ever. Yes it is. It's AMD vs Intel, not AMD vs Intel from 2 years ago. Wait... it would have been the same story any way :P




RE: Let me sum it up in Tweaktown quotes
By TomZ on 1/8/2009 2:23:14 PM , Rating: 1
I was honesly hoping that PII would give Core i7 a run for its money.

I know there is a lot of talk about AMD being competitive with mid-range Intel parts, especially in terms of cost. But as a tech enthusiast, I'm really only interested in the top-tier parts, which leaves Core i7 standing alone. Considering the small price premium for Core i7, the choice of what type of system to buy today is quite simple.


RE: Let me sum it up in Tweaktown quotes
By just4U on 1/8/2009 2:42:00 PM , Rating: 3
I disagree. For those of us who pulled the trigger on QuadBased systems the past couple of years there really is nothing majorly enticing out there... including the i7.

But for those on systems 4+ years old .. damn they have ALOT of options and all of them look good in every price segment.


By The0ne on 1/8/2009 7:15:51 PM , Rating: 2
Yes I agree. My co-worker and I were just having a discussion on 64bit during lunch. While it's nice to have multi-CPU PCs there isn't enough support out there to really be of a use yet, unless you're in one of those specific segments. But then soon enough we won't have any other options except to buy 64bit multi-CPU's like now :)

3rd party support is definitely lagging in the 64bit area. But then this isn't new as 64bit has been out for a while and was projected to pick up pace years ago.

We just need to bail out the porn industry with a clause that have them push for 64bit compatibility :D oh, and on BR


RE: Let me sum it up in Tweaktown quotes
By just4U on 1/8/2009 2:24:18 PM , Rating: 3
If you get rated down it's because your "concluding" comments that you pasted here didn't include any of the positives.. so it's a very lopsided statement.


RE: Let me sum it up in Tweaktown quotes
By FaceMaster on 1/8/2009 4:47:29 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
your "concluding" comments that you pasted here didn't include any of the positives.. so it's a very lopsided statement.


Tell me why AMD should be in the slightest bit happy at the moment.


By just4U on 1/9/2009 3:56:55 AM , Rating: 2
They should be pleased that review sites are giving their new lineup some pretty good reviews overall. Fact of the matter is they now have a viable $200 Cpu that more people will seriously consider. Intel's 8x and 9x lineup isn't going anywhere this coming year. They are going to be very popular sellers. With these two X4 parts people now have another option with very comparable performance and this time around it's actually viable.

That wasn't really the case over the last year. Sure 1 or 2 of the X3's were doing extremely well but the original X4s not so much. Hard to justify buying one when the Q6600 and 8X cpu's were similiarly priced and offering better bang for the buck.


RE: Let me sum it up in Tweaktown quotes
By Reclaimer77 on 1/8/2009 5:09:12 PM , Rating: 2
Good post.

Now tell Pirks his wake up call has arrived :P


By AstroCreep on 1/8/2009 10:00:20 PM , Rating: 2
Why so negative?

SMILE! :)


ouch
By yacoub on 1/8/2009 12:35:36 PM , Rating: 5
All this "PII" abbreviation re-usage is going to give us old school hardware guys a bit of a migrane who were around for the Pentium II. :)




RE: ouch
By just4U on 1/8/2009 12:45:55 PM , Rating: 2
That's why I went with the PIIX4 :)


RE: ouch
By Slaimus on 1/8/2009 4:58:04 PM , Rating: 2
The PIIX4 was a Intel southbridge used by the 440BX chipset.


RE: ouch
By wordsworm on 1/9/2009 12:03:27 AM , Rating: 2
How about PIIxIV?


RE: ouch
By Dreifort on 1/8/2009 1:02:59 PM , Rating: 2
They had me thinking old school. Beginning to think that the Phenom II was no faster than my 10 yr old desktop.

They need a new abbreviation... PhII? Wait, that sounds like a fraternity.


Phenom II Performance Summary
By TechLuster on 1/8/2009 11:58:10 AM , Rating: 5
For those of you too busy to read the reviews, it turns out there's a simple way to describe Phenom II performance (at least according to AT and TR):

PII X4 920 = C2Q Q9300
PII X4 940 = C2Q Q9400

The prices of these parts are almost identical also.

In a nutshell, I'd say Phenom II is to Phenom what RV670 was to R600 (in both cases, a die shrink fixed heat/power issues, returning AMD to competitiveness).




By Warren21 on 1/8/2009 12:40:01 PM , Rating: 2
I think that RV670 - R600 analogy is the best one I've seen so far. Just like RV670, Phenom II definitely doesn't put AMD on or near the top of the spectrum, but solidifies them in the performance/mainstream segments.

As Anand pointed out in his review (from the half of it I was able to read before the site went down), the original Phenom was a very forward-looking architecture but was limited by 65nm technology and die-size restraints. The 6MB of L3 really helps balance the architecture.

There's no denying AMD has bright engineers, so hopefully the recent "asset light" restructuring can help focus the company toward even higher performing parts in the future.


RE: Phenom II Performance Summary
By a123456 on 1/8/2009 1:03:19 PM , Rating: 1
This is a pretty good summary of the performance at stock clocks. The only issue, as mentioned in the AT article, is that Intel's going to cut prices on the C2Q, probably dropping it to the price point so that

PII X4 940 = Q9550
PII X4 920 = Q9400

If this happens, then it's not as good a deal since the performance of the Q9550 > PII X4 940.

If you're an overclocker, it looks like both the X4 940 and the Q9400/Q9550 go to about 3.6-3.8Ghz but the 940 is 4.8%-28.4% slower clock for clock, according to the AT article.

To me, this is great if you have an AM2 board. A new build, it'd not be as good. By the time the AM3/DDR3 prices come down enough, the X4 960 or whatever will be out.


Nice power figures
By ET on 1/8/2009 5:01:24 PM , Rating: 2
What really put me off AMD lately was the high power consumption. The Phenom II seems to solve this.




By MrBowmore on 1/8/2009 9:06:03 PM , Rating: 2
But will it run GTA 4 smoothly on max settings??




More reviews
By maroon1 on 1/9/2009 5:04:44 AM , Rating: 2
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/phenom-ii-940,review...

http://xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-pheno...

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_phenom_2_9...

From some reason, dailytech forgot to add those Phenom II reviews to the list

Q9550 seems to do better in gaming than Phenom II 940 most of the time




that artist deserves credit
By kevinkreiser on 1/9/2009 9:47:36 AM , Rating: 2
whoever put that photo of the phenom together did an awesome job. another higher res version would be even cooler.




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